i7 8700 - Are these quirks of current gen hardware or legitimate problems?

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NoTimeForAUsername

NoTimeForAUsername

Commendable
Nov 19, 2016
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I space things out kind of weirdly when I post on here, but that is done in order to make important information easier to pick out from the crowd of words.




Building a Coffee Lake-based PC for a friend inspired me to upgrade my system to current gen hardware as well. I decided to do things right this time (unlike my first platform upgrade) and go with an Intel Core i7-8700 cooled by an EVGA CLC 240, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM at 2400 MHz and an ASUS Z370-G Gaming (Wi-Fi AC) motherboard.



The PC I built for my friend also has an 8700 and 16GB of RAM and while his system seems to be running perfectly fine, I've been experiencing some oddities that I can't say for sure aren't problems. Two particularly glaring issues have to do with playing games with Discord open and the Java edition of Minecraft.



The CPU and both 8GB DIMMs were purchased from Amazon and therefore I can't guarantee that they weren't jostled around during shipping.

I am running the non-UEFI version of Windows 10 Education on a SATA SSD (there were two boot options for the USB with the Win10 installer on it, one that was labelled as "UEFI" and one that was not).

These issues have persisted across three installations of Windows 10 on this hardware (The first being a non-UEFI installation, the second being UEFI, and the third, current installation being non-UEFI again).

I initially just installed the drivers on the CD that came with my motherboard, but I updated all of them last night (as of the writing of this post).

All games but Minecraft Java Edition are installed on two separate internal hard drives.

I have the GameFirst IV software, which was one of the pieces of software bundled with the motherboard, installed on my system in order to manage the network use of applications which only eliminates the issue with Discord momentarily.



The issues I have with Discord come in the form of constant stuttering when playing any game while simply using Discord. Games that run perfectly otherwise, like GTA V, begin stuttering when using Discord.

I'm not ruling out the possibility that this could just be an issue with Discord itself, because I can play GTA V, stream music via YouTube Music and record the entire process with Nvidia Shadowplay without any issue whatsoever.

The moment I close Discord, the issue stops entirely.



Minecraft Java Edition performs poorly in general. Without v-sync, framerates are gloriously high but the smoothness of motion onscreen doesn't reflect that and stuttering is constant with varying levels of intensity. Turning on v-sync keeps the stutter from being as constant as without, but it is still very much present despite having set the game to use 4GB of RAM.

Performance improves slightly if I crank the settings down to their absolute minimum, but the stuttering remains.

CPU usage isn't really out of line and the workload is being spread across all cores, so whatever is causing the issue is well beyond me.

In comparison, Minecraft Windows 10 Edition runs like an absolute dream and I've since dropped Java Edition in favour of Win10 Edition for the sake of performance.



In conclusion, am I having legitimate problems with my system? Am I just experiencing some yet-to-be-patched quirks that come with using the latest and greatest? Or have I simply run into two unfortunate cases of games and applications that throw a fit if they see more than 4 cores available to use?

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to help me out, it is appreciated far more than words can express!
 
Solution
A
Idle RAM usage is nothing to worry about, superfetch will automatically pull frequently used files into spare RAM so application startup is faster, its perfectly normal. Windows will remove anything unused if you need the RAM.

Linux is even more aggressive about this, I'm seeing 6GB used for buffers/cache right now, probably because I move files around network drives so using RAM like that drastically speeds things up.
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Hi SgtScream, thanks for the reply. I uninstalled Minecraft from my SSD and installed it on one of the HDDs in my system and while it technically made the constant stutter a bit less intense, it's most definitely still there. Here's a link to an example of what it actually looks like: https://youtu.be/qazBIZ9rQ8A
 
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Disable the GameFirst IV software and see if things get better. Discord might be trying to set its self higher in the Quality of Service list for better voice quality and the GameFirst could be setting it lower causing a conflict between games and discord.
 
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I meant uninstall "GameFirst IV"
 
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I'll certainly give that a try tomorrow (no time today because of work). I've also discovered that some combination of processes and software is taking up 4.5 GB of my RAM... at idle! Compared to the 2.9 GB average idle RAM use from my previous system, something is definitely up here. The only problem with this is that the last time I followed an optimization guide for Windows 10 on this hardware config (the most recent one from Tech Yes City on YouTube to be exact), my install started acting really weird and overall appeared to be unhealthy (randomly flickering taskbar icons, all games stuttering instead of just Minecraft, etc.).
 
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I have AVG for my antivirus, nothing specifically for malware though.

In terms of hardware, I have an EVGA Supernova 750 G2 PSU and an ASUS Strix GTX 1070 OC. The Z series mobo is because of this particular model having all of the features I was looking for, namely a micro-ATX form factor and integrated wifi. I'll be the first to admit it is pretty odd having a non-K chip in there though :lol:. I also have been wanting to try an AIO for a while and I figured a hyper-threaded 6 core CPU at 4+ GHz would be enough reason to justify it (that and I'm not sure my old 212 Evo would have been up to the task).
 
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Have to tried running it with AVG uninstalled and just using Windows built-in AV temporarily?

As mentioned above, would uninstall any "gameboost" type software and nVidia Experience. Set the power profile in Windows to High Performance and nVidia control panel to Maximum Performance (to test).

Even testing all that, it does seem like it has to do with Discord itself given the things you've already tried.

Your 212 may have been iffy (loved mine!) but a $35 Cryrog H7 would have done the trick. Still, if you're happy then it's fine :)
 
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After testing Java Minecraft on another Windows 10 PC with completely different hardware (Core i5 3470, 8GB DDR3 RAM @ 1333 MHz, 2GB GTX 750 Ti), I was surprised to discover that it ran terribly on that system as well. Because of this, I think I'm going to remove Minecraft from the list of problems in this thread.
 
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I've discovered the source of the memory leakage! As if it wasn't enough of a RAM hog already, Chrome liked my RAM so much it decided to stick around for the duration of my session in Windows every time I closed it. A restart would fix the issue, but simply opening Chrome, even for a split second, causes the leak. A quick switch to Firefox seems to have fixed the issue entirely, with idle RAM use going back down to around 2.7 GB of usage after closing the browser.

At this point, the only thing that's really keeping me from closing this thread is the fact that my friend's aforementioned build which is also an 8700, 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1070 seems to be performing just fine, according to him. This coupled with the fact that my previous build did not have any of the issues that prompted the creation of this thread keep me just out of reach of true peace of mind. However, that previous, Haswell-based build already had a couple of years to mature as a platform when I bought into it. Perhaps I should stop being so paranoid and let Intel and ASUS iron out the Coffee Lake platform?
 
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sounds more like a malware problem.

coffee lake is a refresh of skylake and then kayblake, should be pretty mature already
 
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Discord issue has been fixed! For whatever reason, hardware acceleration was turned on and they themselves warned that it could cause FPS drops in games. After turning that off a now butter-smooth, fairly lengthy session of GTA Online with four people in the voice chat on Discord confirmed the fix.

The issues with Discord and memory leakage are now fixed. Still not sure what Minecraft's deal is though.
 
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Sorry to have abandoned this thread for nearly three weeks. I meant to spend some time living with the system for a while to see if it behaved itself, but I didn't intend to let the thread sit for this long! :lol:


Java Minecraft continues to baffle me. I opened it this morning after leaving it untouched for weeks and while the stuttering is still there, it isn't nearly as intense as it was. In fact, I could deal with it if (and ONLY if) I was forced to. Regardless, it still shouldn't be doing that at all and I think I'll be sticking to Windows 10 Edition for the time being.

Discord and GTA V have behaved themselves ever since I turned off hardware acceleration in Discord. I don't recall it ever being enabled any other time I've installed it and I wasn't even aware of the feature's existence until this issue arose, so I'm not sure why it was on by default this time.

The memory leak issues seem to be taken care of. I thought VLC Media Player may have been another culprit in that area alongside Google Chrome, but a 45 or so minute session of Forza Horizon 3 after using VLC debunked my concerns.

Every program I throw at the system so far is behaving itself. Photoshop and Premiere (both Elements 15), Audacity, Cinebench and Aida 64 are all snappy and stable. VLC Media Player however, freaks out a bit when you drag back the timeline in media being played from a DVD. The screen goes black while the audio works fine. Some random clicking about in the timeline until the picture returns and then returning the timeline to where it was initially pushed back to seems to fix this. The frequent changing of chapters that happens with TV shows on DVD cause the black-screen-with-normal-audio bug as well after a couple of episodes.

My idle RAM usage, as of the writing of this post, sits at around 3.3 GB. Still not as low as I would ideally like it to be, but it doesn't seem to interfere with performance during my usual tasks. Discord + a game, one Firefox tab with a YouTube video playing + a game, Photoshop + one or two Firefox tabs, usually one playing a YouTube video or Premiere by itself are my main high memory use situations with no other scenarios coming to mind. I suppose if I really wanted to go crazy (crazy? Stupid?) and solve the problem once and for all I could just throw another 16 GB of RAM at the issue and call it a day, but I should probably get a hold of myself. :lol:


Overall, my system seems to be working pretty normally with the exception of the aforementioned quirks with Minecraft and VLC. The only real quirk left is that My 8700 only turbos up to 4.3 GHz on all 6 cores as apposed to the 4.4-4.5 GHz it initially went up to. I went into the BIOS to see if I could manually set the clock speed but it wouldn't let me do so. I know this isn't necessarily a problem (Hardware Canucks uploaded a video this morning which featured a build with an 8700 that only went up to 3.4 GHz or so) and at 4.3 GHz, I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that the missing 300 MHz hinders game performance. I did see an option in the BIOS that switches between custom turbo settings and stock, Intel-provided turbo settings. I'll have to try that out.
 
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Idle RAM usage is nothing to worry about, superfetch will automatically pull frequently used files into spare RAM so application startup is faster, its perfectly normal. Windows will remove anything unused if you need the RAM.

Linux is even more aggressive about this, I'm seeing 6GB used for buffers/cache right now, probably because I move files around network drives so using RAM like that drastically speeds things up.
 
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