Well I go for conservative OCs without changing voltage too much. Since he is coming from a totally non overclocked system I wasn’t going to assume he was going to be that aggressive with voltage. I was also assuming decent but not overboard air cooling.

Edited June 22, 20196 yr by JasonPC

I have an 8086K and recently switched to the ASUS AI OC solution which is just one click and you are good to go.  In my case it was 5.1 but has recently upped the ante to 5.2 probably due to lower ambient temps as winter progresses down under.  I like the way this AI OC thing trains itself and is tailored to your particular system.  When stress tested thermal limits were tested but with P3D temps are quite modest rarely above 70 C.  Never-the-less if I swapped to an 8 core cpu I doubt that I could go beyond 4.9 with my current 280 AIO rad.

Bruceb

Say at 30fps you get 33.3ms between each frame. During that time all the things the sim does add up so that when combined to more than that time, the fps falls.

When we add in programs like dlls the simulator has to take care of whatever processing those do, so these add into the period available. if those add-in items take up any time, that detracts from any reduction saved in time the GPU items take to render. In fact most GPUs since the GTX680/7 class are pretty good at any speed on P3D d3d 11 rendering.

So the problem lies in what's been said, about adding in AI traffic and more buildings, but also dlls and complex gauges like FMS. The CPU time to do those things adds up to a lot more than what time you can save by the GPU rendering faster.

The GPU has another metric which is how many pixels it can draw in the buffer, that's different to how many objects can be 3D manipulated and the faster pixel rate allows more screen real estate.

 

 

Edited June 22, 20196 yr by SteveW

Thanks everyone for your input.  I have never overclocked a computer but will continue to research and learn more about programs to use for stress testing and measuring temperature and then maybe I will attempt it.  But I know when to say "I don't know enough" and I see serious potential for harm to my computer, I'm just not that knowledgeable about all this.  And now I'm reading about changing voltage and adding a cooling system to my computer.  I just want to do a cold and dark startup, fly a one hour leg, park it at the gate for a short turn and I'm done.  So is there nothing off the shelf that provides a nice plug and play upgrade or does everything require tweaking?   I'm seeing chips with "turbo boost technology" that kick in and take it from 3.6 to 4.9.  Anything good about these?  Thanks again, I do appreciate the help and information being provided.  As an aside, the graphics card isn't a total bust, I also got it to bring out the most in a new Dell 1440p monitor and that has been a nice improvement.

 

Bob

Most high end Intel processors have turbo which is basically a built-in factory overclock. The trick is in the marketing that the full 4.7 ghz or so turbo frequency is only applied to one core. Then you might get a 4.6 turbo frequency for two cores, 4.4 for four cores, 4.3 for all six.

When you manually overclock you basically override the turbo and tell the CPU what frequency to run at over all cores. This requires increasing the voltage which requires some trial and error. Failure to increase the voltage high enough can result in system instability (blue screens or lockups). Increasing the voltage too much can cause damage, create excessive heat, or cause long-term chip degradation (not common). Most guides for overclocking are very well-written and will allow you to avoid these pitfalls.

Some motherboards also have pre-set overclock features that automatically select the voltage and clock speed.

2 hours ago, BobKinSTL said:

Thanks everyone for your input.  I have never overclocked a computer but will continue to research and learn more about programs to use for stress testing and measuring temperature and then maybe I will attempt it.  But I know when to say "I don't know enough" and I see serious potential for harm to my computer, I'm just not that knowledgeable about all this.  And now I'm reading about changing voltage and adding a cooling system to my computer.  I just want to do a cold and dark startup, fly a one hour leg, park it at the gate for a short turn and I'm done.  So is there nothing off the shelf that provides a nice plug and play upgrade or does everything require tweaking?   I'm seeing chips with "turbo boost technology" that kick in and take it from 3.6 to 4.9.  Anything good about these?  Thanks again, I do appreciate the help and information being provided.  As an aside, the graphics card isn't a total bust, I also got it to bring out the most in a new Dell 1440p monitor and that has been a nice improvement.

This is one case where you can pretty much get something for nothing...it would be well worth your time to do some green-belt level Google-Fu and learn about this.  If you have a decent CPU cooler, a modest overclock to ~4.8 GHz on all cores on an 8700K or a 9900K is pretty trivial...a few BIOS setting changes and some test runs to make sure it's stable.

It's very, very difficult to harm your CPU by attempting an overclock.  Today's chips have built-in thermal protection that will throttle or shut down the chip if you try something really dumb.  And if you're *really* paranoid, Intel actually sells a warranty for about $30 that covers damage from overclocking (easy money for them).

You can buy already-overclocked PCs from a number of specialty retailers, if plug-n-play is what you're after.

Regards

13 minutes ago, w6kd said:

This is one case where you can pretty much get something for nothing...it would be well worth your time to do some green-belt level Google-Fu and learn about this.  If you have a decent CPU cooler, a modest overclock to ~4.8 GHz on all cores on an 8700K or a 9900K is pretty trivial...a few BIOS setting changes and some test runs to make sure it's stable.

It's very, very difficult to harm your CPU by attempting an overclock.  Today's chips have built-in thermal protection that will throttle or shut down the chip if you try something really dumb.  And if you're *really* paranoid, Intel actually sells a warranty for about $30 that covers damage from overclocking (easy money for them).

You can buy already-overclocked PCs from a number of specialty retailers, if plug-n-play is what you're after.

Regards

Agree it is worth more learning.  I am seeing free downloads for temp and stability testing but also concerned about my chip being "non-K".  

I am spec'ing up my next PC and was going for a PC built to my spec. I think I've decided to go with a 9700k pre binned @5.1 my thinking it might be better to have 8 cores than an 8086 @ 5.1?

9900K seems to need a LOT of cooling and P3D seems to like cores so not sure I need the HT unless V5 is going to make use of them? Also, a [email protected] is almost double the price...Och!

Hoping a 5.1 RTX 2080 and 16GB of fast 3866MHz RAM and Window and P3d running on there own 970 EVO MVMe will work a treat?

 

Edited June 22, 20196 yr by Nyxx

Lol, I am using 980GTX and VR with 3 4K monitors at 60hz

 

Once the P3D5 comes out - I hoping that the rendering engine gets a complete overhaul, you will love your 2060rtx then.  It will be super handy with new MSFS2020 but for now Prepar3d is really cpu bound.  

My cpu is older one for now but still fast for p3d - i7-5820K OCed to 4.4ghz

1 hour ago, BobKinSTL said:

Agree it is worth more learning.  I am seeing free downloads for temp and stability testing but also concerned about my chip being "non-K".  

Just to be clear, the discussion on overclocking is based on your mention of moving up to an 8700K...overclocking a non-K CPU isn't usually doable at all (most OEM motherboards using non-K parts don't have BIOS options for OC), and even if it is (by clocking up the BCLK freq) it doesn't tend to yield much benefit before parts of the system start becoming unstable.

So I'd recommend you forearm yourself with the possibilities presented by overclocking to form the best plan for your next system, whenever that may come.

Cheers

 

18 minutes ago, w6kd said:

Just to be clear, the discussion on overclocking is based on your mention of moving up to an 8700K...overclocking a non-K CPU isn't usually doable at all (most OEM motherboards using non-K parts don't have BIOS options for OC), and even if it is (by clocking up the BCLK freq) it doesn't tend to yield much benefit before parts of the system start becoming unstable.

So I'd recommend you forearm yourself with the possibilities presented by overclocking to form the best plan for your next system, whenever that may come.

Cheers

 

Yep, thank you.  I went to my local Micro Center today, there is a guy there I tend to think knows what he's talking about. I am learning that I will need a new motherboard, I guess my i5 is old architecture.  His recommendation to me was the AMD Ryzen 2700 which has built in cooling and apparently a very simple "one click" feature for overclocking.  Comments welcome.  

1 hour ago, BobKinSTL said:

Yep, thank you.  I went to my local Micro Center today, there is a guy there I tend to think knows what he's talking about. I am learning that I will need a new motherboard, I guess my i5 is old architecture.  His recommendation to me was the AMD Ryzen 2700 which has built in cooling and apparently a very simple "one click" feature for overclocking.  Comments welcome.  

Hold off on the Ryzen... for now.

The new Ryzen 3000-series processors are out in just two weeks on 7th July. Large improvements on current Ryzen CPUs and punching at same level as top-end Intel ones apparently.

At the very least, you'll see a price drop on most current gen CPUs (AMD & Intel) after the new Ryzen family hits the market.

The AMD CPUs trail the intel processors where it counts most in P3D, which is single-core throughput.  There are also a number of motherboards for the 9xxx intel CPUs that will do one-click AI overclocking. 

Intel CPUs and nVidia GPUs are the mainstream hardware choices for P3D...lots written as to why that is.  A Ryzen will work, but I can't say I would recommend it.

I would not consider using a stock CPU cooler of any kind.  The Noctua NH-D15S for air cooling or either the NZXT Kraken x52 or Corsair H100i for AIO liquid coolers are all good choices that will give you the cooling needed to exploit a good (but not necessarily extreme) overclock.

Regards

57 minutes ago, w6kd said:

The AMD CPUs trail the intel processors where it counts most in P3D, which is single-core throughput.  There are also a number of motherboards for the 9xxx intel CPUs that will do one-click AI overclocking. 

Intel CPUs and nVidia GPUs are the mainstream hardware choices for P3D...lots written as to why that is.  A Ryzen will work, but I can't say I would recommend it.

I would not consider using a stock CPU cooler of any kind.  The Noctua NH-D15S for air cooling or either the NZXT Kraken x52 or Corsair H100i for AIO liquid coolers are all good choices that will give you the cooling needed to exploit a good (but not necessarily extreme) overclock.

Bob, while I was trying not to explicitly promote AMD (I did say that I think that prices for both manufacturers' CPUs should fall following Zen 2 release in a fortnight), I believe that it's not a lock for Intel any longer on single-thread performance.

Many technically competent, independent reviewers have spoken very positively about the 15% IPC improvement, the smaller 7mm architecture, 35MB+ cache and lower wattage TDPs that the new Ryzen series will have.

With the better pricing also, you would be silly not to at least give consideration to the new Ryzen as a build option.

Agree on the Noctua NH-D15 air cooler.
I'm a big fan of the big fan... 
 

Yep, the new Ryzen 3000 series are going to be something.

Ryzen 2 (Zen+...the current version) works absolutely fantastic in P3D.  There are other factors also:  price/performance ratio, multi-core performance (if you use other apps that take advantage of it), and especially power used.