Controlling the CPU fan speed without AI Suite on Maximus VI Hero

I had been using the Asus AI Suite from the very first day I bought the Maximus VI Hero motherboard. I used the fan controlling feature of it but wasn’t really happy that I couldn’t limit the maximum fan speed to a value that I liked.

Two things happened recently.

1. I sold the Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler and went back to the old Antec Kuhler 620 with a Scythe Gentle Typhoon AP-29 fan cooling the radiator
2. I decided to shred the bloat-ware off the PC to maintain the system responsiveness

The Gentle Typhoon fan came with a molex cable for powering itself up. I cut the cable and attached a 3-pin header to control the fan speed using the fan controller. Back then I had a hardware fan controller also made by Scythe. After I installed the cooler recently, I used AI Suite to control the fan speed. AI Suite was too aggressive with it’s sensitivity which made the noise vary rapidly depending on the CPU load. That was really irritating.

[Rant] Downgrade bios to improve stability on the Maximus VI Hero motherboard?

Asus has been quite busy releasing new bios updates in the last month or so. They are getting ready to welcome the "new" (*laugh*) Haswell Refresh CPUs. Intel is releasing a new chipset as well, namely the 9-series but board manufacturers are updating their boards with 8-series chipsets to support Haswell Refresh. We shouldn't need a separate chipset for the exactly same CPU architecture. Heck, we shouldn't need. A new chipset for Broadwell either. It is still going to be same as Haswell, with a die shrink.

Let's not get carried away now.

So in the last couple of months I saw about 3 firmware versions come out for my board from Asus. In addition to saying that these bring support for the newer CPUs, Asus has been putting the same string of "improve system stability" with each of them. So I updated each time hoping that it would improve the overclock of my 4770K. Sadly, it's done nothing like that. However, I didn't notice any instabilities either.

[Rant] Another bios update for the Asus Maximum VI Hero

No more than an hour ago I posted that I updated my motherboard’s bios to version 1002. And now, there is another updated bios available – version 1102. Without hesitation, I updated the board’s bios to version 1102.

I don’t know why nobody posts a detailed change log with these BIOS updates anymore. All they say is “improve system stability” or something as such. At least tell us how it would improve system stability. Dumb! Why is Asus acting like a tier 3 motherboard maker? And this is Asus’s top of the line motherboard series - the Maximus VI!!!

This time though, it didn’t need to update the iROG thingy. After flashing the bios, it had to go through 5 rounds of power up and power down cycles before it came back to life. Nothing has changed from the last time. I wonder why this is happening. Is it by design? Or is there something wrong with this particular board? I hope it is the former. I hate RMAing. I hate to see a dying motherboard, although the chances are that I would get a board with the newer revision – where they fixed the USB 3.0 bug. This board has the issue although I haven’t come across it yet as I don’t use USB hard drives and I hardly use Sleep.

Anyways, just like the previous 1002 bios, if I enabled EPU power saving, it would fix the CPU Vcore at 1V and I would get a BSOD. Either they broke it with this firmware, or maybe they want us to disable it so that the PC becomes more stable when overclocked. I had to disable it just like with the 1002.

And one more thing. I tried if these newer firmware would help me overclock the CPU more. No, the board has hardly anything to do with overclocking Haswell CPUs. It’s all about the CPU. If the CPU can go much higher, even an entry level motherboard would be able to get it there. The board has very little to do with overclocking Haswell CPUs. SADNESS!

[Rant] Got a BSOD in months!!!

A few months back, BSODs were a normal thing with my new rig. That was because I was trying to overclock my Haswell Core i7 4770K CPU. I spent a whole month trying to get it to 4.4GHz and finally I gave up and moved on. Now I'm a happily sailing away with a Clock speed of 4.3GHz.

A few days ago I noticed that there was a new BIOS (1002) for the motherboard (Asus Maximus VI Hero) and last night I wanted to try it out. Actually, I skipped the previous one as well. I wasn't going to see if it would overclock better than it used to. I just wanted to update for the sake of updating it.

First of all, I took screenshots of all the BIOS pages because updating would erase all of that. That's a dumb move on Asus's end, right? You can save it to a USB drive as a profile but sometimes when they version the BIOS up, the profiles won't be recognized anymore. Again, quite a dumb thing.

Anyways, just to be safe, I took photos of the bios pages. I could have saved them on to USB drive as screenshots using the shortcut key but that would mean I would have to use the tablet to view all those images. I didn't feel like using the tablet at that time so I just took photos from the phone.

Then it was the time to update the bios. I copied the bios file to the USB flash drive and went into the BIOS. I used the EZ Flash utility inside the BIOS to open the bios file and it took over the rest of it.

After flashing the new bios, it rebooted the PC. Before successfully rebooting, it had to go through 5 POSTs. The PC powers up, the after a couple do seconds it powers down - and this went on for 5 cycles. Man, I hate when that happens. You don't know if something went wrong or not. Anyways, it finally managed to POST and then another screen showed up saying that it is updating iROG... whatever nonsense that means. It took about a minute to complete.

After that it rebooted automatically and I went into the bios straight away and changed the settings back to where they were before. Everything seemed fine so I rebooted to Windows. Except, it didn't work as I expected. It gave me a BSOD just before trying to log into the desktop. Weird, I thought.

[Article] I give up. Have to settle at 4.3GHz with my 4770K.

In a previous post I mentioned that I was able to clock my new Haswell Core i7 4770K chip to 4.3GHz and I was planning to clock it to 4.4GHz. After trying for a week or so, I couldn't get it Prime stable at 4.4GHz below 1.3V Vcore. My CPU is a dog. It doesn't overclock well at all. In fact, it is a well below average chip. That's sad. I lost the silicon lottery.

But it is not the end. There is a few more tweaks I can do. For example, right now the RAM is at 1600MHz with XMP timings (9/9/9/24/2T/1.5V etc.) and cache ratio is at 39x with 1.075V. I think I can tweak the timings a bit and increase the cache ratio to 41x or so. 43x is ideal but will be a long shot  I guess. I would definitely have to increase the Un-core voltage to somewhere around 1.2V to get near 4.1GHz. But that doesn't add a lot of power so I should be alright. Maybe I could tweak the voltages a bit. Perhaps lower the CPU input voltage to cut the temps by a degree or two. I could even play with the BCLK as well. Perhaps put it to 105MHz with the multiplier dropped to 41x? That might improve the performance slightly. Something is better than nothing, right? 

Anyways, I am really disappointed with my CPU. There are people who have chips than can clock to 4.9GHz with just 1.25V. I have a great motherboard - a motherboard made for overclocking. But me not being able to get higher than 4.3GHz overclock is not the board's fault. It's the CPU alone. I probably can get by with 4.4GHz at something like 1.29V and be stable in real-world work loads. (Heck, I played Crysis 3 campaign from beginning to end with just 1.28V and didn't encounter a single crash). But in my head I know that it is not 100% stable and it might crash when I least expect it to. That is not something I can live with. Hey, it's just 100MHz which is even less than 2.5%.

One thing I should tell is that it was almost always the in-place Large FFT test that crashed when I tested for stability at 4.4GHz. Playing with the voltages other than the Vcore didn't made it more stable. It just needed more Vcore. When I kept on increasing the Vcore, the duration until Prime95 crashed lengthened, which means it was Vcore starved. 1.3V is a lot of volts for Haswell, no thanks to Intel cheaping out under the hood. Bastards!

Funny thing was that I could run 10 passes of Intel Burn Test at very high memory usage at 4.5GHz with just 1.280V Vcore. Intel Burn Test might be an indication of stability, but it is way inferior to Prime95, even though the temps while running Intel Burn Test is much higher than when running Prime95.

Here's are my current settings for 4.3GHz.

• Vcore: 1.235V manually set in BIOS (1.248V max recorded in AISuite III)
• Un-core multiplier: x39 (AUTO)
• Un-core voltage: 1.075V manually set
• RAM speed: 1600MHz
• RAM timings: 9/9/9/24/2T
• RAM voltage: 1.50V
• Extreme Tweaking: Disabled
• EPU Power Saving Mode: Disabled
• Everything else: AUTO

Now, I haven't run adequate stress tests. I will do that after tweaking the un-core and the memory timings a bit.

[Article] Overclocking my 4770K – breaking 4.3GHz

You must be wondering why I want to overclock a super fast CPU like the 4770K. Fun, man, fun! No other reason. All the chips that I have had so far, maybe not my Core i5 750 which clocked +50% at stock volts, have been poor to average clockers. My previous 2600K CPU needed about 1.34-1.36V for 4.5GHz.

Unfortunately, my 4770K chip doesn’t break that spree. When it comes to Haswell, there is a simply criteria for checking whether the CPU is a good one or a bad one. If you can boot to Windows with 4.6GHz with just 1.2V, then you have a very good CPU. If you can do that with 1.25V, still your chip is above average. So the first thing I did was to set 4.6GHz and 1.2V in BIOS and check if it can boot into Windows. Nope, it couldn’t. I was greeted with a BSOD just before Lock Screen. I checked 1.25V. Still no go. Dreams shattered!

So I set 4.2GHz and 1.2V and slowly went up. With a lot of testing, I found out that 4.3GHz at 1.24V was stable enough for my liking. This is not the end of everything as I had to lower the cache ratio to 35x and memory clock to 1333MHz SPD. That sucks, but none of them can match the benefits of a 100MHz overclock on the core. Besides, you can increase them later and find the sweet spot. Right now I am only concerned about core clock. 4.5GHz is my ultimate goal, but from the way things are going, I might not be able to get there without a de-lid.

To summarize, here are my 4.3GHz stable settings.

• Vcore: 1.240V manual
• Uncore multiplier: x35 (min = max = 35)
• Uncore voltage: AUTO (1.05V)
• RAM speed: 1333MHz
• RAM timings: 9/9/9/24/2T
• RAM voltage: 1.50V
• Extreme Tweaking: Disabled
• EPU Power Saving Mode: Disabled
• Everything else: AUTO

With the above settings, I managed to pass

• Prime 95 v27.9 blend test for 6Hrs
• Handbrake H.264 encoding for 2.5Hrs
• Crysis 3 Multiplayer gaming for 2Hrs
• AIDA64 stress test for 1Hr.

That’s stable enough for me. I don’t want to run Intel Burn Test or anything because if it passes Prime95, that’s all I need. The others are just for insurance.

Right now I’m testing 4.4GHz. I had to bump the Vcore to 1.28V. It passed AIDA64 for 2.5hrs. I’ve been running H.264 encoding for almost 2hrs. I haven’t been able to run Prime95. For some reason, when I ran it, the core clocks were fluctuating between 4.2GHz and 4.4GHz. I couldn’t understand why that was. Maybe some software glitch. I will check it after I finish with the H.264 encode. Maybe a simple reboot with fix it.

Hope it will be stable after I fix Prime95 issue. Wish me luck.

[Article] From a dedicated fan controller to Asus Fan Xpert 2

One of the reasons why I chose an Asus motherboard was because their so called exquisite fan control software. They call it Fan Xpert 2.

I had a nice looking fan controller installed in my case. It was a Scythe Kaze Master Ace, 6-channel fan controller. It had three issues.

• No automatic fan controlling depending on the temperature. I like to run the fans at low RPM, but there have been times where the graphics card had been scorched because of this.
• The cable mess. Since it is 6-channels, there are 6 cables for temperature sensors, 6 cables for fans and 1 cable for Molex power. As I have a non-modular PSU, there is already a huge cable mess behind the motherboard. I surely didn't want more cables. And these cables are so ugly. Red and white. These issues were not new, but I had to give in because fan speed controlling on my old board was utter crap.
• The PWM fans on my Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler had a hard time starting up. Since I am sensitive to noise, I keep the fans running at 1100RPM. Since the fan controller only supports voltage based controlling, that voltage is not enough to start them. Once started, they can work without issues. So when the fans don't spin up, an alarm goes off and it is really irritating. I can disable it, but then I don't know if something happened.

I could buy a new fan controller, or I could buy a motherboard that came with one. Fan Xpert 2 seemed to do just that. All Asus Z87 boards support it actually. The only difference is the number of headers each board have onboard. My Maximus VI Hero board comes with 5. Sadly, the Z87 Pro comes with 6. But I had to get the Hero because of its audio.

[Article] Moving from Creative X-Fi Titanium to onboard SupremeFX audio

Before the X-Fi Titanium card, I had a X-Fi XtremeGamer card. It was a second hand card that I bought from Ebay. The hardware was fine, but the drivers gave me so much trouble. So I sold it used onboard Realtek ALC892 audio on my old board for a while.

But then I bought a Roccat Kave 5.1 headset and I wanted to get a decent audio card to suit it. Of course I could continue to use the onboard audio. But I thought it was underperforming because of the Realtek chip. But I made the mistake of going with another X-Fi card. Again, second hand, but this time it was the Titanium edition. But there were PAX drivers available, so I thought things would turn out better than last time. It actually did, but there were still some minor hiccups. Few times the audio completely stopped working, and reinstalling the drivers fixed it. And one day this happened as well.

Then there was another issue. I bought a SilverArrow SB-E Extreme air cooler. I had my audio card set up in the top most PCI-E x1 slot so that the video card would have all the breathing room. But with this cooler, the top most PCI-E slot became unusable. For the time being, I moved it to the bottom most slots. It's a PCI-E x16 slot but running at x4 speeds. By moving it to the left of the video card (remember, the cards are installed vertically in the Raven RV-03, so on other cases it would be below the video card. The intake fan would be on the bottom where as in the Raven RV-03, it is on the back.) It's the summer these days, and I need to give all the cool air I can to do video card. The audio card was in the way of the airflow.

So when I decided that I was going to upgrade to Haswell, I knew that had to look for a board that either allowed me to install a audio card in the top most PCI-E x1 slot or came with pretty good integrated audio. But I soon found out that it would be impossible to find a motherboard that doesn’t get the top most PCI-E x1 slot blocked by the cooler. Thus I decided that I had to buy a motherboard with great audio. Not just what the manufacturers advertise as great (ASRock and MSI audio seems bad, although advertise them as being great.) The board that was within my range with the best audio was the Asus ROG Maximus VI Hero. And I went with it.

[Article] Upgraded the rig. Haswell it is.

So, I moved to Haswell after all the bad things I said about it. This was the primary reason, but I wanted to try out something new as well. Right now I'm trying to find the best overclocked settings for the CPU and it is hard work.

I only bought the CPU and the motherboard, but I made some other changes as well. Replacing the X-Fi Titanium with onboard SupremeFX audio and removing the fan controller are the two main things.

To the newest specs then.

CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K @4.4GHz / 1.280V in BIOS (still testing)
CPU Cooler: Thermalright SilverArrow SB-E Extreme
Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus VI Hero
RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 9/9/9/24/1T/1.35V
Video Card: Palit GTX670 JetStream @1056MHz (base clock)/6800MHz RAM
SSD: Samsung 840 series 250GB
HDDs: Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB, Western Digital Caviar Green WD30EZRX-00DC0B0 3TB
Display: Iiyama Prolite E2773HDS
Case:  Silverstone Raven RV-03
PSU: Corsair TX850
Mouse: Logicool G500
Mouse Pad: Steelseries QCK / Razer Sphex
Keyboard: Logitech G15 V2
Headset: Roccat Kave 5.1
Speakers: Logicool Z623
Webcam: Logicool C910

Still there is a lot of things to check with the new setup. I've been trying to get my overclock stable. Currently trying 4.4GHz. The temps go up ridiculously when you stress test with Haswell CPUs, and I have to use a different method to stress test. So it is taking a bit longer.

Cheers.