Well, I couldn't resist the urge for a pre-P3D5/MSFS upgrade when I saw my local MicroCenter suddenly had both the i9-10900K and the ASUS Maximus XII Hero in stock.  With Coronamania making fun a prohibited maneuver, what's a guy to do with his cash, anyway?

I migrated my ~2 year old Z390 Maximus XI Hero Z390 and 5.3 GHz six-core 8086K system to a Z490 Maximus XII Hero and a (so far) 5.2 GHz 10-core i9-10900K.  I have been waiting to make the jump to P3Dv5, and of course there's that new MSFS right around the corner as well.  But from my observations of the 9900K I have on my portable rig and the 8086K, I'm convinced that adding 67% more cores as long as I don't have a big drop in core clock would be worthwhile, in P3Dv4.5, and particularly in v5.

The rebuild was very straight forward coming from the previous generation ASUS Hero board.  Not much had to be moved or re-routed.  I removed a SATA III SSD and added two 2TB Samsung MLC Evo+ NVME drives, for a total of three NVME drives on the new mobo (one each dedicated to P3Dv4, P3Dv5, and MSFS, which will use my more write-resistant 1TB Samsung 970 Pro SLC drive since it will presumably be caching large volumes of streaming data).

The 10900K + Z490 chipset impressed me with its IMC and memory support.  When I built the 8086K system, I bought two 2x8GB sets of GSkill DDR4-3600 CAS 15 RAM, and the 8086K would not run all four DIMMs (32GB) without a good bit of work to loosen up the timings from the XMP settings.  The DIMMs all ran great at/above XMP with just two installed.  Not so the new setup--with all four of the same DIMMs in the board it passed a 4-hour MemTest86+ run at XMP settings (3600-15-15-15-36) first time out with no modifications.  Sweet!

This chip is also a really good, easy overclocker.  I run an aggressive external cooling stack with two 360mm deep XSPC radiators and half-inch tubing.  The 10900K needs good cooling--but unlike previous generations it will effectively bring the heat out to the IHS without trapping it inside the chip.  My opening gambit based on reading the overclocking forums was 5.1 GHz on all 10 cores with cache at 4.8, 1.35v HT Off.  It passed a six-hour run of Prime95 Blend first time out, with peak temps in the low 70s.  With AVX enabled, peak temp was 79 on a few cores.  With HT off, it's passed another long run of non-AVX Prime95 at 5.2 GHz and 1.36v. 

I am getting ready to start a parallel install of P3Dv4.5 HF3 and P3Dv5 HF2...so far this processor is looking very much up to the task.

 

Way to go Bob. Keep us posted

Cheers,

Pierre

This excites me, I’m in the middle of having various parts delivered to build my i9 10900k system, upgrading from an older processor than you, an i7 7700k. 

Thanks for the info, looking forward to hearing more.  

Nice job! I also received my i9-10900k last week and have been using my new machine for about a week now. I'm extremely impressed with it especially coming from an 8 yr old i7-3770k! Now I'm waiting for the 30xx ampere cards to come out to finish the build. I call this new build the MFS build. Which inspired me to build a new computer. I am long overdue for a new one anyways. I haven't messed with overclocking yet. I want to wait awhile before I actually mess with any of that. I want to get a feel for how my system runs at the stock vanilla settings 1st and to make sure that there are no problems with the build. 

@w6kd You're running on all cores at 5.2GHzat 1.36v? May I ask why you disabled HT? Are there any advantages to that? I believe most modern day games benefit from HT on, unless only of course you're just using your machine primarily for flight simming. Also what score did you get in your BIOS for the SP and Cooler Pts? Do you know what the stock CPU voltage is? Or does it differ from chip to chip?

13 hours ago, captain420 said:

 

@w6kd You're running on all cores at 5.2GHzat 1.36v? May I ask why you disabled HT? Are there any advantages to that? I believe most modern day games benefit from HT on, unless only of course you're just using your machine primarily for flight simming. Also what score did you get in your BIOS for the SP and Cooler Pts? Do you know what the stock CPU voltage is? Or does it differ from chip to chip?

As I understand it, P3D reaches a point of diminishing returns when it comes to the number of logical processors in use...at some point more processors don't add much more due to issues with thread contention.  Rob Ainscough posted some time back that he thought that point was ~10 LPs in P3Dv4.  With HT off, the CPU runs cooler and you can typically bump up the clock speed 100-200 MHz for a given approximate core temperature.  My 8086K ran P3Dv4 a LOT smoother without HT...with it on, I saw a fair bit of microstuttering that virtually disappeared when I turned off the HT.

So the opening play will be HT off with 10 cores in play.  One of the interesting new twists with the Z490 and 10th Gen CPUs is that you can enable/disable HT for each core independently, so I might try keeping HT off on the cores that run the main thread(s), and enable it on some or all of the others.  I run at 30 Hz fixed frame rate using VSync, so smoothness is the goal, not better frame rates.  I'm hoping to push a PMDG/FSL bird smoothly through ORBX SoCal one day.

Stock voltage is variable as the CPU moves through the various C-States as a function of load.  I prefer to lock mine at a fixed clock rate and voltage for stability.

23 hours ago, w6kd said:

I run an aggressive external cooling stack with two 360mm deep XSPC radiators and half-inch tubing.

 

Is a liquid cooling system quiter than the traditional fan? Is there an average dB value stated by the producer for a full system?

34 minutes ago, Mirach said:

Is a liquid cooling system quiter than the traditional fan? Is there an average dB value stated by the producer for a full system?

My custom loop on the sim machine is very quiet.  How quiet will depend on the fans you use, and how fast you run them.  I use two 360mm extra-deep radiators daisy-chained together with six PWM maglev bearing fans on shrouds...the large total surface area allows me to keep the fans turned down to their lowest speed.  With the sim running and producing acft sounds through the sound system, you can't hear them at all.  Otherwise it's a steady low hum in the background.

The AIO (Corsair H100i) on my main general-purpose desktop PC is much louder when it spools up under a load.  The fans will speed up and slow down with the load, too, which I find distracting.  The AIO does stay very quiet at idle and doing normal day-to-day web browsing, e-mail etc.

 

Good to know, thanks. I was unsure if moving to a liquid cooling or not, but I think I will switch to it with my new pc.

I built my last system based on your 8086K reports and love it. Now it looks like I need to upgrade, LOL. I'm going to wait for the 3080ti to drop first. 

Edited August 17, 20205 yr by Wise87

On 8/17/2020 at 2:56 PM, Wise87 said:

I built my last system based on your 8086K reports and love it. Now it looks like I need to upgrade, LOL. I'm going to wait for the 3080ti to drop first. 

Well, the 2080Ti hasn't let me down yet...but yeah...the 3080Ti is up on my radar too.  And holy rip, the 10900K is just rockin' the Casbah! 

At some point, when I get a break in the action I'm going to replace my 7700K daily driver with the recently-orphaned 8086K.

Cheers

1 hour ago, w6kd said:

Well, the 2080Ti hasn't let me down yet...but yeah...the 3080Ti is up on my radar too.  And holy rip, the 10900K is just rockin' the Casbah! 

At some point, when I get a break in the action I'm going to replace my 7700K daily driver with the recently-orphaned 8086K.

Cheers

The problem is these days is trying to get a hold of the 10900K. If there is one available its by a third party and they want almost $900 for it. Due to Covid lots of hardware is hard to come by. 

Edited August 20, 20205 yr by Wise87

43 minutes ago, Wise87 said:

The problem is these days is trying to get a hold of the 10900K. If there is one available its by a third party and they want almost $900 for it. Due to Covid lots of hardware is hard to come by. 

I guess I lucked out.  I just found them in stock by happenstance in the Denver MicroCenter store.  They had more than 10 in stock at the time, and still had plentiful stock a week later when I decided to pull the trigger.

In the meantime, the 8086K is no slouch.

This is the problem Intel and AMD will be showing off the next GEN next month, but when you will be able to get your hands on them is another story, some are already warning of shortages due to shipping delays.

installed and tested MSFS on tre PC with 2080TI have one left to test , 

55inc 4k locked at 30hz same settings on all , cant see any difference then the cpu usage no of them bottlenecked its all up to the gpu , GPU usage set to hit 95% most settings on Ultra.

all run very smoth , when on budget you can take a cheap cpu runs as god as the high priced one , overclocking not really do much tested my 9900k  from 4.8 - 5.3ghz HT on only diff little lover cpu usage on 5.3.

cpu tested 

AMD Ryzen 3700x 32gb 3200mhz mems not overclocked

INTEL 9900k 32gb 4000mhz c16 mems OC std to 5.3ghz HT on

INTEL7980XE 32gb 4000mhz c18 mems OC std to 4.9ghz HT on all 18 cores enabled

not tested yet , INTEL 8700K pre binned 5.3ghz hope to do it next week and test it with 2080ti then swap to 1080ti single and last see if SLI works with 2 X 1080ti

 

Edited August 20, 20205 yr by westman

On 8/20/2020 at 1:46 AM, westman said:

installed and tested MSFS on tre PC with 2080TI have one left to test , 

55inc 4k locked at 30hz same settings on all , cant see any difference then the cpu usage no of them bottlenecked its all up to the gpu , GPU usage set to hit 95% most settings on Ultra.

all run very smoth , when on budget you can take a cheap cpu runs as god as the high priced one , overclocking not really do much tested my 9900k  from 4.8 - 5.3ghz HT on only diff little lover cpu usage on 5.3.

I'm seeing 25% average CPU usage in MSFS at Ultra on a 5.2 GHz 10-core 10900K, with workload pretty evenly split across the cores.  Folks have been reporting performance issues with the older quad-core CPUs (2600K thru 7700K), so I'd guess the sweet spot is in the neighborhood of 6 cores with a good o/c or 8 cores at stock speeds.