Want to overclock your CPU? Here's some tips to make it stable.

Remember those days when overclocking the CPU was considered dangerous and only a few people would even attempt it, and those people were treated like gods? Not anymore. Anyone can overclock their CPU if the CPU is overclockable and necessary hardware is available. Getting a modest overclock is easy, but if you are trying to squeeze all that extra juice from your CPU, you might need more than just luck.

Overclocking is not dangerous if properly done. Know your limits and obey by those limits. For example, don't insert a lot of volts to the CPU because it will damage the CPU. Keep it within the manufacturer recommended/commonly accepted volts for your particular CPU. Also be wary of the temps of the CPU as well as other components like VRM heat sinks of the motherboard.

Here are some tips.

1) Prepare a separate environment for overclocking if possible. If you have a spare drive lying around, install a free copy of Windows in it and don't install anything else - not even Windows updates or driver updates. Why this is important is because when your OS crashes while stress testing because your overclock is not stable, it can corrupt the files and settings and that alone can give a BSOD when you stress test with different settings the net time. You might think the CPU is unstable, but in reality it could be a corrupted driver or corrupted software that is running in the background.

2) Stress test for a couple of hours at stock settings. This will rule out any issues that might be present in the original hardware. No point trying to overclocking broken hardware. You'll only waste your "precious" time. Running Prime95's blend test should do the trick.

Bought a couple of Silverstone F122 magnetic fan filters

When I bought the Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler few days ago, I ordered a couple of Silverstone F122 magnetic fan filters to cover the two open vents I had in my case. The exhaust at the rear of the case (towards to top) and the intake on the side panel behind the motherboard to cool the hard drives.

I noticed that a lot of dust was trapped on those fan holes. Definitely they were going into the case. I was hoping to make a fan filter from one of wife's torn stockings but it didn't come out the way I liked. So I finally gave in and bought these. They cost me about ¥450 a piece. So, not cheap at all. But it's OK. These don't need replacing ever. 

They came with screws as well, but they simply stick to my case; both places in fact. It doesn't move or anything. Just firmly sits there. 

The following is just a demonstration. Since I don't actually have a fan on the side panel, I have mounted the filter from the inside of the case so it doesn't show to the outside.

When I took one off to take a photo for this post. I noticed that it already had some dust on it. Hence, they seem to be working just as promised. This is definitely not a regrettable purchase. Funny how seldom that happens. 

Choosing a proper graphics card for your gaming PC

The most critical part of a gaming PC is the graphics card. Graphics card prices range up to $1000 but that does not mean you have to save $1000 to get a good gaming experience. As with everything, at the lower scale of the spectrum, you are getting very bad performance (only slightly better than integrated solutions from Intel and AMD) and at the higher scale of the spectrum, you are getting diminishing returns. Midrange is where the sweet spot lies for most people. I said "for most people" because it is not always the truth. Sometimes you have to bend the rules and go for the absolute highest end cards.

AMD vs. NVidia - which one is better?

 

This is a sensitive matter. You cannot go wrong with either brand. Here's a comparison between the two, and I suggest that you match up your requirements with those and see which one suits you best.

Advantages of going with AMD

• Gives better performance for the money you spend. (Might not be true in some parts of the world.
• You get an amazing free games bundle with the card.
• Has less performance drop when Anti-Aliasing is enabled/increased the level as well as resolution is increased.
• All next generation consoles are using AMD GPUs, and the games will probably be more optimized for AMD's GCN architecture. This is just an assumption.
• Usually overclocks a bit better than NVidia cards.
• Has much better general purpose compute performance.

Advantages of going with NVidia

• SLI works much, much better than Crossfire (at least as of now)
• Adaptive V-Sync support
• Ability to overclock the Pixel Refresh Rate of your display (how far your can overclock, depends on your display. I've managed to increase it from 60Hz to 69Hz on my Iiyama 27" display.)
• Has a little bit better power efficiency.
• People believe that NVidia drivers are usually more stable. But both companies put out buggy drivers every now and then.
• GeForce Experience service, which automatically sets the graphics settings in each game for the best gameplay experience. On top of that, you are getting a cool feature called Shadow Play in a few days.

 

The effect of display resolution

 

The resolution that you are going to play games will primarily decide how much of a powerful video card you need. More the pixels it needs to process, faster the GPU needs to be and more the amount of video memory required.

 

Here's a little guideline

 

Situation	NVidia	AMD
1080p budget	GTX650Ti	HD7790
1080p midrange	GTX660	HD7870
1080p high-end	GTX670	HD7950
1080p enthusiast	GTX770	HD7970
1440p high-end	GTX770 4GB	HD7970GHz
1440p enthusiast	GTX780
Triple display 1080p (5760x1080) high-end	GTX770SLI GTX780 Titan
Triple display 1080p (5760x1080) enthusiast	GTX780 SLI (*) Titan SLI

* memory might become a bottleneck

 

Going for faster setups than recommended above will be a waste of money. Of course, once in a while, a game with bad-ass graphics gets released and even the fastest graphics card on the planet would not be able to deliver a constant 60FPS. But basing your choice on such infrequent situations is not a wise thing to do.

If you look at my suggestions, you'll see that I completely dropped the AMD Crossfire option. That is because, as of this moment, there is a problem in the AMD graphics driver which causes micro-stuttering with Crossfire. AMD is rumored to be releasing a new driver that fixes this issue this month or July. But until it is released and the fix is proven to work, I cannot recommend Crossfire. I will update the guide when those results are released.

 

Balance is the key

If you have a low-end CPU and want to couple it with a high-end GPU, that's is going to be a waste. You need both the CPU and the GPU to work together when playing games. Otherwise the faster part will wait for the slower part until it finishes its designated job. In other terms, the faster part will bottlenecked by the slower part. This wastes money because you cannot take the full advantage of the faster part. It'll be sleeping most of the times - literally speaking.

But most games these days are more dependent on horsepower of the graphics card, thus for a gaming PC, the right balance means going with a little bias towards the GPU. However don't forget that you can always get a cheap CPU and overclock it. But this is not applicable to Intel CPUs anymore. Only AMD, because Intel only allows overclocking their high-end, unlocked CPUs. Sucks, I know.

Here's a small guideline. (I'm only talking about CPUs released in 2012 or later.)

• Core i3, FX6000 and below: keep it below GTX660, HD7850
• Core i5, FX8000: keep it below GTX770 SLI. A single Titan or GTX780 is also OK.
• Core i7 (normal): keep it below Titan two-way SLI. Overclocking might be needed if going with two Titans.
• Core i7 (extreme): anything. Tri-SLI and Quad-SLI might need some overclocking.

In all these situations, I would suggest that you overclock the CPU if possible. Overclocking would not damage or harm anything if conservatively and carefully done. Keep the voltages well below the max allowed voltage and be watchful about the temperature.

 

Do I need PCI-E 3.0?

 

Not really. There is almost no loss in performance by using a PCI-E 3.0 graphics card in a PCI-E 2.0 system. It will inadvertently change in the future. It better! But at the moment, there is no need to upgrade your system just for PCI-E 3.0.

 

Click here for some solid benchmarks. You'll see that current cards don't really need the extra bandwidth that PCI-E 3.0 provides over PCI-E 2.0.

 

Conclusion

 

That’s pretty much it folks. Sure, you have to spend a bit more time researching when you are about to buy a new graphics card than anything else. But it doesn’t mean you have to break a bank to a good graphics card. You can get a very good graphics card for around $250. (Indeed I know that the price in the US is not what is charged in rest of the world. Still…)

 

Sometimes all you need to get a good gameplay experience from a not so high-end graphics card is to find the graphics settings which cause the biggest performance hit, and then dropping them a notch or two down. For example, you can drop Anti-Aliasing or Tessellation or high quality geometry or shading quality. Most of the times, you don’t have to drop them all. One or two settings might give you that smooth gaming experience. But you have to do that on your own, or if you have an NVidia graphics card, you can use GeForce Experience.

Yay! My iPhone 4S is snappy again.

When I bought my iPhone 4S almost 20 months ago, I straight away felt how fast it was compared to my old iPhone 3GS. But after a while it became slow. In fact, it got so slow that there have been times that I felt like throwing it out the window or dropping it on the floor and crushing it with my feet. I know, it would only make things worse, thus I controlled myself every time the thought occurred to me.

Things got worse with iOS 6 update. It would work well as soon as I restored or updated the OS, but eventually get slow.

When Evasi0n released the Jailbreak for iOS 6.1, I went ahead with the Jailbreak. I didn't feel that the phone got any slower, but the battery went down the hill. After a few months, I gave up the Jailbreak. But disappointingly, I didn't get better performance nor battery life. I only lost the Jailbreak tweaks that I really loved. At this point, I was using iOS 6.1.3, the latest as of this day.

Then WWDC2013 happened. iOS 7 was introduced and I managed to install the developer preview on my phone without paying for a developer account. (Click here to find out how to do it.) But it ran so horribly slow on my phone. Restarting fixed it for a certain degree, but it was slow - much slower than the slowness I talked about at the top of this post. People with iPhone 5's were not feeling the slowness. Sure, the iPhone 5 is twice as fast as mine, but if people didn't feel the slowness, that's either because it is not slow, or because people are numb. I wanted to believe it was the former. So what I did was, I cleared out all the junk from the phone.
・I had all 1000 pics from Photo streams and disconnected it from the phone.
・I removed all the photos there were in the camera roll.
That's all really. I had already removed the unnecessary apps and I only had the apps that I frequently used.

But it didn't get any faster. Not only that, it was crashing few of the apps that I really needed. One of them was the Pocasts app. Commuting without the Podcast app would be a nightmare. So I wanted to go back to iOS 6.

But I made a mistake this time. I could not restore the backup via iTunes, because the last backup was done from iOS 7 and it was incompatible with iOS 6's backup format. Yes, I believe the older backups were still there in the PC and I could have chosen one of them instead. I only remembered that the next day. But I do not regret what happened. I had to start over from the scratch, BUT for some reason, the phone is very snappy now. I think it was the junk that was in the backup that was causing the lag. I had all the SMS history and call history and the settings of apps that I don't use anymore all copied back to the phone. That junk must have been the cause of the slowness. I have been using the phone for 3 days and there isn't the slightest hint of it running slow. Sure, it is not iPhone 5, but I don't feel that it is laggy anymore. I'm pretty sure that it is not my mind playing tricks.

So what I am going to do from here onwards is, I'm going to keep my the call history clean, SMS history clean (only keep the ones that I want to keep, and delete the rest), sync only 50 emails, clean up the camera roll every day when I get back home and not connect to photo streams. Basically, I'm gonna keep the phone as clean as I can. I'm sure it will become an obsession eventually, but at least I will have a fast phone.

Is it worth upgrading to Haswell from IvyBridge or Sandybridge?

The official Haswell reviews came out at the beginning of this month (June, 2013) and they proved that the information that was leaked few weeks ago is completely accurate. Haswell is only having a single digit (percent) performance advantage over IvyBridge and they get very hot when overclocked. It seems you need a lot of luck and cooling power to even hit 4.4GHz. However, what you have to do to overclock the Haswell CPU should be quite simple.

Those new z87 motherboards are so delicious though. You get 6 SATA-III ports, 6 USB3.0 ports, PCI-E 3.0, integrated Wireless 802.11ac (certain models), much better integrated audio (certain models) and nice looks overall. Some people would even upgrade to Haswell for this alone. 

Check this HARDOCP article to see how Sandybridge, IvyBridge and Haswell all stand against each other when overclocked to 4.5GHz. This article also mentions all the pitfalls of overclocking Haswell. It's a good read. You should read it if you are planning to get a Haswell CPU and want to overclock it.

BTW, if you are planning to get a non-K CPU hoping that it would allow you to overclock at least a few hundred MHz, you would be disappointed. Only K-editions are overclockable. Others will be stuck to their stock Turbo Boost algorithm. You can try increasing the BCLK, but it won't get your much farther. 

On top of that, you don't get VT-d and TSX instructions support on the K-editions. They are only available on non-K editions. Intel is messing with the Overclocking community it seems. It clearly shows that they don't want use to overclock, because it handicaps their sales because people might not upgrade if their current CPU overclocks pretty well and is faster than the new CPUs. (This seems to be the case with a lot of SB and IB users against Haswell)

I evaluated a bit where the economics stand. I would obviously sell my existing CPU and motherboard if I upgrade to Haswell. According to the current second hand prices, I would only get like ¥22,000 for both of them. I might even add my Creative X-Fi Titanium audio card to that so I might get like ¥24,000 (because integrated audio on these boards is so good). But the Core i7 4770K alone costs little more than ¥35,000 and then add another ¥20,000 for a good motherboard. (It's the massive price you have to pay for getting stuff at launch here in Japan. Prices will drop few thousands in the coming months.) That's about ¥30,000 extra for almost no performance increase (well 15% best case increase isn't a lot). I must be insane to go ahead with the upgrade. 

Thus, my upgrade plans are officially done. I'm keeping my trusty Sandybridge. But being the geek I am, I won't stop there and give up. There are newer CPUs coming in few months, from both Intel and AMD. Hopefully I will be able to upgrade to one of them.