The possibility of upgrading my PC to a Haswell-E setup

Couple of days ago I posted on Facebook how I chickened out from delidding my Devil's Canyon chip. A friend told me that it would be beneficial for me to upgrade to Haswell-E instead. Haswell-E die is soldered to the IHS so it shouldn't run at a temperature as high as Devil's Canyon. And I get at least two more cores to play with.

There is a huge barrier for entry due to price

I checked the prices of the Core i7 5820K (because the 5930K is useless and the 5960X is out of reach), ASRock X99E-ITX/ac Mini-ITX motherboard (the only X99 Mini-ITX board out there) and 16GB of DDR4 2666 sticks.

• CPU: ~ JPY 50,000
• Motherboard: ~ JPY 37,000
• RAM: ~ JPY 18,000

That would total out to around JPY 105,000. Expensive, but that’s what you have to pay for cutting edge. But it all depends on how much I can make from selling my existing stuff.

I checked the offers on Sofmap store and  it was disappointing.  Very disappointing. I would only receive around JPY 50,000 in total for my Core i7 4790K CPU, Asus Z97i-Plus board and A-DATA DDR3-2400 16GB memory. That’s an insanely low amount. No way I am going to sell my stuff to these shops.

However, shops aren’t the only place I can sell them. I can auction them online. However, since these are all used parts, I bet I won’t be able to extend this to JPY 70,000 mark. JPY 60,000 is possible, but it will take a long time because I have three components to sell. And if I sell at least one of them, I would have passed the point of no return.

Had to stress test the 4790K after a long time

The last time I stress test day CPU was when I had the Maximus VII Gene board and the Noctua NH-U12S cooler. And it was with a low ambient temperature as well.

Fast forward to July of 2015 and we have a lot of changes. New case, meaning new motherboard and a new cooler. And Jul means, it's the summer. Sure, we have the A/C on, but the temps are around 26-27C, which is a couple of degrees higher than the previous months.

Wouldn't I have stress tested after all those hardware changes? I should have, but I didn't think it was necessary. For one, the stability of the overclock of Intel CPUs these days don't seem to be affected by the temperature. So the cooler or the lack of airflow inside the case shouldn't have made a difference. Then, Asus says that all of their Z97 Motherboards overclock exactly the same; only the feature set is different. More importantly, I didn't have the time to go through it again.

But yesterday, while I was transcoding a HD video in Handbrake, I got a BSODs. The dreaded "WHEA UNCORRECTABLE ERROR" error.

So the overclock wasn't stable after all. It was time for me to stability test the CPU. At least this time I had a starting point.

“4.5GHz @ 1.21V Vcore with everything else set to default”

That was where the CPU was at up until now.

But first, I wanted to make sure a stress testing tool would find the current overclock settings as unstable. I am not a fan of synthetic stress testing tools such as Prime 95 or AIDA64. Instead, I turned to Asus Realbench, which can be downloaded from here.

My first Mini-ITX motherboard is here

So, someone finally wanted to grab my Asus Maximus VII Gene motherboard and I decided to purchase the Asus Z97i Plus Mini-ITX board. The reason for getting a Mini-ITX motherboard was to make my already small gaming rig even smaller. Well, not just smaller, but lighter too. One might think I am insane, but I have my reasons for doing so which I am not willing to disclose just yet.

Sure, features wise it is sort of a downgrade. The old board had support for dual graphics cards, 4 DIMM slots, a much better audio solution (at least on paper) and better overclocking capabilities (again, on paper). Unfortunately, I am not willing to put a second graphics card or upgrade the memory beyond 16GB. My Core i7 4790K doesn't overclock high enough to warrant a better overclocking motherboard. It only does 4.5GHz without exquisite cooling which would be an easy feat for any Z97 board available. The only thing I would miss would be the audio chip. But I doubt that I would have any issues adjusting myself to the one on the Z97I-Plus board. I will probably feel that it sounds different, but not worse.

On the other hand, the Z97I offers some important features too. In-built Wireless 802.11AC and Bluetooth 4.0 support is one. Better CPU socket placement with respect to the first PCI-E slot is another, although this would only be useful to people who want to install a large CPU cooler. It doesn't apply to me because I'm most probably going to end up with an AIO closed loop water cooling unit.

OMG somebody bid for my Maximus VII Gene board on Rakuten

After writing this post, I headed to Rakuten Auctions website and listed my Asus ROG Maximus VII Gene motherboard. After a few days, I got a message from someone asking me if I had the original receipt with me and whether there was an agent in the country who would handle the warranty related stuff. I had to look up about the latter. There was a Techwind sticker on the box and that confirmed it. Techwind was the official agent for this board who would be handling the RMAs. (It was just like when returned the Corsair SP 2200 speakers due to crackling. You can check out that article here. )

The starting price I set for the board was quite high. JPY 20,000. I did not expect anyone to bid for that amount. I only paid JPY 3,000 more when I bought it. However the current selling price of the board is JPY 26,800 due to devaluation of Japanese Yen. And he eventually placed a bid. Since nobody competed against him for the board, the final bid was same as the starting bid.

The guy paid for the board and I have to send it before 6th of June. In the mean time, it was time for me to look for a replacement. I love searching for new stuff to buy.

The board comparable to the one I was replacing was the Asus ROG Maximus VII Impact. But it was quite expensive at around JPY 26,000. There were few more options too. The Asus Z97I-Plus, the Gigabyte Z97N Gaming 5 and the MSI Z97I Gaming ACK. Indeed, my options were limited.

• The Asus Z97I-Plus was the cheapest, priced at less than JPY 18,000 but it had one issue. The audio chip was the "old" Realtek ALC 892 chip. At least now there were better components such as audio grade caps to complement it, compared to the old Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 board I bought as soon as I arrived in Japan.

• The Gigabyte Z97N board was about JPY 2,000 more and it lacked a M.2 port. Although I don't current own a M.2 SSD, I might have to buy one in the future because if everything goes according to plan, I would not have enough space inside the case for lots of drives. 

• The issue with the MSI board was its price. It was same price as the Impact and in that case the Impact would be the better option for the sheer amount of features it offered.