Hardware Discussion Thread

[admin89]

http://www.maximumpc.com/intel_shows_love_desktop_gdc_unveils_8-core_haswell-e_processor_2014

Quote:Around the same time, Intel will launch an Anniversary Edition Pentium processor. It too will be unlocked and work in both Intel 8 and 9 Series chipsets, and will also have Intel Quick Sync Video technology.

Finally , i have waited for this moment . More speed for free , cheap CPU . Why not ?

[lamedude]

No AVX/HT makes that a hard sell. At 5GHZ I wouldn't expect it to much faster than at an i5 in multithreaded software.

[NaturalViolence]

Well it's not for people who want maximum multithreaded performance. And AVX/HT are practically useless with current applications anyways. If they sell it at the same price as the current lineup I think it's a great idea.

I'm more interesting in devil's canyon though: http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/intel_haswell_refresh_codenamed_devil%E2%80%99s_canyon_have_improved_tim.html

The overclocking ability of a sandy bridge cpu with the IPC and power efficiency of a haswell cpu. Drools..... I'm glad I held off on upgrading to haswell now. Broadwell has apparently been pushed back to 2015 with devil's canyon is replacing high end haswell models this summer. And AMD doesn't get carrizo until next year.....great.

[Xtreme2damax]

Well I think the motherboard may be at fault here.. It's a really old Asrock G43Twins-FullHD LGA775 motherboard I had since 2008. The motherboard wasn't a very good board to begin with and I had issues with it from the start and it was a remnant from the days when I first attempted assembling my own system. So that's to say I made some errors back then, using stock cooler with push pins, poor thermal paste application and nearly shorting out the board.

Ever since I build my i7 system I had much disregard to the care of it since I thought I would never need it again but couldn't bring myself to toss it. So it's been sitting out of a box or tossed in a box with other stuff, no cover protecting the cpu pins etc.. until now. When my i7 board died I bought a used Core2Duo E7500 cpu off of Amazon so I would at least have something to access my files and play games with. Since the board was caked with dust and had thermal past on the bracket that holds the cpu in place I used isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs to clean it, let it air dry and finally assembled everything.

So yesterday I was looking at a couple affordable LGA 775 motherboards on Amazon to replace this old board hoping replacing the board will resolve most of the issues I am experiencing. I think my mother went ahead and secretly purchased it for me lol. I was sitting in the chair by her at her and my fathers place browsing for LGA 775 boards at Amazon, she asks me to show her what board I was planning to get and hand her my tablet. She spends a few minutes on the page so I start dozing off since I had zero sleep that night due to having to fix my system that starts experiencing issues if I so much as lightly sneeze near it. Then she hands me back my tablet after she is done. Even if she did order it I'll pay her back for it otherwise I just feel odd accepting gifts outside special occasion and even then feel somewhat odd.

[Anti-Ultimate]

Try cl_forcepreload 1 (Console command)

It loads everything into the RAM at once, so there is no micro stutters during gameplay.

[NaturalViolence]

I doubt the motherboard could be causing it. Motherboards don't impact game performance (except pci-e speed which rarely impacts performance to any significant degree).

[Xtreme2damax]

Well the motherboard is garbage. I had some problems with it back then which have increased now. The board has stability issues and I end up crashing, sometimes plugging in a usb device will kill all usb devices. When I press the reset switch the led on the fan will power off and the fans will spin down like the system is being powered off rather than reset and the connector for the hdd led is dead. The board got shorted out which busted the hdd led but still worked after I fixed what was shorting it. The board supports both DDR2 and DDR3 and doesn't overclock very well, increasing the FSB to past 333 Mhz will cause the board to fail POST, ram likely isn't running at the proper speed.

Everyone on Spuf blames the Cpu for poor performance. It's old, yes I know it isn't the latest and greatest now but it is still well above the recommended requirements for the game that have never been updated. Using fps configs, lowering resolution and graphic detail nor using dxlevel 81 (DirectX 8.1) do anything to improve performance. Setting cpu priority to high for TF2 doesn't work nor does overclocking the processor, some are blaming Nvidia or Valve for poor TF2 perfomance. It would be nice to get some people together and see if performance issues are specific to specific Nvidia hardware and/or drivers but no one has offered. I was wxperiencing frame drops on with my overclocked i7 processor but they weren't severe enough for me to raise an issues, occasionally my framerate would drop slightly under 60 fps from 150 fps - 200 fps.

However performance issues isn't the only reason for wanting to purchase a new board, I am also experiencing stability issues and the board doesn't work like it should due to shorting in the past. Besides normal crashes and blue screens I also experience another peculiar issue where there isn't a blue screen, my display completely loses signal due to crashing forcing me to reboot where Windows then informs me the system crashed. Sometimes when my sister plays Skyrim my display momentarily loses video signal and recovers a minute or two later.

[NaturalViolence]

Xtreme2damax Wrote:Everyone on Spuf blames the Cpu for poor performance. It's old, yes I know it isn't the latest and greatest now but it is still well above the recommended requirements for the game that have never been updated. Using fps configs, lowering resolution and graphic detail nor using dxlevel 81 (DirectX 8.1) do anything to improve performance. Setting cpu priority to high for TF2 doesn't work nor does overclocking the processor, some are blaming Nvidia or Valve for poor TF2 perfomance. It would be nice to get some people together and see if performance issues are specific to specific Nvidia hardware and/or drivers but no one has offered. I was wxperiencing frame drops on with my overclocked i7 processor but they weren't severe enough for me to raise an issues, occasionally my framerate would drop slightly under 60 fps from 150 fps - 200 fps.

Other than you I have yet to encounter a single person with any hardware configuration that has had trouble maintaining >60 fps in tf2.

My graphics card is out of commission right now and I'm doing fine on my Intel HD 4000 IGP. The game runs fine on nvidia, amd, and Intel GPUs. So yeah it's not a driver issue or hardware issue. Same goes for cpus. Old cpus and low end cpus run this game just fine.

[Xtreme2damax]

Any idea what could be the culprit? I have two GTX 460's and experience severe framerate drops with both so it isn't the gpu. Gpu is running as max clock speed when running a game or application so there isn't a power or driver issue downclocking the gpu as you just said it isn't the gpu or driver.. Cpu is overclocked but temperatures are fine across the board, nothing is overheating. Is there any motherboard issue that would cause this? I was thinking maybe there isn't enough bandwidth in the bus between the cpu, ram and gpu or the cpu isn't performing like it should.

TF2 seems to be the only game so far with performance issues. I think other games that rely more on the cpu might have performance issues but even so it shouldn't be to the extent it is in TF2.

[Xtreme2damax]

So additional issues..

- Overclocked cpu to 3.3 Ghz however the cpu falls short and clock maxes out 50 Mhz less than target clock rate at 3.28 Ghz.

- Ram clock speed adjusts with cpu clock speed. In order to run ram at DDR3 1333 (667Mhz) I have to overclock the cpu fsb to at least 333 Mhz.

- Overclocking the fsb past 333 Mhz will overclock the Pci-e bus speed. There is no way to revert this other than downclocking fsb back to 333Mhz or lower as the option greys out.

So when overclocking the cpu the ram and pci-e bus speed are also overclocked, there is no way to overclock each individually. Windows 7 reports the wrong speed for the overclocked cpu in system properties window, Windows 7 is reporting the clock speed at 3.6 Ghz when in fact it's supposed to be 3.3 Ghz. However Cpu-Z reports the same clock speed as the bios which is correct so maybe it's an error on Windows 7's part.