Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen Breaking 7GHz with LN2

Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by faragon on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @07:20AM (#13270033)

On times with CPUs with so many cores, and with amazing single thread performance even at 3 GHz, overclocking is not what is used to be. E.g. in times when from a 33 MHz CPU you could get 21% speed-up running at 40MHz, or from 300 to 450 MHz on some budged CPUs (+50%, Celeron 300A with 128KB L2 cache), it was way more interesting (even knowing that the overclock could reduce the life of the components, because of electromigration, and some components running above their design limits).

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by smcl on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @08:36AM (#13270335)

Yeh - the impact from overclocking isn't quite what it once was. It's nice that nowadays we're not left wanting for CPU speed even for most entry level processors. But I fondly remember feeling pretty excited by the "AXIA" AMD Athlons and pushing them to some pretty amazing results with fairly standard cooling (1.2/1.33GHz -> 1.66GHz and above, iirc)

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by rasz_pl on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:38AM (#13270720)

Its not the case of Overclocking no longer giving you expected speedup, its INTEL directly FIGHTING with overclockers and blocking every avenue that would enable you to gain performance for free.

Nowadays Overclocking is just another premium market segment being milked by Intel with K/Z series chips.

Every single Intel chipset is 'in theory' capable of overclocking (multiplier change, Turbo). Its all blocked on the Bios/OEM agreement[1]/microcode(!)[2] level. Sometimes OEMs grow bold and ignore it (Asrock pioneering H81 overclocking), sometimes they get spanked by Intel and quickly release 'updated' bios removing OC.

OC in itself works great. You an buy $72 3.2GHz G3258 haswell, OC to 4.3GHz (stock cooler, or ~4.5Ghz on custom) and enjoy >30% speed improvement. Especially great for single threaded games(written in python!) like World of Tanks where your oced $72 cpu performs like $300 4790K.

[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/asrock-killed-overclo...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/3ji7im/nonz_o...

[2] http://www.sevenforums.com/windows-updates-activation/373250...

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by floatboth on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @10:24AM (#13271038)

Board manufacturers are unofficially releasing "non-K OC BIOSes" to http://overclocking.guide/intel-skylake-non-k-overclocking-b...

These firmwares disable power management completely, so that the microcode cannot even read the BCLK frequency and detect overclocking. As a side effect, you cannot use integrated graphics, and AVX instructions become slow — even slightly slower than at stock frequency (need power management to ramp up the AVX parts of the chip to full speed). But if you're not encoding video all day, you can save some money by buying a 6400 instead of a 6600K.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by revelation on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @11:53AM (#13271737)

Not just overclockers, Intel has been gouging everyone ever since AMD stopped producing a competitive CPU (so basically since Core 2 or 2006.. man it's been that long?)

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by snuxoll on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @12:13PM (#13271890)

Here's hoping for Ryzen. Not only has Intel locked up the consumer segment but the server one as well. $200 for an E5-2407v2 is ludicrous, I'm really hoping AMD pulls a rabbit out of their hat because we need some real competition in the x86 space again.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by theandrewbailey on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:18AM (#13270580)

I got a hand-me-down Athlon XP 2500+ around 2004-ish. I had read what you could do with it, so I did: bumped it up to 3200+ specs. It ran like that for years, until I saw the motherboard capacitors leaking and moved on.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by floatboth on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @10:11AM (#13270938)

Oh yeah. When I was a kid, my parents bought me an Athlon XP 2500+… overclocked to 3200+ and ran like that for many, many years. Eventually I gave that PC away to someone. I kinda regret that decision now :D

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by flamedoge on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @11:57AM (#13271767)

I had a 1.8ghz intel low-end pentium processor that could get overclocked to 2.66ghz

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by CoolGuySteve on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:30AM (#13270670)

I've got a 25% overclock on my i5 2600k going right now using the stock air cooler that's pretty rad. And I'm not an outlier, it's normal for these chips. The Haswell "devil's canyon" model was reportedly also a great overclocking chip.

These ~30% overclocks are still out there if you're willing to look for them. (But I believe that 50% celeron was some kind of binning issue caused by marketing).

The bigger issue these days is that GPU performance matters so much more for gaming. I've had the same CPU/motherboard for 5 years but I'm on my 3rd GPU.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by rasz_pl on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:57AM (#13270828)

50% Celeron OC lasted almost all the way to Coppermines. I was building PCs at the time specializing in cheap performance. Intel BX + 300A@450 2v, later 366@550 up to 700@1000 after modding slot1 adapters for 1.8-1.9V. Switched to selling AMD when disaster called P4 came out.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by seanp2k2 on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:03PM (#13275212)

Yeah, I've had a 2500k running at 4.6 stable on all cores on stock voltages since it came out. I'm only now feeling a bit of an upgrade itch. If Ryzen CPUs are under $500 for the top models I'll build my next system on their platform and get a 2nd GTX 1080 or upgrade when the Vega 11 / Navi stuff comes out.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by klodolph on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @07:51AM (#13270148)

I was under the impression that electromigration is a much more serious problem with modern processors due to the higher current densities—was it also a problem with older processors?

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by 79d697i6fdif on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @10:17AM (#13270991)

In my experience at least, the olde fears about shortening the life of the chip are non-issue in practice.

I've run overclocked PC's exclusively for about 17 years and never had a single failure, even though I've been running folding@home for most of those. By the time the chip is 4 yrs old it's time for a replacement for practical reasons.

My current system is a cheap Biostar board running a gen-1 i5 750 that I got second hand. The board dates back to 2009 I think. It's overclocked to around 3.6 ghz with turbo still enabled. About time for a replacement but until a year ago it benchmarked at the same level as $200 chips.

Overclocking is definitely still worth it if you want a fast pc for cheap

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by Baeocystin on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:04AM (#13270487)

Not really. As long as you stayed within the thermal envelope, you were fine. I built hundreds of machines from 1995-2005, overclocking most, and I never had a single CPU failure that wasn't just a DOA chip.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by rasz_pl on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:19AM (#13270592)

Older chips had worse precision and control over overall process (polishing, chemical purity etc). This is a rather niche level knowledge, you would have to ask some ISTFA regular about it.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by Baeocystin on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @09:01AM (#13270474)

The first time I built an Abit BP6 with dual Celeron 300's (overclocked to 450, naturally) I felt like I was getting a supercomputer for cheap. The performance increase going to dual-core was massive, and getting to use the cheap Celerons instead of the crazy-expensive Pentium II's paid for the rest of the system all on its own. The late 90's/early 2000's were exciting times for system builders.

Now? Meh. I still build my own, because you can spec out exactly what you want. But there's no longer any compelling performance reason to do anything beyond stock cooling and stock clocks.

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Re:Intel Kaby Lake Potentially an Overclocker's Dream, Seen ... by patates on Thursday December 29, 2016 @05:57AM (#13276690)

Yeah, and any reasonable overclocking you can do is already automated by some ridiculously designed tuning tool from the manufacturer.

I'm not sure about this but I think any overclocking people do these days are for the fun of the journey, not for reaching the destination.

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