Where is my bottleneck / what should I upgrade next?

[ILLGotti]

ASUS Z370 PRO
i5-8600K - (air cooled with 212 EVO)
2 @ 8gig (16gig) Corsair Dominator 3000 @ C15
Samsung 860 SSD
PNY XLR8 1080 OC (8gig)


Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Dugimodo]

What's your screen resoultion and refresh rate?

It's pretty good as is and doesn't need anything upgraded to my eyes. If you want 4K ultra settings then you might want to look at a new graphics card, but for anything else you should be fine.

 

[Rogue Leader]

If you're overclocking a better cooler would help. Otherwise unless you are having a problem, I see no issues there.

 

[ILLGotti]

What's your screen resoultion and refresh rate?

It's pretty good as is and doesn't need anything upgraded to my eyes. If you want 4K ultra settings then you might want to look at a new graphics card, but for anything else you should be fine.

This computer was built by me for my bosses son. I am not sure what type of monitor he has but he told me he wants to upgrade to water cooling. I'm advising against it as he's only 12 and if water leaks, the computers is toast as he won't be able to fix it on his own and by the time I get there, the damage will be done.

I thought maybe we could fill up all 4 RAM slots, maybe get him a M2 internal SSD, and add a push/pull fan for the CPU. Right now I have it running at 4.6. With water we could get 5.0 but I'm concerned about the processor lifespan, and the fact that the increase to 5.0 is nominal.

Kind of playing the risk to reward game right now.

 

[King_V]

What does the 12 year old want it to be able to do? That's more important than "must watercool" or whether it overclocks great, etc. It almost sounds a little like he's fixated on buzzwords rather than the actual capability.

 

[Rogue Leader]

What's your screen resoultion and refresh rate?

It's pretty good as is and doesn't need anything upgraded to my eyes. If you want 4K ultra settings then you might want to look at a new graphics card, but for anything else you should be fine.

This computer was built by me for my bosses son. I am not sure what type of monitor he has but he told me he wants to upgrade to water cooling. I'm advising against it as he's only 12 and if water leaks, the computers is toast as he won't be able to fix it on his own and by the time I get there, the damage will be done.

I thought maybe we could fill up all 4 RAM slots, maybe get him a M2 internal SSD, and add a push/pull fan for the CPU. Right now I have it running at 4.6. With water we could get 5.0 but I'm concerned about the processor lifespan, and the fact that the increase to 5.0 is nominal.

Kind of playing the risk to reward game right now.

Eh thats a stretch, with water MAYBE you'd get to 5.0, but theres a reason thats an 8600k and not an 8700k. As it is not all 8700k's will hit that. An AIO however would be highly unlikely to leak vs a custom loop, and no maintenance, if you want to make him happy.

More ram will do nothing for gaming, and an M.2 NVMe other than maybe at boot up he won't even notice it.

Pick a goal really, do you want to just make it seem like its better, or does he actually have a problem that needs solving?

 

[Dugimodo]

Watercooling will not achieve anything really, but to be fair a lot of us enthusiasts do things that are overkill and not needed in our builds.
You could disable the overclock and he's unlikely to notice in the real world. I'd just tell him he can do it if he wants to but it won't perform any better and leave it up to him.

I have a 2700X because I wanted the best, I've yet to see the CPU exceed 50% usage and would have been fine with a 2600X but that's not what I wanted Previously I had a 6700K overclocked to 4.5ghz, after 2 years and a BIOS update it dropped back to 4.2 with MCE and I didn't even realise for 3 months.
My new policy is leave everything at stock speed unless I can actually benefit from more performance, but I'm old enough not to care about overclocking for bragging rights now

 

[ILLGotti]

What does the 12 year old want it to be able to do? That's more important than "must watercool" or whether it overclocks great, etc. It almost sounds a little like he's fixated on buzzwords rather than the actual capability.

Its actually my fault. When I was setting it up I said "I've got you running @ 4.6GHz from 3.6... which is basically as fast as you are gonna get without water cooling".


I did this to myself. Now i gotta explain to him that the risk to reward isn't worth it right now. If I dangle the possibility of destroying the whole thing, I think he'll get on board.

 

[ILLGotti]

What's your screen resoultion and refresh rate?

It's pretty good as is and doesn't need anything upgraded to my eyes. If you want 4K ultra settings then you might want to look at a new graphics card, but for anything else you should be fine.

This computer was built by me for my bosses son. I am not sure what type of monitor he has but he told me he wants to upgrade to water cooling. I'm advising against it as he's only 12 and if water leaks, the computers is toast as he won't be able to fix it on his own and by the time I get there, the damage will be done.

I thought maybe we could fill up all 4 RAM slots, maybe get him a M2 internal SSD, and add a push/pull fan for the CPU. Right now I have it running at 4.6. With water we could get 5.0 but I'm concerned about the processor lifespan, and the fact that the increase to 5.0 is nominal.

Kind of playing the risk to reward game right now.

Eh thats a stretch, with water MAYBE you'd get to 5.0, but theres a reason thats an 8600k and not an 8700k. As it is not all 8700k's will hit that. An AIO however would be highly unlikely to leak vs a custom loop, and no maintenance, if you want to make him happy.

More ram will do nothing for gaming, and an M.2 NVMe other than maybe at boot up he won't even notice it.

Pick a goal really, do you want to just make it seem like its better, or does he actually have a problem that needs solving?

There is no problem really, no. He's 12. He just wants "better faster stronger".

 

[ILLGotti]

Thanks everyone for your time.. I appreciate it. As I suspected, it seems that the consensus is we're doing just fine. I just wanted to get some other "eyes on it" to make sure.

 

[Dugimodo]

Nit picking I guess but you didn't get it from 3.6 to 4.6, it was going to at least run at the 4.1 6 core turbo or 4.2 4 core turbo anyway. With MCE enabled like a lot of boards do by default it would be hitting 4.3 on all cores.

Nothing to do with your question though, just me pointing out that base clocks are meaningless and the stock performance was already pretty decent.

 

[ILLGotti]

Nit picking I guess but you didn't get it from 3.6 to 4.6, it was going to at least run at the 4.1 6 core turbo or 4.2 4 core turbo anyway. With MCE enabled like a lot of boards do by default it would be hitting 4.3 on all cores.

Nothing to do with your question though, just me pointing out that base clocks are meaningless and the stock performance was already pretty decent.

I'm confused, are you trying to say I didn't get it to overclock to 4.6 on air? because I absolutely did. If someone came on this website to lie to strangers over something that little, they would be a total psycho. I'm just a normal dude, not some type of habitual liar. lol

 

[Dugimodo]

No I'm saying it didn't start at 3.6, that in reality it was already 4.1 - 4.3 depending on settings.

I'm not questioning the speed you got, just the way you phrased it making it sound like a 1 Ghz OC from 3.6