Railworks America

I got board a couple nights ago and decided to play with my MSI mobo's Overclock Genie.
First off it worked like a charm. I got a nifty, stable 4.2 ghz automatically. It also upped my RAM speed to 1600 with no problem.
It smoothed out asset heavy routes some, but not a lot.
I didn't get any temps on the board or CPU over 70c. That was good, since I'm not using water. I'm using some version of the Cooler Master 212 air cooler.

The only strangeness that occurred, was that my GTX 780 went from running between 60 and 65C. It jumped to about 71C under extended load (over a half hour)
Now that GPU temp is perfectly acceptable, but it made me wonder why it got warmer. The case is well ventilated, and the GPU draws it's air from the bottom of the case, not to close to the CPU cooler. There was a barely perceptible increase in the air temp exiting the case.
Also the Overclock Genie has nothing to do with the GPU.... Unless it upped the PCIe voltage...

The only real thing that bothered me, was that the CPU runs full tilt at 4.2 ghz. I'm thinking about playing with the turbo boost multiplier to get a higher Turbo Boost to 4 gig, without it being overclocked at all times. I read somewhere that, can be done. However, I haven't found a Turbo Boost multiplier in the BIOS yet.

I wouldn't think the PCIe voltage got increased, but maybe the buss speed did. That would effectively overclock the video card and make it run hotter. You can keep an eye on the card with MSI Afterburner; clock speeds, voltages; compare with no CPU O/C, and with O/C. You can also turn up the card's fan speed.

My Phenom II 970 runs stock a little over 3.5Ghz, which is fine, since most of the time it's running all four cores at 100% (Folding @ Home). I'm already pushing it pretty hard compared to most folks, so no overclocking for me. Cooler Master Hyper 212, the early version, gives me 54c. GTX670 stock speeds, fan at 80%, running Folding, 100% card usage, about 60c. (yes, I do have to pause Folding to play video games, but I can do Internet, You Tube, even Net Flix or a DVD with Folding still running)

I use EVGA Precision with Riva Tuner to monitor my in game temps, fan speed etc.

He he he he, MSI Afterburner is a customized Riva Tuner. And I don't care for Precision. Just MHO.

arizonachris wrote:He he he he, MSI Afterburner is a customized Riva Tuner. And I don't care for Precision. Just MHO.

I don't know when you last tried Precision, but it's vastly improved. Main problem being a lack of instructions.

Eric
As I understand it - the Turbo Boost has to be disabled when you overclock other wise you can get some strange results.
I overclock both an i7 2600K (1600Mhz RAM) and an i5 4670K (2400 mHz RAM)at 4.2 GHz both on auto voltages etc and both with water cooling they run around 15 deg C above ambient (30 deg C at present). Using MSI OC genie takes out the guessing and works well.
I have oc'd the Haswell rig to 4.8Ghz (stable manual voltages) but the performance gains were not significant and the temperature rose about 15 deg C even with water cooling.

When I overclock I see a significant cpu usage DROP and in most routes this is well below 15%. I use software called process lasso which for me evens out core usage to a large extent.

IMHO no point in in overclocking a gpu for TS2014 - the law of diminishing returns - heat gain, very little if any gain in performance. Even a GTX650 is about 4/5x faster than the fastest overclocked cpu and high speed RAM and so if the code is passed seamlessly to the gpu for display - you don't need to overclock. However if this is not the case the problem is latency, in that any card overclocked or not has around 4 - 5 x the latency of the cpu/RAM. Cure the latency and we would be there.

I postulate that if you get your cpu to run cooler then the performance lift will be better than any gpu overclock.
Regards
pH

Well Peter.
My CPU even with air cooling is only reaching about 70C and that's still way below the allowed 100C plus.
There isn't any appreciable noise from the CPU cooler or system fans either, but the GPU fans are the source, along with the higher GPU temps that accompanied the overclocking of the CPU.
I want to make sure people understand. I didn't overclock the GPU. That's why I'm stumped as to why the GPU fan speed and temps went up with a CPU overclock.
Unless the GPU is starved for data and the CPU overclock is allowing the GPU to work harder?

Many many experts said I shouldn't have had to overclock a i5 3570k to feed the GTX 780, but now this man is wondering if the GPU was starved for info.

When I'm not gaming, my rig cools within a minute and gets quiet again, so the overclock isn't a problem as far as noise goes.

What I had read "somewhere" is that someone had left the core at stock settings, but ingeniously ramped up the Turbo Boost feature to something like 4.5 gig, so their gaming rig was cooler and quieter like a stock setup under most circumstances, but ramped up with speed stepping when under a heavy load.
Supposed to be the best of both worlds.

Eric
I see now - yes you are throttling the gpu - you have high cpu usage because the gpu is demanding data faster than the cpu may be able to deliver - so the cpu usage goes up as it tries to deliver more and more data.
It would be interesting to underclock the gpu and see if that makes a difference?
The other way would be to try disabling 2 cpu cores and push up the cpu overclock - getting a higher overclock with lower temps and voltages.
There are articles on overclocking SB/IB/Haswell and running turbo boost at the same time - I didn't think that was possible but I'm obviously wrong! I still can't see how it would work - you would have to oc the turbo boost as all the voltages would be out if set manually at the non-turbo settings? But if the voltages are set higher for the turbo when the load drops the voltages will stay the same and could be too high for the non-turbo cpu speed??
I would not attempt it on stock air cooling!
This is one for IB: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/co ... ew,11.html
Good Luck
pH

Hi Peter.
Yes, sorry, there was a typo in my OP that I have now corrected. I just realized I had a brain fart and referred to my GPU as being "overclocked" when it was not.

I looked in my OC settings in my BIOS and there are customizable settings to fine tune the Overclock Genie. One of them involves something to do with Turbo Boost, but they didn't call it that.

Right now I'm back at stock, except I'm trying a trick a developer friend taught me. I set the minimum CPU state in the power plan to 50% so there wasn't as much of a delay from the power steps. It did indeed make opening apps snappier. I haven't tried Railworks yet, and I can set the minimum as high as 100%, which would still be better than running at 4.2gig all the time.
This friend of mine said the power stepping can help battery life on a netbook or laptop immensely, but can cause hangups and strange little things to happen under heavy loads.

Anyways it's fun to tinker.

Ericmopar wrote:Anyways it's fun to tinker.

Yeah, until you let "The Magic Smoke" out of your PC.

arizonachris wrote:

Ericmopar wrote:Anyways it's fun to tinker.

Yeah, until you let "The Magic Smoke" out of your PC.

Well, isn't that the mantra? "Tune for maximum smoke"?

Eric
It sound like you are on the right track.
pH

Well now.
I'm experimenting with a core multiplier that gives me a steady 3.8 GHz and a turbo boost of 4 gig even. The benefits without the heat. Hmmmm

arizonachris wrote:

Ericmopar wrote:Anyways it's fun to tinker.

Yeah, until you let "The Magic Smoke" out of your PC.

If that happens, I hope a beautiful Genie appears.

It's an old joke (which I kinda messed up in the delivery) about, "When a PC is made, there is magic smoke built inside that makes the PC work. When you screw something up by messing with the PC, the magic smoke gets out, and the PC dies". Or sumthin' like dat.