A Hardware Tale

[RichieFly 728]

Here's my experience with upgrading my computer.

Foreword

At first, I was planning to upgrade. I was going to reuse my old case, keep the old video card and save some money. Since my old computer was more than 5 years old, I later thought I should replace the works. I didn't want to destroy one computer to make a new one. What if something goes wrong and I have NO computer?

Another realization I had along the way: I have a lot of Add-on's. I have spent hours and days getting my old system 'just right'. There are a huge number of licenses to keep straight. It takes many hours to get all this re-installed and configured.

And...tuning and tweaking an overclock setup also takes huge amounts of time.

Was it really worth all this? Read on and see what you think.

Scope

This post won't contain any hard and fast P3Dv4 performance numbers. I'm in the process of experimenting with all the simulator settings. I will mention general values I've seen along the way. This is a journal of the process of building, tweaking and installing software.

Parts

Here are the components I used in my computer build.

• Fractal Designs Define R5 case
• EVGA 850 G3 80 Plus Gold power supply
• ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero Wifi motherboard - BIOS version 0802
• Intel i7-8700K chip, not delided
• G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 4x8Gb memory
• EVGA GTX1080Ti SC graphics card
• Corsair H100i V2 AIO water cooler
• Samsung 960 Evo M.2 SSD 500Gb
• 2x Samsung 860 Evo SSD 500Gb
• Seagate FireCude 2TB HDD
• Windows 10 OS

I'm continuing to use my Viewsonic monitor @2560 x 1440 and my CH controllers.

Build

The case is very adaptable to whatever you might need to do. It's a mid-tower.

I removed both drive cages, via thumbscrews and 4 small screws. This provided lots of room. I installed the cooler in the front. No problems. I placed the power supply with the fan facing up for additional airflow. I moved the included front fan to the top of the case. I may remove this later, or move it to the bottom. We'll see. Not sure it's needed.

I installed the CPU and memory. The M.2 chip was installed under the included heatsink. Don't forget to remove the plastic under the heatsink which reads "please remove". I then fastened the motherboard into the case. So far, so good.

Next, I attached the cooler to the CPU and connected all the various leads to the motherboard: fan cables to fan headers, front panel leads to motherboard headers. You get the idea...

This case has 2 mounts in the back for your SSD's. That's where the 860 Evo's went. I mounted the HDD in the 51/4 bay using an adapter bracket I had in my parts pile.

The power supply is modular. This means you only have the cables you need. Which is good because after everything was wired up and connected, there was an unholy mess of cables and wires.

I tidied up the wires and cables using the included velcro straps and ties. I also used some additional ties which were also provided. This case has the best cable routeing system I've encountered. There's plenty of grommet holes, some of which are angled towards the motherboard's location. Also, the back of the case has a generous space for tucking and hiding.

Finally! That only took 6 hours. I'm pretty old and my eyes are getting worthless at doing detail work. I'm sure somebody younger would knock this out in an hour or 2.

Looks good. Clean as a whistle. Time to fire this baby up.

Configuration

It booted up! Always a relief.

Updated the BIOS. Selected the XMP profile and let that take. What do we have then?

The memory was running at the rated speed. The XMP profile also increased some voltages, enabled Multi-core enhancement and generally had it running at what could be good enough for general use and gaming. But, that's not why we're here, is it?

I installed Windows 10 and the stuff which came with the motherboard. Next, I installed the updated versions of the ASUS stuff I have downloaded previously. Just a note here. There's some garbage that is loaded with the included CD from Asus; including Kasperski AV. I just uninstalled it and said "so long". I also installed Corsair's Corsair Link software. This is completely necessary if your using their AIO cooler. More on that below.

Here's where things stopped going smoothly, due to my lack of understanding.

I ran the "5-way Optimization" accessed either through the BIOS or via the rather nice AI Suite 3. Wow. I'm running at 5.0 Ghz just like that. And it seems OK. Not hot or crashing. I guess I'm done.

During the automatic optimization I introduced some problems which became apparent when I started stress testing.

I mistakenly set the CPU fan to DC control as opposed to PWM control. Also, the core voltage is set to 1.35 (same as the memory). This voltage is safe, but only if you're using water cooling or a top of the line air cooler.

During my testing, I was seeing my temperatures spiking into the 90's. No bueno. That's enough for the day, I thought, so off to bed...what could the problem be?

Upon waking, I thought that the cooler didn't seem to be running correctly. The pump speed was meager and the fans over the radiator were also weakly spinning. After some looking on-line and thinking hard (and nothing was happening!), I realized or read the H100i must be set to a PWM fan type. My bad. Also, I hadn't really looked at the Corsair Link setup.

I created a custom profile in Corsair Link and made sure the pump was pumping and the fans were fanning. Cool. The difficulty here is in that there are 2 places for fan control: AI Suite 3 and Corsair Link. I have it sorted out now, but I'm sure I'll return to this to get the optimum cooling with the least noise. The fans on the cooler can get stupidly loud. The same can be said for the included Fractal Designs fans, if they run at RPM's over a certain threshold.

You must have your fans and cooling working if you are overclocking. Duh!

I stepped back the overclock and started again.

Onward

Time for another attempt at overclocking and stress testing. I found this youtube personality who had some settings for the motherboard as a starting point. I'll post a link below. The values he suggested worked, but the voltage was a little high for my liking.

What I have now is a steady 4.9Ghz overclock on all cores with hyperthreading enabled. My temperatures range from 38ish at idle and mid to high 70's at full load. Completely acceptable, for me. I'm not quite finished with the tweak. I'm pretty sure I can run at 5.0Ghz on all cores with HT enabled.

Results

I'm stoked. My early experiments with P3Dv4 are very good. A generic aircraft at a generic airport is practically pegged at 60 FPS (my monitor's refresh rate). Loading up the FSL A320X at payware KSEA with full Orbx, AS16, Envtex with rainy weather and sliders haphazardly moved to the right, I see FPS values at 30-40. My temperatures remain very acceptable.

I haven't mentioned the graphics card, because that isn't where I need to spend time. It works and it's grand.

I'm far from finished configuring everything. I wanted to share my experience so far hoping that some will find this story interesting and perhaps helpful.

Here's my overclock settings as of now:

• Asus Multicore Enhancement - Disabled
• AVX Negative Offset - 2
• CPU Core Ratio - Sync all cores
• Core Ratio Limit - 49
• Digi+ Power Central/CPU Load Line Calibration - Level 6
• Internal CPU Power Management/Long and Short Duration Package Power Limit - Max (4095)
• CPU Core/Cache Current Limit - Max (255.5)
• Min/Max CPU Cache Ratio - 42
• BCLK Auto Adaptive Voltage - Disabled
• CPU Core and CPU Cache Voltage - Manual
• CPU Core Voltage Override - 1.248

Link to der8auer's guide

[reecemj 146]

Built my first i7 7700, evga 1080ti. What temps are you going with the over clocking? I plan to OC when I get everything set up.

[RichieFly 728]

22 hours ago, reecemj said:

Built my first i7 7700, evga 1080ti. What temps are you going with the over clocking? I plan to OC when I get everything set up.

My goal is to keep temps below 80 during stress testing. With the settings noted above I'm staying around 70-71.

I think the 7700 has similar properties, so you could expect similar temps. Some say the 8700 is a 7700 with 2 more cores.

[mokeiko 39]

Hi Richard,

what CPU did you have before?

fly safe

[Mace 1,910]

I'm building an 8700K setup right now (parts on order) -- very similar setup to yours, Asus Maximus X Hero Wifi.. Corsair 850 modular, too.  I'm using two (2x16) sticks of Trident Z 3200 mem instead of four.  NZXT S340 Elite with a Corsair H100i v2.   A pair of M.2 drives.

Thanks for the insight on your build.  I am not going to overclock it for at least the first couple of days, maybe weeks if I get busy with other things.  I want to take the rig on some shakedown cruises before I start upping the mhz.  Thanks for the heads-up on the Kaspersky bloatware, and the PWM fan thing.

My thinking is to update the BIOS first thing.  I'm hopeful that mine will ship with the latest BIOS.  I hope so, because i'd rather not mess with flashomg it, but i will if I have to.  The latest BIOS solved the Load Line Calibration problem.

[Dougal 165]

On 12/17/2017 at 9:00 AM, RichieFly said:

Here's my experience with upgrading my computer.

Foreword

At first, I was planning to upgrade. I was going to reuse my old case, keep the old video card and save some money. Since my old computer was more than 5 years old, I later thought I should replace the works. I didn't want to destroy one computer to make a new one. What if something goes wrong and I have NO computer?

Another realization I had along the way: I have a lot of Add-on's. I have spent hours and days getting my old system 'just right'. There are a huge number of licenses to keep straight. It takes many hours to get all this re-installed and configured.

And...tuning and tweaking an overclock setup also takes huge amounts of time.

Was it really worth all this? Read on and see what you think.

Scope

This post won't contain any hard and fast P3Dv4 performance numbers. I'm in the process of experimenting with all the simulator settings. I will mention general values I've seen along the way. This is a journal of the process of building, tweaking and installing software.

Parts

Here are the components I used in my computer build.

• Fractal Designs Define R5 case
• EVGA 850 G3 80 Plus Gold power supply
• ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero Wifi motherboard - BIOS version 0802
• Intel i7-8700K chip, not delided
• G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 4x8Gb memory
• EVGA GTX1080Ti SC graphics card
• Corsair H100i V2 AIO water cooler
• Samsung 960 Evo M.2 SSD 500Gb
• 2x Samsung 860 Evo SSD 500Gb
• Seagate FireCude 2TB HDD
• Windows 10 OS

I'm continuing to use my Viewsonic monitor @2560 x 1440 and my CH controllers.

Build

The case is very adaptable to whatever you might need to do. It's a mid-tower.

I removed both drive cages, via thumbscrews and 4 small screws. This provided lots of room. I installed the cooler in the front. No problems. I placed the power supply with the fan facing up for additional airflow. I moved the included front fan to the top of the case. I may remove this later, or move it to the bottom. We'll see. Not sure it's needed.

I installed the CPU and memory. The M.2 chip was installed under the included heatsink. Don't forget to remove the plastic under the heatsink which reads "please remove". I then fastened the motherboard into the case. So far, so good.

Next, I attached the cooler to the CPU and connected all the various leads to the motherboard: fan cables to fan headers, front panel leads to motherboard headers. You get the idea...

This case has 2 mounts in the back for your SSD's. That's where the 860 Evo's went. I mounted the HDD in the 51/4 bay using an adapter bracket I had in my parts pile.

The power supply is modular. This means you only have the cables you need. Which is good because after everything was wired up and connected, there was an unholy mess of cables and wires.

I tidied up the wires and cables using the included velcro straps and ties. I also used some additional ties which were also provided. This case has the best cable routeing system I've encountered. There's plenty of grommet holes, some of which are angled towards the motherboard's location. Also, the back of the case has a generous space for tucking and hiding.

Finally! That only took 6 hours. I'm pretty old and my eyes are getting worthless at doing detail work. I'm sure somebody younger would knock this out in an hour or 2.

Looks good. Clean as a whistle. Time to fire this baby up.

Configuration

It booted up! Always a relief.

Updated the BIOS. Selected the XMP profile and let that take. What do we have then?

The memory was running at the rated speed. The XMP profile also increased some voltages, enabled Multi-core enhancement and generally had it running at what could be good enough for general use and gaming. But, that's not why we're here, is it?

I installed Windows 10 and the stuff which came with the motherboard. Next, I installed the updated versions of the ASUS stuff I have downloaded previously. Just a note here. There's some garbage that is loaded with the included CD from Asus; including Kasperski AV. I just uninstalled it and said "so long". I also installed Corsair's Corsair Link software. This is completely necessary if your using their AIO cooler. More on that below.

Here's where things stopped going smoothly, due to my lack of understanding.

I ran the "5-way Optimization" accessed either through the BIOS or via the rather nice AI Suite 3. Wow. I'm running at 5.0 Ghz just like that. And it seems OK. Not hot or crashing. I guess I'm done.

During the automatic optimization I introduced some problems which became apparent when I started stress testing.

I mistakenly set the CPU fan to DC control as opposed to PWM control. Also, the core voltage is set to 1.35 (same as the memory). This voltage is safe, but only if you're using water cooling or a top of the line air cooler.

During my testing, I was seeing my temperatures spiking into the 90's. No bueno. That's enough for the day, I thought, so off to bed...what could the problem be?

Upon waking, I thought that the cooler didn't seem to be running correctly. The pump speed was meager and the fans over the radiator were also weakly spinning. After some looking on-line and thinking hard (and nothing was happening!), I realized or read the H100i must be set to a PWM fan type. My bad. Also, I hadn't really looked at the Corsair Link setup.

I created a custom profile in Corsair Link and made sure the pump was pumping and the fans were fanning. Cool. The difficulty here is in that there are 2 places for fan control: AI Suite 3 and Corsair Link. I have it sorted out now, but I'm sure I'll return to this to get the optimum cooling with the least noise. The fans on the cooler can get stupidly loud. The same can be said for the included Fractal Designs fans, if they run at RPM's over a certain threshold.

You must have your fans and cooling working if you are overclocking. Duh!

I stepped back the overclock and started again.

Onward

Time for another attempt at overclocking and stress testing. I found this youtube personality who had some settings for the motherboard as a starting point. I'll post a link below. The values he suggested worked, but the voltage was a little high for my liking.

What I have now is a steady 4.9Ghz overclock on all cores with hyperthreading enabled. My temperatures range from 38ish at idle and mid to high 70's at full load. Completely acceptable, for me. I'm not quite finished with the tweak. I'm pretty sure I can run at 5.0Ghz on all cores with HT enabled.

Results

I'm stoked. My early experiments with P3Dv4 are very good. A generic aircraft at a generic airport is practically pegged at 60 FPS (my monitor's refresh rate). Loading up the FSL A320X at payware KSEA with full Orbx, AS16, Envtex with rainy weather and sliders haphazardly moved to the right, I see FPS values at 30-40. My temperatures remain very acceptable.

I haven't mentioned the graphics card, because that isn't where I need to spend time. It works and it's grand.

I'm far from finished configuring everything. I wanted to share my experience so far hoping that some will find this story interesting and perhaps helpful.

Here's my overclock settings as of now:

• Asus Multicore Enhancement - Disabled
• AVX Negative Offset - 2
• CPU Core Ratio - Sync all cores
• Core Ratio Limit - 49
• Digi+ Power Central/CPU Load Line Calibration - Level 6
• Internal CPU Power Management/Long and Short Duration Package Power Limit - Max (4095)
• CPU Core/Cache Current Limit - Max (255.5)
• Min/Max CPU Cache Ratio - 42
• BCLK Auto Adaptive Voltage - Disabled
• CPU Core and CPU Cache Voltage - Manual
• CPU Core Voltage Override - 1.248

Link to der8auer's guide

Are you still running Asus AI Suite & Corsair Link side by side?

Those two programs can, and often do clash terribly when run together.  Sadly, I speak from experience:-(

[RichieFly 728]

3 minutes ago, Dougal said:

Are you still running Asus AI Suite & Corsair Link side by side?

Those two programs can, and often do clash terribly when run together.  Sadly, I speak from experience:-(

Yes. And yes, that was the origin of my cooling problems.

I have it sorted out now. And after more tweaking Corsair Link profile, I have the CPU running a bit cooler (although this could be the thermal paste setting).

If I were to remove AI Suite, would I lose anything?

[RichieFly 728]

22 hours ago, mokeiko said:

Hi Richard,

what CPU did you have before?

fly safe

i5-3570k

A very good processor in its day.

[RichieFly 728]

19 hours ago, Mace said:

I'm building an 8700K setup right now (parts on order) -- very similar setup to yours, Asus Maximus X Hero Wifi.. Corsair 850 modular, too.  I'm using two (2x16) sticks of Trident Z 3200 mem instead of four.  NZXT S340 Elite with a Corsair H100i v2.   A pair of M.2 drives.

Thanks for the insight on your build.  I am not going to overclock it for at least the first couple of days, maybe weeks if I get busy with other things.  I want to take the rig on some shakedown cruises before I start upping the mhz.  Thanks for the heads-up on the Kaspersky bloatware, and the PWM fan thing.

My thinking is to update the BIOS first thing.  I'm hopeful that mine will ship with the latest BIOS.  I hope so, because i'd rather not mess with flashomg it, but i will if I have to.  The latest BIOS solved the Load Line Calibration problem.

Sounds like a good plan.

Updating the BIOS isn't a scary as it used to be.

I should have waited to start overclocking--wait for the paste to cure and making sure all is working.

As I mentioned, setting the XMP profile provides enough of a boost for most needs.

[Dougal 165]

1 hour ago, RichieFly said:

If I were to remove AI Suite, would I lose anything?

Not anything you can't set in the bios;-)

[richbonneau 76]

I plan to do a very similar thing. Time to replace my 3770K and 970ti.  Following :)

[xenonsk 129]

I have similar setup. Maximus hero X, 8700k, 16GB corsair dominator 3200Mhz. Overclocked at 4.8Ghz with 1.230 vcore. Temps are 73 C max during simming. Very happy with this cpu.

[martin-w 3,235]

On 19/12/2017 at 6:39 PM, RichieFly said:

Yes. And yes, that was the origin of my cooling problems.

I have it sorted out now. And after more tweaking Corsair Link profile, I have the CPU running a bit cooler (although this could be the thermal paste setting).

If I were to remove AI Suite, would I lose anything?

 

 

I seem to have got away with it with my daughters PC. Both Ai Suite and Corsair Link running together. EVGA Precision X Working fine too.

Ai Suite feeds anything you set directly into to the BIOS. Therefore you can remove Ai Suite and all settings will remain in the BIOS. Fan profile, any overcvloking etc.

It's advisable that you run the Asus Ai Suite uninstallation tool though, to make sure all is gone. It's available on the ROG site. Check in the forum.