[SOLVED] Increasing ring ratio on locked CPU Intel Core i5 4690 (non K) H97 chipset

[Lefteris Fousteris]

Hello,

I have an i5 4690 non K 4 core 4 thread CPU on a MSI H97 Gaming 3 Motherboard (with most recent bios m-flashed successfully)
I've had this question for a long time so i'll cut to the chase.
FYI: I am running this with a MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G

Ive had some obvious bottleneck issues on many games where the cpu stays at 100% load while the GPU chills at 35% load
When I stress test this cpu or play games (which has a 3.9GHz max turbo boost clock) the cpu never boosts to 3.9GHz, I noticed some fps hiccups while playing valorant and tried to monitor my cpu clock with rivatuner on a couple of other games I also play and the cpu was in fact not boosting to 3.9GHz constantly but rather fluctuating around 3.5GHz (which is the base clock of the cpu) to around 3.7GHz.

I went into the bios and played around with different settings, I set the ring ratio from Auto to x39 and saved and booted (keep in mind I had SpeedStep and Turbo Boost enabled with this adjustment).

The cpu now boosts at 3.9GHz at 115w consumption and ~75c temp while stress testing prime95 small ffts and while in-game (the task manager now shows a base clock of 3.9GHz -previously showed 3.5GHz- and when the cpu is actually boosts to 3.9GHz it reports 4.33GHz for some weird reason butCPU-Z and RivaTuner shows 3900MHz while playing and the cpu downclocks to 800MHz when idle)
The cpu and gpu loads are now somewhat evened out at around 65% both.

I think I have some performance benefit from this but I am not sure, is it worth keeping this x39 ring ratio, should I change some other settings or should i reset it to factory and let it do its thing?
Is there a way to find out if there is any performance improvement by benchmarking the cpu in some way?

 

[SamirD]

So benchmarking is nothing more than checking before and after in the same conditions--your gaming test was a benchmark and you proved that your changes improved the performance. Just be sure cooling keeps up (or turn it to 100% when in OC mode) and you should be fine.

 

[Lefteris Fousteris]

So benchmarking is nothing more than checking before and after in the same conditions--your gaming test was a benchmark and you proved that your changes improved the performance. Just be sure cooling keeps up (or turn it to 100% when in OC mode) and you should be fine.

Shouldn't the cpu boost up to 3.9 on its own though? Thats whats been bugging me. Could it be then MSI OC Genie kicking in?
I could assume the AUTO ring ratio didnt turbo up to it for power consumption and heat reasons, but speedstep is still on and the cpu boosts like crazy up to 3.9 now while before it was trying to stay cooler at around 60c during p95 small ffts. Of course i had to ramp up my cpu fan profile to kick in at lower temps just to be sure it doesnt give low pwm which in fact happened the first time it ran and at that point it reached 81c and started capping the power, after adjusting the fan profile at 80% speed - 70c and 100% at 75c it is pretty stable at like 67c at the worst case scenario (p95)
I should try a cinnebench or cpuz benchmark to see if it makes any difference, although i can definitely say browsing files and bootup are waaaayyy snappier now, I also recently installed a 500gb nvme ssd (crucial p2) on a pcie expansion card from icybox because the m.2 slot couldnt detect it after a long support ticket with msi so now i run it on the x8 gen2 slot i can say i now feel the speed benefit more somehow.
I wouldnt call this an overclock though, just pushing the cpu to its max potential.

 

[SamirD]

Yeah it should have been boosting to 3.9 on its own, but there's so much software crap controlling the cpu speed these days that something probably was interfering. On my older lga775 systems, I shut off all the speedstep and power savings forcing it to run 100% all the time. I'm not worried about power, just performance. If I want to worry about power, I just turn it off, lol.