Windows Gaming PC hardware, building, troubleshooting, & benchmarking

i7-980x still running well, no BSOD yet.

Its a x58 chipset, 1366 socket with triple channel memory (6 slots).
I got the MB and ram in 11 years ago, it was 2GBx3 sticks for 6GB.

I have a pair of gskill 8GB sticks for 16GB and a corsair vengeance 8GB stick, all are 1600MHz, but the timings are probably not the same (different MFG). I can not get all three to be seen in booting, bios or the OS, only shows 16GB max.I am pretty sure they are running 1333Mhz.

I did a quick passmark memorymark and the 8GBx2 is 8561 and with 2GBx3 sticks its only 7% faster (2ch vers 3ch), does this seem correct?

--Oz-- said:

Regarding my i7-980x WHEA BSOD issue. I upped the cpu voltage 5 clicks (1.24375 to 1.26575) but it failed to boot, so i put it back to the stock voltage, but instead of AUTO, I manually set it to the default value (1.24375V). Is there a difference from AUTO and setting it to MANUAL? (like auto changes voltage on the fly and manual just keeps the same voltage, or)

I also turned off the built in 1394 port.

It has been running all day without a hint of WHEA BSOD.

What voltage above stock are you using on your x5675? (20, 50, 100, 200mV, or)

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Yeah sounds like you got it stable by increasing the voltage, I remember on my i7 920 CPU on my X58platform with everything in the bios set to "AUTO" the core CPU volts would drop from around v1.2 to 0.9 when the PC was idle or doing very little, this was obviously to save power.
So locking your CPU voltage to around ~v1.2 and having it run stable makes ALOT of sense...

While not a truly logically statement as far as I am corned all BSOD's are caused by the CPU not getting enough voltage/(or good enough voltage at the right time).

--Oz-- said:

I did a quick passmark memorymark and the 8GBx2 is 8561 and with 2GBx3 sticks its only 7% faster (2ch vers 3ch), does this seem correct?

Click to expand...

Yeah that is another advantage of the X58 motherboards was the triple channel memory increased performance, so even smaller amount of memory using all 3 channels would be faster for memory benchmarks at least.

You should be able to run your 3x8GB memory sticks on the X58 if you manually set the timings, the safest memory timing that's common would be 11,11,11,28
My bios for memory is a lot like this guys X58 MB bios in the YouTube video below, where if you leave it on auto it defaults to 8,8,8,20 which is way too tight for my ram. It's probably just the odd memory stick that doesn't like the 8,8,8...settings and causes it to fail to boot/run properly.
https://youtu.be/NItI0J5ZR68?t=1114
^Copy this where he puts it in to 10,11,11,31 and see how you go. But I recommend 11,11,11,28 for your memory as it sounds quite good, you should probably be able to go 9,9,9,24.
For the "DRAM Timing Mode" he recommends "2N" but that is only for really high overclocking of ram to make it stable at the cost of performance, I recommend "1N" as it will give better performance, "1N" is supposed to be the default/auto anyway. Only use 2N if its the only way you can get it working.

For my MB manual said it could only take 24GB of ram max, I saw others claim (for different model X58 MBs) they could get 48GB ram, but I couldn't. I am stuck with 8GBx3, if I populate the other 3 DDR3 slots with my 3x4GB ram it just ignores it.

The more I use Aliexpress, the more I learn about the whole site.

They have a real shitty message system, actually three of them, this clusters everything (the 1st is ok, "if" they respond in a timely manner, 2nd is the new system and by default its not the one you start with, 3rd is the dispute center).

One seller (top cpu store) has not answered any of my questions in 4 months, it takes him a month just to read my post, and in 4 months, he responded with a question (asking if the issue is "x", and thats what I write in every post, pathetic), so frustrating. I had it with them, I just went to my CC and got a refund, but had to prove it with screenshots.

Even if the seller and you cant reach an agreement, ali steps in (one time for me), they did not do anything, pretty sure they did not even read what I wrote, completely useless, this is where ebay comes in 1st place, buyer is king.

I have about 50 purchases on ali, most are under $10, so if there is a problem its no big deal. Its the higher than $50 orders that concern me.

Whats your Ali experience and how many transactions?

Well my e5-2678v3/MB/32GM ram came yesterday, but I won't be able to fire it up for a while, to many other projects and the heatsink/fan has not come yet (although I can steal it off my e5-2689 setup), doh!
https://aliexpress.ru/item/4000440445220.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.200f5ca1Ltg9hf&algo_pvid=9bc77eca-ce50-4aa0-b68e-2f19cd02b06e&algo_expid=9bc77eca-ce50-4aa0-b68e-2f19cd02b06e-0&btsid=0ab50f6115875071303853122e1de0&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_

I said screw it, robbed the heatsink/fan off the 2689. Used my m.2 drive with already installed win10 (probably not the best, after a reboot C drive activity settled down, used my old 7850 video card (half the speed of the rx580) and ran PM.
Impressive for a $106 12c/24t cpu. I am really thankful you showed me the $52 8 core YT video. I do like the MB, larger, more stuff (sata, m.2, pcie-slots, usb3, etc). I will reload win10, because it hardly takes any time (8 minutes on my 2689)

--Oz-- said:

I said screw it, robbed the heatsink/fan off the 2689. Used my m.2 drive with already installed win10 (probably not the best, after a reboot C drive activity settled down, used my old 7850 video card (half the speed of the rx580) and ran PM.
Impressive for a $106 12c/24t cpu. I am really thankful you showed me the $52 8 core YT video. I do like the MB, larger, more stuff (sata, m.2, pcie-slots, usb3, etc). I will reload win10, because it hardly takes any time (8 minutes on my 2689)

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Looks good, you really are getting into this stuff
Yeah I agree about Aliexpress, I can't remember what it was but once when I asked for help/questioned something the sellers response was very lacking and I thought wow if I get into real problems good luck getting my money back.
Requesting a refund via your CC operator is a good idea, I only use paypal to challenge bad purchases because of its easy web interface, instead when it comes to Aliexpress I only buy what I really can't source elsewhere.

The problem is when folks abuse the process, for example years ago there was a guy on this forum who bought a $450 battery pack from a seller via Paypal and he said on the forum that it worked fine but it had a cratch on it of some sort, and he argued with the seller but they didn't come to an agreement. So he called paypal and made a big kick and fuss and ended up getting Paypal to return the whole $450 for merely a scratch on his battery pack.

So its folks like that who have probably caused Aliexpress to become ultra unfairly hardened against the buyer having any say when something goes wrong.

I did some upgrades on my PC. I wanted to reinstall windows 10 so I bought a NVMe drive and a PCIe to M.2 converter for my X58 motherboard.
Then followed this guy below to make it bootable for Windows 10 since my X58 doesn't have a UEFI bios.
https://forums.evga.com/How-to-set-up-EVGA-X58-Motherboard-E762-with-NVMe-M2-Boot-drive-m2890374.aspx
Basically it involves making a little USB stick with some pre-loader drivers that the X58 bios sets as its boot drive, it loads first and then finds the NVMe PCIe drive and starts booting from it, works great.

So I got the 1TB Crucial P1 M.2 PCIe CT1000P1SSD8
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-p1-nvme-ssd-qlc,5852.html

I overclocked my PCIe from 100 to 109 which seems to be the max the Crucial P1 can take for overclocked bus just to make it that tiny bit faster..

100Mhz bus, just a tiny bit slower, all up I wondered if I should have got the Intel SSD 660p which is similar but costs a tiny bit more, maybe it could of taken an overclocked PCIe bus beter.


When I used this USB booter technique to be able to boot from my NVME drive on my old motherboard it causes CPU-ID to see my motherboard under a different name, now called "000001" instead of "Asus P6T DELUXE V2".

I been overclocking my CPU harder, I been reading around on guides and it seems like you can run most of the mobo voltages stock except the CPU Core voltage v1.50 and I was able to run it up to 4.73Ghz with little issue.

https://valid.x86.fr/afmnhh
Version 2017.1 (x64)
Single-Thread 430
Multi-Thread (12T) 3345
https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V10/display.php?id=122672201911



You can see how I did better on single threaded performance, but since you got twice as man CPU cores on your beast you get higher score.


But if you want to run it just a tiny bit higher then you got to start pumping up the mobo voltages of everything.
Here in AIDA64 you can see I am running the north bridge at 3967Mhz, to keep this stable compared to around 3777Mhz I need to increase the QPI voltage from around 1.3v to around 1.5v.
View attachment 3

I also tried to overclock my ram to 2000Mhz but I just couldn't get it stable, I cleaned out my motherboard slots with a generic brand of contact cleaner, when I placed in my spare ram dimms (extra 12GB) they came alive on the motherboard when previously I thought the MB/Bios couldn't take that much ram as the Asus MB manual said no more than 24GB, but I am now using the PC just fine with 36GB of ram that is fully detected in Windows 10/bios, so it appears it was just dirty slots.
https://www.wd40.com/products/contact-cleaner/

I also upgraded my graphics card to a RTX 2070 Super, runs fine on the PCIe v2.0
I experimented with GPU benchmark tools the directX 9 and GPUcompute tests are the only GPU benchmarks inside PassMark where if you overclock your PCIe bus Mhz you can actually see the GPU scores increase due to more bandwidth. Directx 10/11 or 12 etc don't change at all because they use the PCIe bus more efficiently I guess.


I did a fair amount of testing with my CPU at x25 multiplier instead of x23 but aside from single threaded performance gains it wasn't worth it, Cinebench scores considerably higher at x23 with a massive bus overclock at around 207Mhz.

It's been fun overclocking the hell of out my PC, but I think I have no squeezed every possible realistic piece of performance I could ask out of it

Wow, you been busy, will write back when i have more time, just started work.

I came across this https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
AMD FX-8350 @ 8794.33 MHz wow!

--Oz-- said:

For the guys like me learning about low cost Xeon PC server builds, I put together some info/links here, nice to have it in one place:
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/member.php?u=91160

Click to expand...

Nice thread.
One thing I been thinking about is whether your second beast with your "e5-2678v3" can use the Intel Extreme Utility (XTU) software to overclock the CPU in software? Or what about ThrottleStop?
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/24075/Intel-Extreme-Tuning-Utility-Intel-XTU
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/throttlestop-overclocking-desktop-pcs.235975/

The interesting thing about the e5-2678v3 is that it doesn't/wasn't ever officially listed as a buyable/retail CPU by Intel, this would mean it was custom made for Dell/HP or whoever wanted it (possibly even custom for Facebook or Google massive data centers).
The closest one is the E5-2680-v3.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/81908/intel-xeon-processor-e5-2680-v3-30m-cache-2-50-ghz.html
You can see there when your CPU first came out it sold at $1749, quite some chunky cash for a single CPU.

I would say this chip is basically exactly the same as the e5-2678v3 but it's obviously something is missing something or conversely something added to it. I wonder if it has the same "turbo boost frequencies. The E5-2680v3 is suppose to turbo to 3.30 GHz.
It could be that it has more cores that turbo differently like all cores can turbo to 3.25Ghz or 3.35Ghz or something weird like that.

Can you test with your CPU and see if you can get any turboing out of your rig? The other twist to it all is that it might be your motherboard that prevents you from accessing the software based CPU turbo modes
While its known to be the downside to the China mobos is they don't have any bios overclocking, I am still wondering if it's possible to use these software utils to access some overclocking features.

What surprised me looking at your posted benchmark performance is how decent the single thread performance is despite being a lower clocked CPU, this would be the result of all the optimizations Intel would have made over the ~5 years between your CPU and mine.

I haven't been able to control my self and been overclocking my CPU a tiny bit higher.
So far I increased my internal CPU unclk or "North Bridge Clock" now to "4195Mhz" and the CPU core to 4824Mhz.
View attachment 1
Again this is stuff you could only dream of doing on those china mobo bioses. It's possible that if these second hand resellers make enough money maybe they can make even higher end mobos with more overclock features, I would say they don't support it deliberately to minimize people wanting their money back because they saw some freak rig like mine on the internet and thought they could easily replicate my OC setup. But if the china mobo makers are willing to charge enough for a solid mobo with solid overclock support I would say they would be a market. I guess the other part of all this is just the unknown supply levels of these Xeon CPUs being dumped by large data centers.

On another subject, I started overclocking my RTX 2070 Super, this basically involves this "one click OC" process in the MSI Afterburner program that overclocks the GPU.
What surprised me was after doing this I started looking at manual overclocks but I barely got the GPU any higher.
Turns out a lot of the overclocking on the Nvidia GPUs is done via its own internal bios decion making and it only decides to overclock if its cool enough, it appears as tho u can't force it to overclock if its hot.

Mine pretty much self overclocks to 2100Mhz and I assumed this was low because I bought a cheaper brand GALAX RTX 2070 Super, but it turns out 2100Mhz is what the premium cards offer.

Occasionally it jolts to 2115Mhz...

I think I owe a lot of the success of my overclocking to the case I originally bought, the CoolerMaster StormSniper
When this case first came out most people just said it was ugly, but I actually saw it's real beauty in its design like the beauty of a tank by its design, it was was the most practical PC case to buy if you wanted good cooling.
It was designed by some famous PC gaming clans at the time and I think they also were thinking about cooling performance and practicality rather than how it looks.
https://www.pccasegear.com/products/12647/coolermaster-cm-storm-sniper-black-edition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEzAGW-T-Zg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5riMOP8iNQ
There was an online poll for a PC builders local forum in Aus, asking "Do you run your PC with your side cover off?"
And about 50% of the voters said "yes", which I thought was crazy, why bother buying a case if you are just going to end up having the side off the whole time for more air, this was added to why I loved the Storm Sniper case, with the huge grill/filtered side with the fan I effectively killed 2 birds with one stone...

I don't have much interest into staring into my PC so I always keep my PC out of sight so for me it was entirely about the most practical cooling and usable case rather than else.


And on another subject a new version of CPU-Z came out "1.92", even though the CPU benchmark code is suppose to be the same I noticed that my CPU loses about 10 points in single thread performance when using v1.92 rather than v1.91 which I have so far only posted results from.
At first I thought my CPU was going slower somehow but it turns out there is a consistently slower benchmark result score from this newer version of CPU-Z (1.92)
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html#version-history

Thats a nice case. I have a ancient steel server case, with all my drives installed it weighs 78lbs, lol, its so old it has 5 80mm fans. It has five 5.25 bays, one a dvd burner, but the rest i have 5 HDD in plus the 6 in the bottom, my case sits on my L shaped corner desk to the right of my triple 24" monitors. This allows me to easy access to the usb and sata ports on the back.

Sleep function did not work on the 2689 (probably MB/bios issue), all the fans/lights still running and would not resume (tried s1/s3/hybrid). But the new 2678v3 does nicely. I am now mostly playing the free Unreal Tournament 2020 and the cpu is sitting at 13%, this is with the rx580 at 1080. UT has always been written well and played fast compared to almost all the other FPS.

I ran the 2678v3 pretty stock for a week plus to verify its stability, everything fine sofar. Last night I loaded my soundblaster Xfi-titanium, what a difference. Number one is being able to hear better where the enemies are and during racing what tire is starting to slide, huge difference. After a week i will add my pcie 7 port usb card, then later my pcie 6 port sata card, going slowly because i have the time.

I came across this websight to be able to OC my MB with mod'ed bios.
http://www.miyconst.com/Blog/View/2082/original-bios-for-chinese-x99-motherboards

As you know, these days the video card is the dominant factor for playing games, I notice my rx580 is mostly bouncing around 50~90% while playing, looks like its being limited to 120fps, core clk is 1386 and mem is 2000. For this reason, I am not in any hurry to try OC my cpu. I did watch the video on how to do it and there is quite a few steps, and i dont need to risk bricking my new MB, lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6HvzvlsLE4&t=204s

How much did you pay for the 2080 and where? I read they have a 3080 coming, that might drop the 2080's price.

EDIT: When I installed UT2020, i let the game auto setup the graphics in all the tests above. Today I set UT2020 to max settings for everything (but res stayed at 1920x1080), fps is now 109~120 and definitely looks better graphics, gpu temp was 80, fan was 60% (I could ramp it up alittle earlier, I really like the fan temp control in afterburner, been using it since riva-tuner), cpu went down a couple percent 10~11%, it is about 78F AMB, not hot, but a little warm.

What games you been playing?

In the 2689 i have my old r7850 video card, these where known for OC ~50% higher than stock, might have to afterburner oc it and see what it helps in the game on that rig.

EDIT2: My 7yo boy and I just finished UT2020 via lan on the two zeons, we chose the same side team, was a blast, mom not so happy (the boy blowing things up).
It seems UT is using 1 thread about 100%, and the other 23 are not being bothered, it does not bother me, as the game playes smooth.

--Oz-- said:

How much did you pay for the 2080 and where? I read they have a 3080 coming, that might drop the 2080's price.

EDIT: When I installed UT2020, i let the game auto setup the graphics in all the tests above. Today I set UT2020 to max settings for everything (but res stayed at 1920x1080), fps is now 109~120 and definitely looks better graphics, gpu temp was 80, fan was 60% (I could ramp it up alittle earlier, I really like the fan temp control in afterburner, been using it since riva-tuner), cpu went down a couple percent 10~11%, it is about 78F AMB, not hot, but a little warm.

What games you been playing?

In the 2689 i have my old r7850 video card, these where known for OC ~50% higher than stock, might have to afterburner oc it and see what it helps in the game on that rig.

EDIT2: My 7yo boy and I just finished UT2020 via lan on the two zeons, we chose the same side team, was a blast, mom not so happy (the boy blowing things up).
It seems UT is using 1 thread about 100%, and the other 23 are not being bothered, it does not bother me, as the game playes smooth.

Click to expand...

Those are interesting links thanks, that link contains this YouTube video https://youtu.be/H0OzFSGt2Dg?t=562 and it looks like he was able to get XTU working after he modded the bios for that particular mobo/cpu, so that does answer my question.

Mine is the RTX 2070 Super, I paid $815AUD when I got it as i thought they would go up in price and they have, amazingly they are now $850AUD, this price looks expensive in AUD.
https://www.centrecom.com.au/galax-geforce-rtx-2070-super-1-click-oc-graphics-card
But once u convert it to USD it will look more reasonable, the AUD dropped as low as 0.55 USD or cents two weeks ago so almost 50% of the USD, it has since recovered to 0.65cents, makes buying things difficult, about 10 years ago the AUD was above parity the USD, how things change.

I don't like paying this much for a video card but I really needed a new one and I knew for the time being they were going to get more expensive and I knew gaming was a good way to spend some time for covid19.

What games I play? I love playing Battlefield 4 multiplayer online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_4 , their are a fair amount of busy BF4 64 player servers in Aus and it's fun to play this game with a GPU that can push out 200fps in high quality graphics mode enabled.

I haven't bought/played much the newer BF titles because a lot of them are lame, this seems to be a popular claim among a lot of BF4 players.
For example BF1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_1 which is suppose to be about WW1 and fighting in World War One has an African man as the main character/title picture, what does African men have anything to do with WW1 and its been the same since, and BF5 with WW2 is similar... all the SJWs have taken over EA and made this games stupid and if anything insulting to the war dead of WW1 and WW2.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51T15aSwW8L._SX376_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I wish EA would open source their older games like BF4 so they can continue to be worked on and tweaked, there are a lot of multiplayer modes and annoinces that aren't configurable for the BF4 game servers, but this is the last thing EA is interested in doing.
John Carmack was famous for open sourcing his games even though they are worth probably billions, EA is the exact opposite, with BF4 if you the EA Origin login server is offline you can't even play the game on a local server.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3

Now that I have the 2070 I am going to try other games soon like the newer CoD games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_Remastered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_(2019_video_game)
So far I am still enjoying BF4 multiplayer, because it's 64 people trying to kill each other in all sorts of interesting ways it struggles to ever get boring.

Yeah the Nvidia RTX 3080 looks very interesting, it looks like there will be some very interesting GPU options by the end of this year, this was in my mind when I got my RTX 2070 but I couldn't hold out any longer.
Intel is also been working a "real GPU", until recently it looked like it's standard 20fps tiny GPUs just for trying out games but not for real usage, but now it appears the rumors of a monster GPU were true.
So we might have more GPU options in the future. I believe Intel are being tight lipped about it because they might fail in this area for "desktop PC graphics" chips, because a lot of it is also making good drivers that support the games properly and that isn't Intels thing. Intel could be trying to circumvent excessive gaming driver support by making an overly powerful GPU to compensate, either way it's all very interesting
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-graphics-all-we-know

I was checking out my fps of 110~120, then I thought, my asus triple monitors are gaming monitors, but 7yo, looked up the specs and 75Hz max, doh, lol. So I limited UT2020 ingame to 60fps everything on max at 1920x1080, looks and plays well, I am happy with it. Cpu is bouncing 6~8% lol, the 3rd core that was almost maxt at 120fps in now around 75% of max.

GPU temps are in the low 60's, gpu is also bouncing around 0 to 100%, why does it do that?


I setup triple 24" monitors to be 1 eyefinity screen (5760x1080) and then set the game to that, but it was screwed up, I wanted 1920x1080 x3 wide for a wide fov, it was wider a little, but it lost vertical fov a lot (maybe half), on the forums they said it would be an unfair advantage to see that much FOV. It really helped in racing to be able to see how close you are to the competitor.

What monitor(s) do you have?
If you like FPS, try the Unreal Tournament 2020, its free.
https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/
I mostly prefer the offline side (I play both), the online guys are very good and jumpy, hard to kill.

What surprised me looking at your posted benchmark performance is how decent the single thread performance is despite being a lower clocked CPU, this would be the result of all the optimizations Intel would have made over the ~5 years between your CPU and mine.

Click to expand...

I was watching a YT video, the gen1 and v2 of these processors did not change to much, but v3 and v4 were a step up.

Yeah you are correct most of the real work loads for games is the GPU and the CPU is just there to help, this is been core part of the reality to me sitting on the same core PC for 10 years now!
With graphics cards you got to replace them whole, but I am still using the same motherboard/ram/Power-supply/case I bought 10 years ago, with only 1 CPU change, and added ram because it's so cheap. I also changed CPU coolers when I swapped CPUs, I don't know if the heat pipes had lost their seal/gas over 10 years or if I just needed to "re-thermal-paste" the heatsink since it would of been very dry after 10 years of heat.

While I like and believe in Snowman/Noctua air style coolers, I wanted to try a sealed AIO water cooler, I got one of the cheapest major brands I could buy like this one. The fans were noisy/vibrated so I swapped them for the original fans from my 10 year old Noctua heatsink air cooler which worked great. I then just placed the Coolermaster RGB cooler fans elsewhere in the case suspended on rubber holders so they didn't vibrate and are now much quieter.
https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/coolers/cpu-liquid-coolers/masterliquid-ml240l-v2-rgb/

Because I live in an apartment I actually PC game from a sofa with a 65inch TV.
It's just a chinese gray market rebranded 4k 65inch TV, and then I have a smaller 43inch side TV and a regular monitor on either side of my main 65inch TV.

I have my main TV overclocked to 77Hz.
You can force higher refresh rates out of your monitor by changing them via your AMD/Nvidia driver control panel
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=overclock+monitor+refresh+rate

You can also do monitor tests here https://www.testufo.com/refreshrate#background=000000&foreground=ffffff&digits=4

At 65inch inch I can read text quite easily from sofa distance, at either 1080p resolution or at 4k resolution with 200% scaling in windows 10.

I bought this TV about 4 years ago and have been LONG waiting for a good "gaming TV/monitor".
It actually looks like this year is the year TVs are monitors on the same level, that is if it's a high end Samsung or LG..
Gaming monitor vs. TV | Should a 4K OLED be your next gaming monitor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlU2QffaUbQ&feature=youtu.be
LG have been demoing their TVs as PC monitors at all major tech expos including CES 2020 https://youtu.be/NiWPfggiGTw?t=799
With HDMI 2.1 some TVs are including features like Gsync/Freesync. But it's complex just like DisplayPort v1.4 you can buy a device that is DisplayPort v1.4 but not gey any features like Gsync/HDR/144Hz/FreeSync. It's up to the device manufacture to decide what features/specs you get, so DisplayPort 1.4 or HDMI 2.1 are just general bandwidth specifications.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/g-sync-compatible-2019-lg-tv-available-now/

There has been a lot of discussion about HDMI 2.1 in TVs and a lot of people are struggling to get their head around it all.
https://youtu.be/JKRL44Spvvg
https://youtu.be/WF8BEkg0DoI

Linus Tech Tips is a famous "pc sofa gamer" and has for ever been chasing the ultimate TV-PC-monitor, he has upgraded twice recently and claims we are now there, but its not cheap.
https://youtu.be/7ci7mFBuShQ
https://youtu.be/S6M85rboYy0

--Oz-- said:

Thats a nice case. I have a ancient steel server case, with all my drives installed it weighs 78lbs, lol, its so old it has 5 80mm fans. It has five 5.25 bays, one a dvd burner, but the rest i have 5 HDD in plus the 6 in the bottom, my case sits on my L shaped corner desk to the right of my triple 24" monitors. This allows me to easy access to the usb and sata ports on the back.

Click to expand...

When it comes to cases with lots of 3.5HDD bays I noticed they are being phased out in a lot of gaming cases.
I used to run a raid 5 setup of 3.5HDD drives in my case but now since HDs are so large and cheap I just have a few drives running in normal mode. Now that internet is so much faster and online movie streaming is so cheap and convenient I don't need storage anymore.

These two have large storage bays
https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/cases/mid-tower/silencio452/
https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/cases/mid-tower/n300/

This type of case is now the typical PC case standard, lots of RGB fans with glass/plastic in front to dampen noise with small vents to suck in and blow out air. But very little 3.5HDD slots.
I am like this guy at this point where he says "I just like it, no money in it for me" https://youtu.be/cXquletXjGk?t=1385
[youtube]cXquletXjGk[/youtube]

For USB I just have a long 5meter USB extender cable from my PC to a USB hub near my sofa...

My apartment isn't very new/nice so I don't try too hard on making my place look like something that should be in a home lifestyle magazine, but I don't like clutter much either, I tend to have "chuckout days" where I look and decide if I should turf things I have been arguably hoarding as an argument that its all just "draggin me down..."

*EDIT* removed randomly chosen item sites that sell the product to ones direct from the product producer, I somewhat like/recommend these products rather than have ANY gain in anyone buying them. If you think it's about clickbait adverts, then for gods sake install Brave browser! https://brave.com/
Don't EVER EVER again load an advert from a website unless you actually LIKE and want to support their service, otherwise it's just evil.

The last series of post look like advertisements for products.
DELETE this please so I don't keep getting notifications from this topic.

What a spam fest. I will sort this out when I get off work...

I don't see any spam, just discussion with links to relevant stuff.

The discussion itself doesn't seem to really have much to do with the original topic, but...it's still computer-related, and sort of OS-ish related....

I decided to "lap my CPU", which involves sanding down the CPUs heat spreader so that its thinner, normally involves taking away the nickel coating to reveal the copper underneath, and ideally more polished surface than normal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzPgJjZZLUY
[youtube]HzPgJjZZLUY[/youtube]

Looking at these videos it appears the best improvement you can expect is a 1-2 degrees Celsius drop in temps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iShcG91eLoc

This appears to be why I got as well, but it might just be the freshly applied thermal paste, CPU lapping is not recommended as it doesn't yield better heat transfer performance for the effort involved rather than just buying better quality thermal paste.

But I decided to do it anyway just for fun.
Here is the old beast X5675 before being removed.


Interestingly after removing the CPU I thought I saw a bent pin on the mobo, but it turned out to be dirt of some kind, I think it might have been a flake of tried thermal paste, I sprayed the electrical contact cleaner and used an old tooth brush which I also sprayed with the contact cleaner to soften the bristles and this was quite gentle on the pins and it cleaned away the dirt debris nicely.


Here is the sanding process, the claim that it should be done of the flattest surface possible is a good idea.
I didn't buy fine enough sand paper, the max I bought was 400grit, I think 600+ is the minimum you should buy if you want a mirror finish on the CPU.
I will omit what brand of sanding paper I used or where I bought it from to lower the chance of stealth market accusations


Here is the finished result, you can see a tiny bit of nickel on both sides of the sanded heat spreader, this is because the metal applied to these heatspreaders isn't perfectly even I think.
Overall I did a pretty crap job in terms of sanding down to a fine mirror polish, maybe next time.


Here it is back in its socket.


And here are the results.
I ran AIDA64 under CPU stress for 4minutes for before and after lapping the CPU. Overall it appears I lowered temps by about 1 degrees C, so yeah this isn't worth it, but this was what I was told and expected, but it was something I wanted to try!

On the plus side I cleaned up my CPU and CPU MB socket with the electrical contact cleaner spray which I believe is mostly just "isopropyl alcohol", this is great stuff for computers IMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_cleaner

Temps before CPU lapping from AIDA64

Temps after.

The purpose of "lapping" is to make a flatter smoother surface with less scratches and more highly polished, to create a more perfect metal-to-metal contact between heatsink and CPU, so that thermal paste is not only unnecessary, but would actually make the contact worse.

What I see in the pics looks worse than the original. :/ I'm surprised at the degree-lower temps, and suspect something else is at play.


If you really want to lap the surfaces for "perfect" mating, you would want to use the finest grit polishing powder you can get, and put it between the heatsink and the CPU, and lap them *together*, using a fixture that keeps them perfectly parallel to each other but allows some pressure between them.

When done you should have a mirror surface on each part, and they can be fit directly to each other with no thermal paste and will have better thermal performance because there are less thermal barrier layers, and more surface area in direct contact.

Yeah, that lap job is REAL poor Beastie. Not to sound like a jerk, but for this to work you should have a near-mirror finish with no visible marks- you've got real deep cuts in the copper now thanks to the garnet in the sandpaper.

Not only should you have started with 800 grit, but you'll need to work towards 1200 and 1600 grits followed by linishing paper like emery- the stuff is really used for engine building and polishing cranks bearing surfaces, so you might be able to ask a machine shop if they have a small segment you can snag. You'll also want polishing compounds, but our standard Permatex stuff might not be good enough so you might have to look for something like rouge.

As for the temp drop, it's probably because you've removed the nickel plating- i'd be interested to see if any odd chemical reactions have occurred because it's anti-corrosion properties have been removed.

TheBeastie said:

[youtube]cXquletXjGk[/youtube]

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Lessss said:

The last series of post look like advertisements for products.

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Yeah, well, I just like the look of that case and I really need a new computer and fiber optics. I suppose I need the brave browser he's talking about, too.

Yup, if not for TheBeastie writing about Brave's background video playing feature it wouldn't have occurred to me to even try Brave.

Now I can listen to good shows like Stefan Molyneux, Krystal and Saagar, etc. while doing other things.

Don't you know the more RGB you have inside a pc, the faster it runs and the better benchmarking it performs.

On topic, Ryzen is the way to go from my research 6 months ago. You just can't beat the value of Ryzen, then the choice of motherboards is a complicated one but the Tomahawk MAX is a decent mobo at a decent price with good t/s features, then throw in any ram as its a gamble unless you want specific chipset like the Viper lineup, has the desirable V-chipset at a value cost. Storage, 500MB SSD and a 1TB 7200 rpm. I used to mess around with PCPARTSPICKER to dream up a computer, but I just end up buying a Dell or HP and throwing more ram into it as you cant beat an older generation Intel OEM pc, 4/5/6/7th gen i5 or i7 all very cheap because everyone wants Ryzen the newest and greatest. I dont play games that require lots of graphics. I used to play World of Tanks, stopped for the last 2yrs then tried to play it again during China Virus times. I played few dozen games and it got boring. I should really look into other games, first person shooter, Zelda but I am too cheap when it comes to purchasing games. All I do is buy $1 - $5 games on Steam.

markz said:

Don't you know the more RGB you have inside a pc, the faster it runs and the better benchmarking it performs.

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:lol: :lol: :lol:

I just built a Ryzen 5 3600 on a tomahawk max board with a used ebay 2080 video card. By far the best computer I have ever built. Like you I used to upgrade older Dell or Asus ones.

I dont play anything that requires a graphics card so I dont need to spend money on a new pc, the igpu's are just fine. If I were to play games and require a gpu card, I'd do that setup because its cheap, maybe a cheaper gpu card if the 1080's are cheap or 1070 or 1060.

CONSIDERABLE SHOUTING said:

As for the temp drop, it's probably because you've removed the nickel plating- i'd be interested to see if any odd chemical reactions have occurred because it's anti-corrosion properties have been removed.

Click to expand...

My main aim was just to remove the nickel plating evenly, I realized before I started I hadn't bought high enough grit sandpaper, but decided I was going to do it anyway.

Having a pure copper top CPU isn't that weird, in fact you can buy pure copper top head spreaders for your CPU if you "delid" your CPU https://www.ekwb.com/blog/what-is-delidding/ https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/-delidding-definition,5738.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHPkviUv5BM

My particular Intel CPU isn't worth delidding because its a model that was Iridium based soldered to connect die to the IHS copper/nickel top. Most Intel CPUs use a regular thermal paste under the CPU IHS top.
https://www.google.com/search?q=IHS+CPU+Pure+Copper+Cover+for+Intel

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/IHS-CPU-Pure-Copper-Cover-for-Intel-LGA-115X-i5-i7-3770K-4770K-4790K-6700K-7700K/113497539483


Also, more CPU heatsinks have a copper bottom then don't.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10500/stock-cooler-roundup-intel-amd-vs-evo-212/3


Nickel Thermal conductivity 90.9 W/(m·K)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel
Copper Thermal conductivity 401 W/(m·K)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper

With a rough top I can now collect data on it, and then a few months later have the option to fine-sand my CPU and see how much it helps.
Just more bits of data/information for everyone!

Thank for those details! I wonder then why they keep that nickel plating on the lid at all instead of a copper one- the latter it seems, would let you get away with a smaller cooling circuit or something more efficient.