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Core i7-4790K Overclocked to 7003.38 MHz on ASRock Z97 OC Formula

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Sustainable or not, there is not much point in overclocking an i7 to 7GHz if you are going to have to disable half of its core and HT to get there... you basically have a very expensive Pentium-K at this point.
 
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.
 
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.

I wouldn't call it holding back, but it degrades the chip and shortens the life of the CPU. Not exactly a good thing..
 
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.

LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.
 


What game(s) utilize more than 4 cores efficiently?
 
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.

LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.

I would like to see a stock i7 compete against an OC i7 lol. Even with Hyper Threading disabled. I have a 2600 too @ 4.3 and I really don't see any reason to upgrade.

And this overclock to 7ghz, who cares, its not stable, you can't use it. If it were 5.5 or 6ghz and underwater and stable for daily use with low temps, I would be very excited. I like practicality and usability, those are most important IMHO.
 
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.

LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.

You do know that hyper-threading actually decreases FPS in games, right? Look it up before commenting...
 


What game(s) utilize more than 4 cores efficiently?

Guild Wars 2 is the big one here... my friend upgraded his i5 to an i7 3770k, and running that at stock speeds against my i5 2500k (4.4 Ghz), he gets about 30% more FPS than I do. Sure that shows that the game has some coding inefficiencies, but still, I just wanna play my game
 
Hyper-threading will improve performance in some games, others it won’t do as-well. But we are talking old games; most these days are using 4+ cores. However most are slowly moving most things off the CPU to the GPU. The CPU is slowly becoming more of a data director over actually computing things.

In all honesty the only real reason to upgrade the CPU is for more bandwidth and PCI lanes. I’d say the best place to look at speeding stuff up is the GPU memory size/bandwidth utilization and storage. Most cards haven’t come close to touching the bandwidth that the PCI-E can provide. And storage devices are still fairly slow even the new M.2 standard is fairly slow in the grand scheme of things.
 

You might want to look at BF3/BF4, Watch Dogs and other higher-end game benchmarks.

HT has a SLIGHT negative impact on single-threaded games but also has a significant positive impact on more heavily threaded games and applications.
 
This is completely pointless if you have to cripple the CPU just to hit a number, can it even bench? play games? or is it just to say you got to XXXX number without crashing? Total mhz doesn't really mean anything to me anymore, unless it's fully functional and can be sustained I just don't care and thus no this wouldn't impact which brand of board I buy next.
 

Most likely not since they already need to disable HT and two cores just to get the thing to boot into Windows.

I wish OCing contests required that overclocks be Prime95-stable for 10 minutes to qualify... and have separate categories for fully-enabled CPUs and completely unrestricted crippling.
 


Even better, 10 mins stable using 1344 and 1792 FFTs. 😀 I've seen oc's which are fine at default settings
with P95 but don't last 5 mins at these sizes. Good idea about the categories aswell.

Ian.



 
Hyper threading haters.. LOL

Dont comment if you dont understand the tech.


im curious if they get diminishing returns on performance as clock speed increases. At what point is it not worth it?
 
Impressive! These kinds of things don't affect my buying decisions at all. Hardware is so powerful these days that even stock machines from a few years ago are far more than adequate for generally all consumer tasks; including modern "extreme" gaming where most of the load is off-loaded to the graphics hardware anyways. For the most part, the money spent on things like this is either for personal challenge, or to impress your friends on the forums. Nothing wrong with that, but not a purchasing decision for me!
 
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.

Yepper! I found better FPS with HT disabled and a higher clock speed than having HT enabled. Even BF4 was tested. But yet again I do have high video card bandwidth.

LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.

You do know that hyper-threading actually decreases FPS in games, right? Look it up before commenting...
 
Although:

... it's always nice to see how close the hardware can be pushed before reaching its breaking point

To me it seems if you have to disable the majority of the features to have it run for any amount of time, you've exceeded its breaking point.

Otherwise, by that logic, a 100GHz crystal attached to nothing at all qualifies as an "overclocking record with some features disabled" - "some features" being all of them...
 

Probably sooner than most people think with on real-world apps and games due to the amount of background stuff the extra cores and hardware threads (vs the 2C2T i7 @ 7GHz) can take care of even if the application or game itself is only lightly threaded.

Also, the bigger the gap between the CPU cores' speed and the un-core and external IO is, the more time the (remaining) cores will spend just waiting for off-core stuff to happen. Instead of waiting for ~60 cycles on a cache line miss at 4GHz, you now wait 100+ cycles at 7GHz and this penalty will likely happen more often as well. This means more execution slots not getting filled because the scheduler is stalled waiting for data.

Overclocking contests may produce impressive numbers but they are not very useful beyond that.
 


Indeed; the old version of HT in the old days didn't work very well, but today there aren't
may apps that don't benefit from it to some degree.

Ian.



 


Indeed; the old version of HT in the old days didn't work very well, but today there aren't
may apps that don't benefit from it to some degree.
It's not just the old HT that's improved: back in the day, WinXP didn't know how to park threads properly and your single-threaded game could camp on a crap HT "core." Win7 (and to a better extent, Win8) can differentiate and utilize real cores over HT cores whenever available. The HT haters are still stuck in 2002.
 
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