1 hour ago, martin-w said:

 

Yeah, 1.5 is way too high. Not surprised it throttled. Its pretty much the absolute max voltage Intel state, a voltage absolutely nobody without exotic cooling could handle. Quite a few boards seem to set bonkers voltages on Auto. 

It was even pulling this high voltage despite me having Vcore changed from Auto to Fixed Core and manually setting a lower Vcore like 1.32V. Perhaps it is this MCE setting that martin-w is talking about that is causing it, so I will check it again later today and see if it makes any difference.

I tried my system with MCE enabled and disabled and it made no difference to temps and voltages.

Also, now that I have PSVR working quite well, I found I had to enable the intel graphics function to get a third HDMI output for the PSVR for it to go with my other two screens (one a 75" 4K TV and the other a 32" 1080p monitor). In doing so, I had to down clock my overclock to 4.9GHz as it was no longer stable at 5.0GHz.

I realise that I could use a display port to HDMI cable from my 3080 to the third display, however I don't have one and the drop back to 4.9Ghz is about a 2% loss in performance and I am am finding FS2020 is mostly GPU limited anyway at either 4K or with PSVR, so it doesn't really make any real performance difference.

Have you installed the latest BIOS for your motherboard. Very important to do so. This motherboard was released a while back, there will be numerous performance and bug fixes.

This may help you re MCE.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3590-dont-run-z490-motherboards-with-default-settings-for-your-build

Not sure about Gigabyte because different manufacturers do different things with MCE. They also sometimes call it something else. But for Asus, it sets all cores to run at the max turbo frequency, rather than just on one or two cores that Intel specify. So with a CPU with many cores this is a signifcant OC. And because voltage is set to Auto, and has to accommodate chips that lost the silicon lottery, voltage is higher than most need. Asus are good about this with 10th gen, and set to BIOS defaults, don't switch on MCE. I recall Gigabyte do though.

Edited January 31, 20215 yr by martin-w

3 hours ago, RESET MCP ALT said:

I tried my system with MCE enabled and disabled and it made no difference to temps and voltages.

 

 

 

Re stress tests it depends what kind of stress test you are running and if its running AVX instruction sets. Try something like Real Bench.

If you run something like R20 temps will be high because it runs AVX. Some of these stress rests put a load on the CPU that barely any of us will encounter.

Temps in the sim and your other applications are the important factor.

Your ambient temp should be considered too.

Edited January 31, 20215 yr by martin-w

I have been running TS Bench from the ThrottleStop app, which I have found tells me OC stability and max temps much quicker (as in seconds or a few minutes at most) than Prime95 or others I have tried. As FS2020 is mostly GPU bound for my setup, I am going to leave CPU alone for now and just enjoy the sim.

I really appreciate your help and suggestions though martin-w. You got me further than I did on my own and have given me options to try in future if I try again.

Nothing, will tell you if a rig is stable in "seconds or a few minutes".

An hour ot two of Real Bench might. Running the sim for a few days might. Not minutes, not seconds.

Do update that BIOS, make sure its the latest. Unless whoever built your system has already done so.

Have fun with your PC. 👍

For giggles I tried to turn on HT with all cores at 5.1 (at the same settings on everything else). Result - can't get to the desktop after login.

I just went back to default settings. I'm going to run stock for a couple of days and fiddle with the sliders in P3D first to get things that way that I like them and to get a better feel for where my starting point is. Quite frankly, P3D at max settings is overkill. Too many houses, trees, random buildings, etc.. I think it starts looking too busy and ugly beyond a certain point. It's funny, I have run every version of Flight Simulator and it's variants ever made. The one setting that I immediately disabled in every version was the traffic slider. I literally, never saw vehicle traffic from the air. I do recall seeing vehicles driving around the airport when the plane was sitting on the ground, but that just served as a reminder to turn it off, which I always did as soon as I saw it. I turned it on after I saw LM's comment in the release notes about traffic being optimized to reduce performance impact. I'm getting a real kick out of seeing traffic crossing under me on short final. I wish it had been working properly all along. It adds a nice touch of realism. I keep it at about 20% on the slider because it's one of the "too much of a good thing" options IMO.  

I'm also realigning my OC strategy with how P3D actually uses the CPU. OCing 10 cores is just a waste of power when only 4 of them are above 10% usage. So I think after baselining my system stock, I'm going to try to get the cores P3D is using to 5.2 or 5.3 (which technically, isn't really an overclock on this CPU - 5.4 on 2 would be super IMO) and let the other cores doddle along at whatever they run stock, which seems to be in the ballpark of 4.8Ghz on this Asus TUF z490.

I was on the tail end of the FS2020 beta (too late to add any input of value to the beta) and it looked and ran real nice on my 8600K. As soon as PMDG gets the NGXu in there, I'll be over. I just enjoy flying the airliners too much to even bother with it right now. I am really looking forward to when FS202 finally gets there so I an join in on the fun. I'm also trying to be good and get some work on the house and the boat done before I get distracted with another sim. 🙂

Edited January 31, 20215 yr by MDFlier

You know... I have never run benchmarks. I just don't care. If I set it up and it doesn't crash doing what I normally do, then I call it good.

I had a 5 year run as a systems analyst doing UNIX performance tuning on multiprocessor systems (found a pic) . I spent hours upon hours running tests for memory transfer speed, IO speed, CPU interconnect bus speeds, etc.. It was a horrible job. In an 8 hour day I spend about 2 hours actually working on the system, and 6 hours freezing my butt off in the systems room (or closet, lol) waiting for the dang tests to finish. That's probably why I don't do it at home. 

7 hours ago, martin-w said:

Nothing, will tell you if a rig is stable in "seconds or a few minutes".

An hour ot two of Real Bench might. Running the sim for a few days might. Not minutes, not seconds.

Do update that BIOS, make sure its the latest. Unless whoever built your system has already done so.

Have fun with your PC. 👍

I should have added the word likelihood after stability in what I said, as in I find that all my systems are long term stable with normal use, including gaming, if it can survive that couple of minutes of testing. eg. I have been using FS2020 solidly (50 hours) since overclocking as I have discussed here and not once has it crashed. ie. The test is quick and dirty but has been giving me a commensurate result long term, so it's good enough for me.

Yes I have updated to the latest, seemingly non-beta, BIOS. In fact when I did this on day one of getting my PC it actually bricked the computer (would not even get to the BIOS screen for me to hit DEL, the screen was blank!). Dr Google revealed I was not the only one with this problem with this particular BIOS and I found a method to reflash the BIOS using Qflash, a button on the motherboard and a USB stick with a specifically named file in a specific USB port. That brought it back to life  and I found a few days later Gigabyte had pulled the BIOS from their site and I have since tentatively flashed to the next latest one with positive results.

7 hours ago, MDFlier said:

I had a 5 year run as a systems analyst doing UNIX performance tuning on multiprocessor systems (found a pic) . I spent hours upon hours running tests for memory transfer speed, IO speed, CPU interconnect bus speeds, etc.. It was a horrible job. In an 8 hour day I spend about 2 hours actually working on the system, and 6 hours freezing my butt off in the systems room (or closet, lol) waiting for the dang tests to finish. That's probably why I don't do it at home.

Ditto in that I used to run a software development facility for safety critical aircraft software, and that wore down my desire test extensively at home anymore.

Also, back when I first started overclocking as far back as the Pentium 1 days, there was a lot more margin in how far CPUs could be pushed (eg. remember the Celeron 266 that many could run at 400, ie a 50% boost, at stock settings with the stock cooler?), Modern CPUs don't have that much margin in them eg. a 10850K already runs stock at 4.8GHz with all cores running, yet most people can't get much over 5.0 GHz, a measly 4% increase, without needing exotic cooling and high core voltages to get there. IMO, the return for pushing this edge is no longer worth the effort or expense like it was a few decades ago.

Edited January 31, 20215 yr by RESET MCP ALT

13 hours ago, RESET MCP ALT said:

 

Also, back when I first started overclocking as far back as the Pentium 1 days, there was a lot more margin in how far CPUs could be pushed (eg. remember the Celeron 266 that many could run at 400, ie a 50% boost, at stock settings with the stock cooler?), Modern CPUs don't have that much margin in them eg. a 10850K already runs stock at 4.8GHz with all cores running, yet most people can't get much over 5.0 GHz, a measly 4% 

 

Not surprising though. There are now 10 cores, not one.

All core base frequency for 10850k is 3.6 GHz. Yes, at stock, it Turbos to 5.2 GHz on one or two cores, but thats only for a short boost duration,  with sufficient thermal headroom.

Compare the above, 5.2 on only one or two cores, briefly, with running all 10 cores permanently at 5.2 GHz, and you can see its a bigger overclock than many realise.

I agree with your basic premise though.  We have more cores to deal with and chips have higher power consumption and thus generate more heat.

Edited February 1, 20215 yr by martin-w

To clarify... 4.8 GHz on all cores is feasible, but that's at PL2. (Power Limit 2) And "Tau" (duration) for PL2 is only 56 seconds, then the power level will drop to PL1 along with the frequency which will drop to the base level.

So again, as you see, manually overclocking to the max turbo frequency on all cores, permanently, not just 56 seconds,  is a bigger overclock than many realise.

I should add, that motherboard vendors often boost both PL2 and Tau above Intel spec, often setting Tau to infinity, but this is of course the vendor  overclocking.

 

Edited February 1, 20215 yr by martin-w

4 hours ago, martin-w said:

So again, as you see, manually overclocking to the max turbo frequency on all cores, permanently, not just 56 seconds,  is a bigger overclock than many realise.

Good point. I shall be more respectful of my 4.9GHz, all cores, all the time, overclock on my new CPU!

Turns out enabling and using Intel Graphics to run my 1080p monitor causes major monitor syncing issues, regardless of whether or not I over clock or use different Intel Graphics drivers, so I've had to turn it off.

The good news is that using a display port to HDMI adaptor with my 3080 works perfectly fine with this 1080p monitor, even with my 4K TV and the PSVR using the 3080's two HDMI outputs at the same time. Even better is that because I am no longer using Intel Graphics, I can go back up to my 5.0GHz stable OC 😁