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Gigabyte Board Sets Intel X79 Overclocking Record
MojoKid writes "Renowned overclocker 'Hicookie' achieved a new high clock speed on the Intel Core i7 3930K processor by cranking the chip past 5.6GHz using a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard, the first mobo in the world to achieve a mulitplier of 57x. There was a bit of a scandal with Gigabyte recently when a YouTube video showed one of its X79 boards going up in smoke. Gigabyte released a BIOS update for several of its X79 boards to prevent such incidents from happening, and there were outcries that the new F7 BIOS would ... [reduce] overclocking performance; Hicookie's achievement should erase those concerns."
While you and your friends were comparing TV sizes to compensate for your small penises, this Eunuch overclocked an X79 motherboard to a 12 inch E-Peen.
That E-Peen is as long as a nigcock, and as thick as a coke can!
Overclocking was just as stupid in the days of motherboard clock jumpers as it is now.
Hurr durr, listen to my chip squeal in ultrasonic pain and fail days later just so I can gets an extra 33 MegaHertz duuuuuh.
A way to compile Gentoo in a reasonable amount of time.
When's this going to be possible with all the cores enabled?
Are there any contests to see who can do the best job with the least resources? Or am I naive?
thats all? amd hit 8.4 something like 6 months ago. meh. intel. always playing catch up.
*facepalm*
Someone's going to go well beyond 5.6ghz using the 125MHz BCLK strap.
And they won't even need 57x multiplier.
It would be refreshing to see some crazy underclocks too. For example, if you ran Sandy Bridges at 500MHz they would still be quite fast and not require much cooling.
I was interested in this board and out of the several reviews on Newegg, several RMA and DOA stories. Too bad, I like the all black and all the pci-e and usb 3.0 slots.
Previously, when multi-processing (and multi-threaded) applications weren't that well developed, it was hard to parallelize applications, and in that scenario, it made perfect sense to try and drive the frequencies as high as possible. But all Intel chips since the Pentium and all AMD chips since the Phlenom, Opterons and Turons have been doing better in having multiple cores, while on the OS side of things, every OS, whether it's Windows NT based OSs like XP, Vista, 7 or 8, or Unix's like OS-X, BSD, Solaris or Linux - all of them have improved support for multiple threads & processes, and that's what a lot of the applications have been using. Like in a browser, each of your tabs is a different process, and could theoretically be handled by different CPUs. And they could use unified or distributed memory, as needed.
So given these advances, it makes more sense to make simpler, smaller & cheaper cores, and then pack more of them on a CPU, be it 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8. And if one could gain more performance by adding a core, it makes a lot more sense to do it that way than to try pumping up the MHz. In fact, I'd say that there is a case for slowing down the MHz and extending the life of the CPU, as well as saving power that way. For a manufacturer, it's even better since they get to use lower bin chips that would normally be discarded, but are perfectly good for use in low end boxes.
What you are describing is pretty much exactly what AMD has done with the E-350 which as the owner of a EEE with one I can say is quite nice. Bobcat is a simpler dual core paired with an 80 stream Radeon GPU to share the load and it lets me get 6 hours watching 720p video and closer to 7 if i'm just surfing.
That doesn't help me decide which is the better path for the kids though. they play games like L.A. Noir and the new Star Wars MMO and are needing more horse than their Pentium Ds can give them but i have two chips nearly the exact same price. on the one hand the Phenom X4 9500 which is a 2.2GHz quad, on the other the Athlon X3 455 which is a 3.3GHz triple. The question becomes which would be better in the long run, a lower clocked X4 or a higher clocked X3? Since I don't have either game i have NO clue whether they benefit from more MHz or from more cores, does anybody play these games and can give me a hand? My gut says that gaming would probably benefit more from raw speed than having a fourth core but then again I don't play PVP MMOs but i heard they benefit from more cores. Either way what they get will probably have to last them a good 3 years so i'd hate to flip a quarter and make the wrong call. Any suggestions?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's briefly interesting that they can hit such numbers with LN2, but I fail to see much value in the exercise. To the best of my knowledge, increasing the core multiplier doesn't have any impact on the motherboard, it's all internal to the CPU. As long as the board's power circuitry can deliver enough voltage, you just need to dissipate the heat, hence the LN2. You could replicate this on a $100 board, as long as it's not a Biostar.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The reason you can overclock without raising the voltage is that there is a voltage "guard band," which is like a safety margin. Some of my research has been about finding ways of reducing that guard band, because it's wasted energy. But that guard band is there for a good reason. Typically the critical paths in the chip (those with the longest propagation delay, which limit the safe clock speed) are a bit faster than the clock period. But that's only true whe the voltage is stable. If the voltage droops, then the propagation delay of those paths will increase, possibly too much, and you get incorrect computation. Voltage droops occur when circuits suddenly start switching a lot, demanding more current, or in other words, the effective impedence of the circuit drops, and by V=IR, for the current being supplied by the voltage regulator at that instant, the voltage inside the chip will drop. The regulator cannot respond instantly, so a guard band is provided so that the maximum droop never brings the instantaneous voltage below a certain margin. If you overclock without raising voltage, then your CPU will work fine most of the time, but certain workloads will cause wide swings in current demand, and if you execute one of those, you may crash your system.
This is why memory tests are worthless for stability testing, because due to cache miss latency, the current demand is relatively low and stable. Prime number generators are also not so great, because their current demand is relatively high and stable. I know that some of the SPEC and PARSEC benchmarks have some wild behavior, like FFT, for instance, or anything that has a lot of barrier synchronization. For the regular user, what's likely going to happen is that you'll get random such events where variation in cache hits and vector computation phases will cause significant spikes in current, and your game will crash.
Okay, recreational air/water cooling overclocks? I can dig that.
They're sustainable overclocks, something you can run the system at every day.
Throwing a liquid nitrogen pot on top of the CPU and getting some stupid-high speed while destroying the chip, the board, and most of the components?
Yeah. Not sustainable, and not impressive beyond a half second or so of "gee whiz".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...if it still puts HPAs on hard drives without warning and offers no way to permanently disable this behavior, I don't care if it runs twice as fast as everything else on the market and mixes me a drink at the same time while cooking me a gourmet dinner, I don't want it even if it's free.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Given the choice of those two chips I would go for the x3 (assuming there are no plans to overclock). Three cores at 3.3GHz are going to beat two cores of the same architecture at 2.2GHz in pretty much any workload. Add that to the fact that afaict the athlon in question is a newer and better architecture than the phenom in question and I really see no reason to go for the x4. Generally you should only start looking to more cores after you hit the point of diminishing returns in speed of individual cores.
Though i'd suggest taking a look at intel's offerings too. The i3-2100 seems to be similar in price and afaict it's better than either of those chips (with hyperthreading and better architecture more than making up for the lower core count and slightly lower clockspeed). This will depend a bit on what pricing is like where you live though.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
looks like it took out a Fire Emitting Transistor in the power supply section of the board...
Good times, seeing what happens when you let out the Magic Smoke.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Scandal, huh? You're overclocking to the point that you need liquid nitrogen to cool the processor, then the mobo fails and something smokes and this is a "scandal?"
Thanks for the advice but I won't buy Intel after it came out that they were rigging the compiler and bribing OEMs. i know in the end what i do will have little effect but I prefer to stick by my principles. that said even if for the sake of argument i would buy Intel the i series is a really bad deal, I've just looked up the chip in question and you are talking nearly DOUBLE the price compared to the AMD triple, in fact i could get them an unlocked quad for cheaper, and the boards and nearly 40% higher. if I were to do as you suggest it would add nearly $140 to the cost of the build which is just too damned high when we are talking two kids needing boxes.
Anyway I figure I'll go for the triples and who knows? maybe I'll get lucky and they'll be able to be unlocked down the line. The two boards I already have I don't think have core unlocker but we'll see and by using already bought and paid for boards all I'll have to supply is the chip and RAM which should cut the cost of upgrading both kids to around $100 a piece, then i can take their old Pentium D boards and RAM and slap them in a couple of old cases and get most of that back if not a little profit and use that to add more RAM which in the end will probably benefit the kids for gaming more than a fourth core anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Clearly you missed the point. The OP was saying Intel was significantly behind (5.6 GHz vs 8.4 GHz). I was showing how that was clearly not the case, not that Intel has better records. Never even hinted at such a thing.