New PC toys!
Disregard this post if you find PC stuff boring...
20150123_150023158_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
I decided to admit defeat for the moment and get a Haswell-E rig because Broadwell and Skylake from Intel seem to be some ways away still. The purpose here is mostly just to give me something to do in the winter's dark eves, and I like geeking over PC stuff.
Anyways, I ended up getting:
- Asus X99 Pro motherboard
- Intel i7 5930k CPU
- Noctua NH-D15 air cooler for the CPU
- 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance 2400MHz DDR4 RAM
- Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD
- Corsair AX1200i power supply
- Fractal Design Arc XL enclosure
In addition I will use the dual ASUS GTX980's which I purchased last year.
Started with the case. It's set up thusly out of the box:
20150123_160721266_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
It comes with 3x low-rpm 14cm fans, a rear exhaust one, a top exhaust one, and one frontal inlet. In addition it has space for one extra fan each on the top, on the front, and on the floor. All the fan grids except the rear one have dust screens.
The upper SSD/HDD rack on the front can be rotated 90 degrees to direct airflow from the inlet fan to the GPUs:
20150123_161208540_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
As you can see the case has nice rubber-lined holes for routing wires through the backside of the case.
The power-on button and leds are in the frontal top area, not in the middle of the front fascia like usually. There's also a 3-way control panel for chassis fan speed (12V, 7V and 5V IIRC), but I won't be using that, since I'm leaving controlling the fans to the motherboard.
There's also a tinted window on the usual side of the case, which I wanted for easy inspecting of the machine's innards (for example the diagnostics readout on the motherboard). It also doesn't hurt that the window shows off the GTX-series lightshow which I'm a big fan of.
Next there's the PSU which came in the nicest box of the bunch. In fact the Corsair PSU line has always been good about the packaging, I have owned 2 of them previously.
This time around they had a nice cardboard box within a cardboard box, which contained the PSU in a really nice fabric bag, and the modular cables in the typical Corsair cable bag.
20150123_161723630_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
20150123_162028086_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
Next up was installing the RAM and the CPU.
I decided to go with a Haswell-E setup to futureproof at least some part of my purchase - namely, the DDR4 part. When eventually BW/Skylake come out they will most certainly use DDR4, and maybe even LGA2011v3, which would allow me to get rid of the horribly inefficient Haswell-E CPU.
20150123_171127796_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
20150123_172326761_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
For cooling that junk, I went with what I consider the best air cooling on the market, a Noctua. I've been running Noctua cooling since 2008. The NH-D15 is their biggest and baddest tower cooler, with in fact two towers and two 14cm 300-1500rpm fans.
Initially I thought I was going to go with a Corsair Hydro 110 (or 100i) AIO water cooler for the CPU, to get my cooling to work with Corsair Link. However, word is that it is not that much more powerful as a cooler than a big air cooler, and considerably more noisy. There would have been better AIO water coolers (in terms of cooling power and quietness), from Swiftech for example, but I was drawn to Noctua purely based on my previous experiences with Noctua and air cooling, and wanting to support the company.
20150123_175038480_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
20150125_194243409_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
The Noctua is a beast, it's almost as tall as there's room in a large form factor ATX case.
20150123_192414501_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
After some wrestling I had the motherboard in the case. There was a manufacturing defect in the case which forced me to adjust one of the PCI cards' mounting brackets with a screwdriver. Other than that, it was smooth sailing.
You can see how huge the Noctua is and how little room it leaves for the GPU. In fact the only way you can remove a "double-decker" GPU with the Noctua installed is to remove the Noctua's middle fan, so that you can reach the PCI-E slot release with some kind of narrow tool. Otherwise, the release switch is unreachable.
As usual these days the PSU mounts on the bottom.
Before I received the new SSD, I temporarily installed a HDD to use a couple of days for finding reasonable clocks for the 5930k and the DDR4.
By "reasonable" I mean taking out as much of the slack as possible while keeping it under TjMax in Prime95 torture testing. While 24+ hours of torture is recommended, I settled with 4 hours stability since this is first and foremost a gaming machine, so it never has to withstand long periods of 100% stress on all cores.
After much fiddling and testing I settled at 102 base clock, 41x multiplier while overvolted to 1.275 volts (which the motherboard further overvolts to about 1.28 volts). The stock speed of course is 100x35.
To achieve stability for the RAM with the 102 base clocks (I'm not using XMP), I increased voltage from 1.2V to 1.3V.
It turns out that overvolting one of these Haswell-E CPUs makes them a real furnace. The Noctua just can't keep up with the explosive heat that the thing generates when heavily stressed. Therefore I cannot reach the 4.4 - 4.6 GHz that is achievable with a good AIO water cooler, and I'll have to stay at ~ 4.2 GHz. Maybe if I'd gotten luckier in the silicon lottery, and the CPU overclocked better with a lower voltage, I could get closer to 4.4 GHz.
For case cooling, I settled with having the case fans running according to the overall CPU temperature. The rear exhaust fan has the most aggressive curve where it pretty much constantly runs (at a low RPM, of course). The top and front fans only kick in at 50 degrees CPU temperature and accelerate towards 60 degrees where they will spin at maximum speed. Below 50 degrees CPU temp, the top and front fans are stopped.
Eventually the SSD finally arrived:
20150128_144404796_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
The Fractal Design case has two SSD mounts in the rear of the case, so that in fact no storage at all is visible on the usual side of the case.
For graphics power, I moved my ASUS GTX 980 from my old rig to the new one. Thus I already had stable clocks figured out for it: 1436 MHz core, 7356 MHz VRAM. I'm running an aggressive fan curve where the fans accelerate to full speed when the GPU core temperature approaches 70 degrees. It's not quiet that way (in fact very noisy compared to a stock GTX 980 fan curve), but it allows the GPU to stay at turbo clocks far longer, which I really need, because I do my gaming in 4K 60Hz.
Difference to my old rig is that I can run SLI 980's. I was fortunate in that they happen to be just as speedy, both of them, so I can use the same clockspeeds even though there is a new GPU taking those clocks.
And so it was done:
20150128_153343437_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
20150128_173335931_iOS by
jkohvak, on Flickr
Now it was time to enjoy the results and run some benchmarks. I'm comparing my old rig to the new rig, both stock and overclocked. I'm comparing the same GPU so only the surrounding rig changed. My old rig was from 2008 and it had the following:
- ASUS P5E Deluxe motherboard
- Intel Q6600 CPU @ 3.0 GHz
- 4 GB DDR2
- 256 GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD
- Corsair HX650 PSU
- ASUS GTX 980, like I said
Notice how in the following gaming benchmarks I am utterly GPU bound on a single GPU at 4K. The CPU and RAM situation makes absolutely no difference, in fact sometimes it's worse to run newer hardware.
The real kick comes with SLI where the effect approaches +100% performance.
In the Dragon Age: Inquisition benchmark I get pretty much the same performance regardless of the CPU/RAM situation.
Really the only game where I see immediate benefits is Batman: Arkham City which is very smart about using resources for physics:
But this is how it is: in gaming, the real difference in having lots of fast RAM and a fast CPU is in the subjective experience that you'll be having - you spend less time loading things and there are fewer instances where the framerate just drops or the game goes jittery for a while, while it swaps or streams in content.
Other than that, you can run most games just as well on a dog-slow CPU, and even with quite little RAM as long as you're swapping to a fast drive, and don't care about stressing the drive.
This is not to say that it isn't nice to have a fast rig to support a fast GPU. It makes a big difference to have stuff load fast and not swap constantly.
An objective difference can be measured with synthetic benchmarks.
Even with only 1 GPU the overall result in 3DMark is +7% while overclocked. The physics score is more telling:
This is partly because for "fairness" 3DMark doesn't use hardware PhysX for physics: otherwise AMD customers would be crying foul, because they don't have PhysX.
My score for Fire Strike Standard is all right too.
The ugliest graph of them all for the poor Q6600 is a single-threaded run of SuperPi 8M on the CPU:
In conclusion, the speed of the new machine is in loading stuff. Installing Windows and migrating apps from the old SSD was a breeze. Heavy games like DA:I don't swap and stutter so much any more. But having a fast machine doesn't fix bad programming, Dragon Age still stutters often, given the right circumstances. In a normal situation, though, whereas I was previously getting 30-40 fps avg. in a certain location in that game, now with SLI and the new machine, I'm getting 70-80 fps on average at 4K/maxed settings. In a difficult location where I was getting 25 fps average before, I'm getting about 40 fps.
The most astonishing thing about new hardware is efficiency. With all this new powerful hardware, I'm idling at 12 watts less power draw:
This is of course because of things like SpeedStep which reduces the CPU frequency multiplier when CPU load is low, meaning the Haswell-E furnace is only idling at about 1 GHz, and therefore using very little power and generating very little heat. This is in contrast to the Kentsfield Q6600 which was always running at 3 GHz regardless of load.
And even when stressing the system, getting +100% the performance (when using Dragon Age as an indicator), I'm only using +40% more electricity (again using the Dragon Age test location as an indicator).
In the graph below you can see my unscientific method of "as much power draw as I can trigger":
Usually that ultimate stress situation turned out to be the Combined test of the 1080p 3DMark Fire Strike. It is in fact more taxing than a heavy game.
Apart from power usage, the new machine has a lot of quality of life improvements. The new machine is almost dead quiet while I'm doing desktop stuff, whereas on the old machine, only the GPU and its fan would slow down.
When it's dead quiet in my house, I can barely hear the rear exhaust fan idling. With any ambient noise, the Haswell-E rig becomes inaudible. This is even more awesome compared to the old machine, which was already very quiet with its Noctua CPU cooling, quiet PSU, and only 1 self-adjusting 8cm case fan.
More quality of life stuff includes integrated 802.11ac which actually works this time around, Bluetooth, USB 3.0 and a BIOS that supports a mouse. Most of these are old inventions but my old machine was even older at 7 years!
My current plan is to run this PC for at least as long, which is why I blew all that money on it. The exception is if Broadwell or Skylake turn out to be amazing jesus-chips like Maxwell was for NVIDIA, and can be installed in LGA2011v3, in which case I'll probably swap out the CPU. The CPU is the clear weak point of the new rig.
Other than that, I'm a happy camper! 8)