Question Should i upgrade? or is my current cpu not set up right?

[daylightriot]

I currently have a ryzen 2600 @ 4.2 ghz with 3600mhz ram in dual channel. It bottlenecks my 980ti quite a bit. i recently played darksiders 3 and my gpu was running @ 70% max during gameplay @1080p ultra no vsync.
Does anyone have experience with this issue? according to all the benchmarks out there my cpu should barely bottleneck this gpu and when it does it should be between 5-10%. if i cant find a way to resolve this then i'll probably buy an 8600k and a z390 mobo soon. since switching to AMD i always seem to be waiting for that cpu with better ipc and higher clocks.

 

[gggplaya]

Vega 64 Liquid cooled is definitely worth it. Any Vega 64 is going to be loud when you use it to it's max, but even with undervolting, I can only get mine Powercolor Red Devil 64 to maintain between 1600-1615mhz during full load. It's not thermally limited thanks to having 3 fans, the GPU temp is usually around 65-70C under full load. The problem is I'm power limited, I keep hitting the max wattage so it drops down in clock. The Vega 64 liquid allows for more watts, but unfortunately can't get my card to flash with the vega 64 liquid bios.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Vega 64 Liquid cooled is definitely worth it. Any Vega 64 is going to be loud when you use it to it's max, but even with undervolting, I can only get mine Powercolor Red Devil 64 to maintain between 1600-1615mhz during full load. It's not thermally limited thanks to having 3 fans, the GPU temp is usually around 65-70C under full load. The problem is I'm power limited, I keep hitting the max wattage so it drops down in clock. The Vega 64 liquid allows for more watts, but unfortunately can't get my card to flash with the vega 64 liquid bios.

You're limited to use it seems when it comes to the Liquid cooled Vega 64. I can't find a new one anywhere. They seem to go for around $450 on ebay.

Like I said, as an owner, all i can tell you is bring your game with the PSU, this thing will spike and take down nearly 400w on its own.

 

[gggplaya]

I have a watt meter laying around somewhere. Power was never an issue as far as power supply is concerned, I have an 850watt power supply. The bios of the graphics card itself however, will limit the max wattage while using the card. I have to use MSI afterburner to see the wattage of the GPU.

 

[daylightriot]

ill pick one up over the next week and let you know how it goes. i'll definitley be undervolting tho, maybe that could alleviate those power spikes a bit.

any advice on this or is it like most cards, undervolt through wattman and maybe bios mod.

 

[Rogue Leader]

I have a watt meter laying around somewhere. Power was never an issue as far as power supply is concerned, I have an 850watt power supply. The bios of the graphics card itself however, will limit the max wattage while using the card. I have to use MSI afterburner to see the wattage of the GPU.

With 850w you're fine, he has a 650w PSU.... The LC card will in Turbo mode with HBCC on pull down 330w on average and 380 on a spike. This is from AMD Link monitoring it while Playing.

ill pick one up over the next week and let you know how it goes. i'll definitley be undervolting tho, maybe that could alleviate those power spikes a bit.

any advice on this or is it like most cards, undervolt through wattman and maybe bios mod.

If you run it in Balanced or Chill mode it keeps the wattage use down with not too much of a performance hit. Wattman does everything you need. There are many guides.

There is no reason to mod the BIOS and I HIGHLY recommend against it. Thats how people end up bricking cards, for no reason.

 

[daylightriot]

I bios modded my old rx480 and found it quite straight forward as long as you just change values on the original rom and save the original rom as a backup. from what i gather, most bios mod issues come form using other vendors roms or trying to upgrade a rom. a.e flashing an rx 470 with a 480 rom.

however i have no experience modding a vega 64 and dont know how temperamental that gpu is. from what gggplaya is saying it looks like i'll need to increase the wattage limiit, thermal limit and undervolt slightly. needless to say, if i do go the air route, i'll slap an accellero 4 on it first and thoroughly test with killawatt before i even consider a bios mod.

are there any threads on toms with a guide on bios modding a vega 64?

 

[Rogue Leader]

I bios modded my old rx480 and found it quite straight forward as long as you just change values on the original rom and save the original rom as a backup. from what i gather, most bios mod issues come form using other vendors roms or trying to upgrade a rom. a.e flashing an rx 470 with a 480 rom.

however i have no experience modding a vega 64 and dont know how temperamental that gpu is. from what gggplaya is saying it looks like i'll need to increase the wattage limiit, thermal limit and undervolt slightly. needless to say, if i do go the air route, i'll slap an accellero 4 on it first and thoroughly test with killawatt before i even consider a bios mod.

are there any threads on toms with a guide on bios modding a vega 64?

No there aren't any that i know of, but in your case at least now you don't want to increase the wattage limit or anything like that as you want top undervold and bring it down a bit. Everything you need is done within Wattman.

I follow this thread although i have no reason to mod my bios, this is a start

RX Vega Owners Thread, Tests, Mods, BIOS & Tweaks !

ATI/AMD RX Vega Owners Thread, Tests, Mods, BIOS & Tweaks ! Vega64 Chip size in numbers: GPU only (Vega64 in the 'flesh') is ~366mm² HBM2 Dies at...

forums.guru3d.com

 

[daylightriot]

UPDATE 1. I have managed to reduce the cpu bottleneck by about 10% on average.

whilst tinkering in the bios menu, i came across a setting called cldo vddp. after i a quick google i found a guide and changed this setting to 1.00 and changed llc to mode 1.

voila!! slightly less throttling and more fps!! I even managed to get ram up to 3600mhz stable before i decided the voltage was too high for 24/7 operation.

 

[daylightriot]

after a bit of tinkering the other day i managed to get 4.3 ghz HT off @ 1.35V as well. Needless to say, performance has improved slightly.

cpu z score.
https://valid.x86.fr/m5pksn

cpu single score comparison
https://valid.x86.fr/bench/m5pksn/1

looks like i finally managed to get the performance i wanted 😀 😀
definitely won't be upgrading to an 8600k now.

 

[daylightriot]

Update 2

So, after days and days of tweaking, I finally found the real reason why my system wasnt performing as expected. memory compatibility. the ram i use isnt officially supported by amd. and b350 motherboards have much less compatibility than x470. who knew?

because of this, i was seeing wildly different single thread test results on cpu z, from as low as 250 to as high as 455 without any overclocks in the same windows session.

I did fix this issue. All i had to do was look at a ryzen compatible version of the same ram (G skill sniper x series) use those timings/subtimings and disable power down/gear down/memory bank swap. voila!! a stable system at last!! this would also explain why changing cldo vddp had such a dramatic performance improvement.

over the last week or so, thank god i was off work, i have done 100's of bios and OS tweeks that have added up to a system that performs just short of an 8600k system in gaming (within 5% fps, even in cpu heavy titles). All i can say is ryzen is a riddle wrapped within a mystery within an enigma but if you take the time to optimise it, you can see surprising gains.

I'm considering making an all in one complete system tuning guide for ryzen systems because all the information out there at the moment is all over the place. Consolidation is severely needed.

 

[gggplaya]

Were you using a the XMP profile, or the boards defaults? XMP didnt work with my corsair memory, so i just use the default with a few adjustments to voltage, clock speed and timing. Hopefully ryzen 3000 will have a better memory controller now that its on a separate chiplet.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Were you using a the XMP profile, or the boards defaults? XMP didnt work with my corsair memory, so i just use the default with a few adjustments to voltage, clock speed and timing. Hopefully ryzen 3000 will have a better memory controller now that its on a separate chiplet.

With my system as well I had to manually set up the memory, using DOCP (ASUS word for XMP on Ryzen) only caused instability and XFR wouldn't work either.

AMD is stepping up memory compatibility testing but there is nothing that I have seen saying the memory controller itself or the design is changing at all. Its still the same basic architecture.

 

[daylightriot]

Were you using a the XMP profile, or the boards defaults? XMP didnt work with my corsair memory, so i just use the default with a few adjustments to voltage, clock speed and timing. Hopefully ryzen 3000 will have a better memory controller now that its on a separate chiplet.

all manual settings now. i was previously using xmp and manual dram voltage, vsoc etc.

i'm still getting slight variations in single core performance but within 20 points on cpu z. my latest configuration is only 10 points behind the 8600k at similar frequencies.

have a look 😀 it has literally taken hours of my life to get it running this well.

https://imgur.com/a/HqqGy2o

View: https://imgur.com/a/HqqGy2o

 

[daylightriot]

and this is the rest of the data sheet with my handle on the top so you know im not pranking you 😀 im not gonna lie, im surprisingly proud.

https://imgur.com/a/Xc3UU6e

View: https://imgur.com/a/Xc3UU6e

 

[Rogue Leader]

So, we were right, with the benchmarks we posted. I had mentioned earlier you may have some sort of setup issue.

 

[daylightriot]

So, we were right, with the benchmarks we posted. I had mentioned earlier you may have some sort of setup issue.

Yes and no. There was definitely a bottleneck in my system. but it was ram not the cpu. my bad. and it was this forum members answers that got me looking into this issue in depth so thanks man.

I'm also seeing better performance now than the majority of the youtube benchmarkers are seeing. I can only assume this is because they're using xmp profiles and are unaware of the inconsistent single thread performance over time.

Weirdly enough, the biggest single thread increase happened when i disabled hyper threading.

I would recommend running some tests yourself on your rig to see if you're suffering with this issue, as the inconsistencies appear over time in the same windows session.

an easy way to check is to leave cpu z stress test running and memtest (all ram, run indefinitely-stop on error) at the same time for about half an hour t to an hour, stop the tests and then immediately do a cpu z benchmark. if your single thread score is 440ish or above (HT on, stock frequency/voltage settings, xfr enabled) then your configuration is good. if its lower than that then you'll need to do some tweeks. i would also advise just randomly running cpu z tests to see if you have any performance degradation. I gotta warn you though, cldo vddp is an absolute time sink. worth it when you find the right settings though.

 

[Rogue Leader]

I don't see the issues you are saying thats why I was confused by your complaints. Also turning off HT will always give you better single core benches since its keeping the core's resources from being shared between more than 1 thread.

But yeah I don't use XMP/DOCP in my case my system wouldn't even work right (and disabled XFR) with those settings, so I did everything manually and got it working far better than it did like that anyway. Maybe it works now with new BIOS updates, I got my CPU and board at launch 2 years ago so there were a LOT of BIOS changes and updates since then.

But I get a GTX 1080 crushing score in Superposition with my system, and I have some of the fastest scores for non manually overclocked 1800X systems in many benchmarks. Its all about tweaks and optimizations of your settings you're correct.

 

[daylightriot]

I don't see the issues you are saying thats why I was confused by your complaints. Also turning off HT will always give you better single core benches since its keeping the core's resources from being shared between more than 1 thread.

But yeah I don't use XMP/DOCP in my case my system wouldn't even work right (and disabled XFR) with those settings, so I did everything manually and got it working far better than it did like that anyway. Maybe it works now with new BIOS updates, I got my CPU and board at launch 2 years ago so there were a LOT of BIOS changes and updates since then.

But I get a GTX 1080 crushing score in Superposition with my system, and I have some of the fastest scores for non manually overclocked 1800X systems in many benchmarks. Its all about tweaks and optimizations of your settings you're correct.

Beat a 1080 in superposition? impressive mate. Any advice for me? I just bought a vega 64 asus strix version, arrives tomorrow. I did look at the liquid cooled version but they were out of stock everywhere i checked. The only one i found was a guy asking 400 pounds (531 dollars) on ebay for a card he had used for mining, no warranty. the strix new cost the same. Also picked up a scythe ninja 5 cpu cooler.

so far it sounds similar to my old rx 480, undervolt and increase mem/cpu frequency for good gains.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Beat a 1080 in superposition? impressive mate. Any advice for me? I just bought a vega 64 asus strix version, arrives tomorrow. I did look at the liquid cooled version but they were out of stock everywhere i checked. The only one i found was a guy asking 400 pounds (531 dollars) on ebay for a card he had used for mining, no warranty. the strix new cost the same. Also picked up a scythe ninja 5 cpu cooler.

so far it sounds similar to my old rx 480, undervolt and increase mem/cpu frequency for good gains.

Basically right about what you need to do. But as mentioned earlier you are PSU limited. If you want to go really fast you need to turn HBCC on . and I wouldn't with the PSU you have. Good price.

 

[daylightriot]

Basically right about what you need to do. But as mentioned earlier you are PSU limited. If you want to go really fast you need to turn HBCC on . and I wouldn't with the PSU you have. Good price.

I'll consider a psu upgrade, especially after seeing the power mod for vega 64. Mind blowing. Also, do you want a copy of re2? I got 3 free games with the gpu and I already got that one. Let me know and I'll pm it to you once I get em.

 

[Rogue Leader]

I'll consider a psu upgrade, especially after seeing the power mod for vega 64. Mind blowing. Also, do you want a copy of re2? I got 3 free games with the gpu and I already got that one. Let me know and I'll pm it to you once I get em.

I appreciate that but I cannot accept. Also AMD doesn't let you share the codes anyway. But thanks.

 

[daylightriot]

I appreciate that but I cannot accept. Also AMD doesn't let you share the codes anyway. But thanks.

no worries mate. This is the first high end gpu ive bought retail so didnt know you cant share steam keys or however it works, i usually get cards a generation old and second hand. im a tight fisted swine haha.

Gotta say though fella, vega 64 is awesome!! outperforming my 980ti by quite a margin. all i've done so far is undervolt it, strip the card down and replace TIM/thermal pads. I know i've lost the warranty now but it had to be done. vrm temps were @110c on day 1. Toasty af.

Check out my firestrike extreme score, tessellation @ 16x, gpu voltage at 1.050, mem voltage @ 1.025, frequencies @ stock, fan @ 60%.

https://imgur.com/QZ0pKvG

View: https://i.imgur.com/QZ0pKvG.png

pretty good results eh? I'll upload an overclocked score later. any chance we could do a comparison? just so i can get a bit of a performance metric going?

 

[Rogue Leader]

pretty good results eh? I'll upload an overclocked score later. any chance we could do a comparison? just so i can get a bit of a performance metric going?

Sure this is the last time I ran firestrike, I don't have the paid version

https://www.3dmark.com/fs/13959146

This is HBCC on, no overclock on anything. For some reason my turbo clock speed doesn't show correctly in there.

This is Timespy

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/2611814

And finally here is a shot of my superposition score

https://imgur.com/7NNa3jG

View: https://imgur.com/7NNa3jG

 

[daylightriot]

Sure this is the last time I ran firestrike, I don't have the paid version

https://www.3dmark.com/fs/13959146

This is HBCC on, no overclock on anything. For some reason my turbo clock speed doesn't show correctly in there.

This is Timespy

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/2611814

And finally here is a shot of my superposition score

https://imgur.com/7NNa3jG

View: https://imgur.com/7NNa3jG

i'll run a couple of benchmarks now. i think that superposition score is a couple of hundred points above mine. impressive

 

[daylightriot]

alright. did a bit of tweeking and in the end i decided on an undervolt/small underclock. got the memory at 1.050v and the core at 1.050v. mem frequency: 1000mhz, gpu frequency 1550mhz average, fluctuates up and down by around 25mhz. did this because i was seeing gpu performance degradation while using an oc'd cpu. also this cpu is now turboing up to 4.35ghz after being overclocked to 4.2ghz in ryzen master, this seems to negatively affect my scores somewhat. will do a bios tweek and sort it out later.

firestrike score
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/18801991

timespy
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/6676780

superposition

https://imgur.com/eMXAoL6

View: https://imgur.com/eMXAoL6