A while ago I mentioned delidding my i7-4790k, and recently (3 weeks ago), I went ahead with it. I've used the CPU for close to 4 years at stock speed and wanted more performance in games such as beam and arma, so I started tinkering with it. Very soon I hit a thermal wall, as I couldn't get to 4.7 GHz without almost hitting the throttle point of 100C in OCCT stress test. Since I wanted more out of it, I bought a better cooler and liquid metal with intents on delidding. The method: Process: Pressing a delicate piece of hardware was scary. I felt like the PCB was going to give and snap before the sealant. Eventually, the seal came loose, which revealed the toothpaste inside. Most of it had spread to the PCB, and a piddly coating remained on the die. I recommend using a vice with smooth jaws. Mine had rough-type jaws, which caused a small dent to the heat spreader, that had to be filed down. I scraped the silicone off and cleaned the whole thing before applying liquid metal. When I finished, I didn't reseal the CPU. Additionally, I used liquid metal only inside the CPU and regular thermal paste for the cooler. opened and partly cleaned Temperatures: Measured with OCCT stress test. The voltage was at ~1.27 Volts. In the post delid measurements, clocks were accidentally 100 MHz higher and voltage 0.005V higher. 1. Undelidded, Old cooler, 4.5GHz@1.270V: In 5 minutes, temperature averaged at ~85C with a ~96C peak. The program stopped after reaching the temperature limit at 5 minutes. 2. Undelidded, New cooler, 4.5GHz@1.270V: In 9 minutes, temperature averaged at ~74C with ~81C peaks. 3. Delidded, New cooler, 4.6GHz@1.275V: In 9 minutes, temperature averaged at ~64C with ~71C peaks. However, the clocks and volts were slightly higher than before. Overall I'm happy with the result. The improvement wasn't the highest I've ever seen, but the experience was fun by itself. Right now, I'm running at 4.7 GHz at 1.32 Volts. I want to go higher as I have tons of thermal headroom, but it requires high voltages. Opinions? EDIT: corrected 2nd temp. image
10°C is a pretty amazing improvement. Now I don't know if going any higher than this voltage will be good for the CPU as most people don't go above 1.3V on these (1.35 seems to be very much possible though) but I mean at this point you've risked its life for your experiments more than once. If you're going to follow this up I'd love to hear all about it.
The biggest noticeable change in daily usage is the noise. The CPU cooler rarely needs to ramp up in games and most usage scenarios, but that means the GPU and HDD stand out. I've also overclocked the northbridge and sped up memory from 1600 to 2133 MHz with acceptable timings. It worked surprisingly well, considering half of the sticks are Kingston's and other half Crucial's Benchmark dump: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/14093147 https://www.3dmark.com/fs/18013923 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/32744589?
By the way, do you have a cooler on that SSD? It's purely a gimmick for most uses, but I have an Icybox heatsink on mine, plus a slim copper heatsink on the underside and more conductive thermal pads for contact. Instead of thermal throttling at 82°C within two miuntes of full tilt it's impossible for it to get within 15° of that.
Kinda silly how little improvements there has been to CPUs, when old 4th gen with overclock still beats most current CPUs in single core performance and is perfectly enough fast on multicore performance. Sure overclocked modern CPU is faster, but upgrading would offer still quite little practical performance to such overclocked system. Your overclocked 4790K is faster in single and multicore than my 6700 or most 6700K CPUs, of course idle power consumption is less, mine is 38-43W it goes up and down constantly, but it includes gtx1080 too, so quiet part is improved or at least was up to 6th gen, I think 8th gen is bit noisier again as 6 cores produce heat quite a bit more and 9th gen again adds cores. I think that power to noise ratio is best in 6th and 7th gen Intel's, not sure how well 3rd gen Ryzen does in that, but it might take a while to have something enough good to upgrade from such fast 4790K
Haven't got one. I saw the temps get high but i should investigate it more. Yeah I've been following the CPU releases in recent years and wasn't too impressed with some of the offerings. It wouldn't be nearly as noticeable to move to for example a 9900k, compared to my previous upgrade (partly because i used to have an older AMD). For that reason I decided to OC instead, getting new life out of the system. I do like the trend of increased core counts that AMD started. I'm very excited about the Ryzen 3000, but I'll have to wait and see. The 4790k is indeed quick and should be able to serve me well for a couple more years. It's also funny in userbenchmark, how much a fast SSD will increase your score. Here's an old run without OC https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/14093147
Cool the controller chip and NOT the NAND chips on it. NAND likes to write when it's warm, it requires less voltage when warm to change voltage states, so it lasts longer. The controller is what will throttle when you get it too hot. This is common on m.2 NVME drives and not common on Sata 2.5 drives as they normally have integrated heat spreaders and are on a slower interface. Cooling the NAND will shorten the lifespan of the drive just slightly if you do a lot of writes (it's not life or death but if you plan on keeping it a while, leave the NAND warm). Only exception is drives like to be cold when powered off and stored long-term (year or more, data will get corrupted as voltages normalize with neighboring cells, can be up to 1.5~3 years in cool storage, depending on the drive, SLC = longest, MLC = fairly long, 2~3 years, TLC or QLC, year or so). All values are at room temp of 70F indoors out of sunlight. @mtslittow I delidded my 4790k a year or two back. I think two years ago. I have a beefy Phanteks TC-14PE in RED/WHITE on it, as it was chosen for decent cooling but awesome looks (because, I wanted a RED computer this time, after a few blue ones and choosing all new parts). The case in a out-of-production Fractal Arc XL (if you find one, they're sweet but huge! get it!), good airflow, full tower. I was easily hitting 100C in no time with this on it's pathetic stock cooler at stock volts. That was tossed a day or two into the build. I figured as much anyways, as I hate push-pins. Stupid design from the get-go. Stuck the big cooler on and at-least that kept it under 60~65C at all times even Prime (which is bad for intel chips that aren't delidded). Cranked it up to run @ 4.4ghz on 1.251v and that's where it's happy 24/7. Ran up to 75~78C on that turbo speed, locked there at all times as that's the way I want it. If it blows up I'll replace the part (yes even at 4.2 years of age!) and keep it going. All of the above is on some Zalman and Rosewill Generic paste, which is your typical deep grey non-metallic stuff I believe, non-conductive, not much difference between the two brands, it just came in a nail polish like bottle, so it was easy to apply (and easy to apply too much, at that). So I got the delidder back in the beginning of 2017 or so, I believe, it could have been beginning of 2018 for all I remember, and got some liquid metal too. I was about 40$ into it, not including shipping if there was any charges for it at all. Use the ROCK-IT Delidder for what it's worth. Super easy, no risk, no damage, worth the 30$ I paid for it even if I only used it once. Stuck some liquid metal on there, albeit carefully, and removed any black glue from die/IHS. Didn't turn out well 1st time so went back and used a touch less, and scraped it flat when I was done to remove excess from both surfaces, and made sure nothing was anywhere it SHOULD NOT be - for obvious reasons. Worked great! Knocked almost 10C off it. Hardly ever goes over 70C here. Whatever max 142F comes out to on the warmest core (they're about 9C apart in temps, maybe that's my fault, it's not enough to bother with though) we use F here to measure temps in the USA, so that's what I ended up switching it to. Googled it, 61.x C. 4.4ghz @ 1.251v @ max 61~65F (on a warm day with no AC, with this thing going full throttle). Needless to say I always have the warmest room in the house where I am at with the computer. It's the room I stay in the most being physically disabled. It's also my bedroom, so no biggy. Saves on heat never-the-less. For someone who's always cold, maybe I should try making the overclock 100~200mhz higher. I found a stable setting prior to delidding so I never bothered with going through testing stability etc all over again. For consistency, this has 32GB (4x 8gb) DDR3 Corsair Dominator (I believe), at 2400mhz dual channel, cas 11 latency memory. Originally had only 2 sticks for 16gb but needed 32gb when working on modeling buildings with BeamNG open. I kept having to close things down every few hours. Used RAM from EBAY for the win man. Got it for 30% of the inflated price of a new kit. I looked at the numbers, mine seems to fall off when the 4th core is saturated, more than 6xxx processors and your 4790k, I am going to say that's more a throttling due to the motherboard or BIOS setting that I never bothered to undo. I will have a look into it as though it's 1~2% faster initially, it falls off faster than it should. Could also be some things running in the background as Windows always has something up it's sleeve to foul up your day (Windows 7 x64 Pro, legit, The Bob hates Windows 10 with a passion as it cannot be told what to do!). That being said, this game's physics and draw-call limits LOVE *RAM SPEED*. So quick RAM speed with low-latency numbers, really can help especially when you have both a very busy setting (city), and several vehicles in play up to no-good. So, all things considered, THE BOB is going to be keeping his 4790k processor for another year or two. I have already had it since mid-October 2014. That's almost four and a quarter years. I've NEVER had a computer that long as my primary machine. So going for a personal record here. 90% sure my next machine will by a Ryzen though, I'm sick of intel and their tactics, artificial limitations, limited PCI-E lanes, and hot-running chips that advertise overclocking as a feature but won't let you without water cooling or pulling it apart. Sure the new ones are soldered, but that didn't help much any. Ryzen 3xxx Matisse can't get here soon enough (May/June 2019). I have a Patreon for my city map and I'm NOT going to waste it all on computer parts for absolutely no reason, that'd be a slap in the face to my subscribers. So I will happily 4790k my way into the next decade (2020) if I must & will be quite content. Most new games are rubbish anyways, because they're not BeamNG - where we can make our own game, our own cars, and our own goals. Glad you enjoyed your delidding experience. Cheaper and better results than i7 5775C or whatever it is upgrade. They couldn't clock worth anything. --Cheers!
Cheers, That Fractal case looks absolutely cavernous! I'm happy my Define R5 also. As for temperatures, it doesn't tend to get very hot in Finland (except last summer when my flat got close to body temperature). Also when renting, heating/AC is usually covered. I was considering the Phanteks cooler too, it looks awesome by the way. Ultimately I decided on the Noctua NH-D15 because it might have a higher lifespan. As a cheap ass student, I didn't want to invest in proper hardware for delidding . I found the video tutorial and thought it looked relatively safe, and I was fully committed. Confession: I managed to drop the fully open CPU in a bag of cement (I worked in the family garage), which meant some additional cleanup for sure. I might check on the CPU in a few years to see how my liquid metal application turned out. I'm satisfied for now. That's some sweet RAM, too. I initially had only 8 GB, and with a mismatching set, they really won't work any higher than 2133. I grabbed another pair of 8 GB from Germany very cheaply. I realize fast RAM and latencies have a huge impact on many workloads. For example, I've seen great gains in Arma 3 multiplayer with a lot less stuttering. In BeamNG I've seen insane increases in physics throughput on the newer generation i7s with fast DDR4. For me the game runs better overall, but there seem to be bottlenecks from my GPU and the atrocious UI. I haven't measured any of these, but loading times seem about the same, can't tell if they have significantly reduced. Game responsiveness feels similar too, and hiccups in UI interaction remain. My mod count might have an impact, though. I have an Asus Z97 motherboard, which seems to work great for overclocking. Also if you haven't, overclocking northbridge can increase memory performance even further. That's a long time for a single system indeed. I had my previous PC for barely 3 years. It also tells something about the performance of new hardware. I'm still very content with my CPU and don't need a better one yet. My Gtx 970 is starting to show its age though. It can't drive my high refresh rate monitor properly in new games. Thanks for the response! EDIT: Also @fufsgfen I realized I had a wrong link in the last response. This is what I intended: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/5740025
This is mine with overclock (GPU with factory setting), difference to yours is pathetically small really, consider Intel has worked SO hard for 4 generations, minus the two cores and what is difference really not even 20%? Here is my other system, so totally not worthy upgrade, but I'm trying to avoid Win10 and see what comes long time in a future and AFAIK z370 is last one that is possible to make work in older Windows, still I'm wondering what better that new system does than this old, but this old one is kinda specially good for what it is, never found out why. With stock clocks 8086K is only 4.3Ghz when there is more CPU load, it does help in BeamNG though, so now I can have high details, ssao and dynamic reflections on, but still have to keep dynamic reflections at low, which might be helped by future updates I hope: Still, I would think that your delidded 4790K does very close to same with gtx1080 or gtx1070 if there is more performance updates coming as was mentioned earlier, so not sure if there is much else than supporting development of new CPUs that upgrading can do, well few years and maybe CPU race development picks up the pace. 3x Z370 motherboards and none really good, current Asus one is kinda ok, but VRM gets too hot if I overclock CPU, might get AIO and VRM cooler after some years, but there really is not too much to upgrade to if one has already overclocked 4th gen Intel. My Asus motherboard has fake phase doubling, it is only 4 phase, with low and high chips, low chips are then rubbish which make VRM run hot and to cap it off chips are good only for 65C, ROG quality. Much better than two previous ones, which one I did never even saw as according to OCD testing it might catch fire, no thermal protection and VRM easily goes past 125C that is Gigabyte revised "we did fix VRM issue by removing safety limits" for you. With z370 boards only those 300 euros or more seem to have(had) some quality, Z390 are better at bit lower price point, but still not quite what older boards used to be. So, if you are going to upgrade in 2 years or so, make sure you see tests that go to great detail with VRM, more cores need more power and cheaped out VRM fashion with fake doubling is not going to help when trend is to more CPU cores. Oh and that first board, it did fail after two rounds of Blender benchmark, smells burnt, totally useless VRM that had no hope handling even stock 8700K, despite claims by manufacturer.
No problem. Yes I would 100% recommend this Fractal case. They actually haven't been making this specific model since 2014 (though they have a similar slightly down-marketed version now based on the same chassis with a different front). This specific model I got in 2014 for about 70$ or so, cash and carry, it had the back top corner dented in pretty good and was a good half-inch out of square. So I proceeded to take this 200$ case apart, knocking out all the rivets with a chisel and a hammer. I then laid out some wood and sandwiched the bent pieces between the wood blocks and proceeded to metal-work this thing back into shape. No torch. No welder, just lots and lots of hammering. My late father taught me well - among many other skills (I also grew up watching all the builder shows in the 80s and 90s I could find - they were my favorite). So I got the case in good shape now and I've been using it the last four years. Love this thing, won't give it up for the world. Well maybe for a Lian-Li 400~500$ model full-tower - but heck, many new cases don't even have large DVD bays and I've used 3 our of 4 on here, so they're a 100% must. Do you know how many SSD's you can cram into one of them when you've already filled the two hidden bays and the 8 ones in plain view, regardless of throwing temp regulation to the wind? To those wanting to replace default fans in the Fractal case - don't - these ones have been whisper quiet for the entire duration of the case's lifespan over four+ years, with nary an issue. I would recommend just keeping them unless you need BLASTING airflow of a Noctua setup. Speaking of Noctua, be happy with your D-15. It may not have all the flashy colors of mine but it *DOES* have great cooling performance. The Phanteks model I have is close to but not quite as good as a Noctua, but I couldn't stand the looks of it unless I could paint it (don't paint your fans kids, just don't unless you like rattling/burnt-up bearings). For those with no window in the case or slightly less OCD when it comes to the inside of the tower, I wholly recommend the Noctua over the Phanteks, but when it's got to look nice because it's on-top the desk with the KB-and-Mouse, well you get the point. The Noctua D-15 IS one of THE best performing air coolers, better than some/many small-to-modest size AIO units out there. There is however, something to be said of buying a 300~350$ CPU and then spending 100$ or close-to-it on a cooler though, when you could have possibly snagged a 400~500$ processor on the next-higher platform (X99 then, X299 now) and a 30~40$ cooler in-stead... can't win can we? When I built this in OCT 2014, it was about 300$ to jump to X99 including increase in RAM costs, so that was out. So long-winded that was a bit, but to cut to the chase here. The 4790k is still quite relevant, as is even a good clocking 4770k/3770k or a close-to-4.8~5.0ghz 2700k chip. This processor will provide years of service yet - I mean YEARS. I'd say another good solid 3 years before you'll really need to upgrade. By that time there should be plenty of options out there for you, all at reasonable cost. Asus motherboards, the only type of motherboard I'd buy or recommend. They're the one manufacturer that sticks to digital VRM's the most (some of the cheapest of cheap boards have analog ones + digital), where-as even Gigabyte likes to put analog + digital setups on their boards even into the 200$ price range. That being said I've heard some mixed opinions on phase doubling with the Z370/Z390 motherboard series, so I'd get well into some reviews before I'd snap one of those up - this is not solely ASUS, this is *all* manufacturers, in what looks like a bit of a rush-job here. To that end however, the Asus Maximus VII Hero I have in here has provide rock-solid service and surely, my next one would be a 'hero' board if the price is right. I don't need top-end, I just wanted it to match the rest of the components well enough while still having the features I needed. So yes, do enjoy, as I do mine, for many years. Consumerism can get out it's knee-pads as far as I'm concerned. I'm not buying into this newer-better-faster, until there is something truly that much better, almost double-faster, for less than I paid for this, and most importantly, something that requires it. Until then, I'm sure there will be a few more folks joining along on this forum thread. --Cheers! EDIT: @fufsgfen Have you purchased a fire extinguisher yet?
What, this house is build from stone, it does not burn, just flakes a little Noctua D-15 and Thermaltake Macho Rev. B with two fans are best air coolers that I know, D-15 with two fans is slightly better than Macho Rev. B with one fan, not sure how it is with two fans, but even with 8086K Macho does not need to spin fans more than 600rpm, TIM in CPU is limiting, so delid + annoying liquid metal might help, but might still not need much more rpm of fans. 600rpm Noctua x 2 does not make noise, but provides all cooling one needs, although I might look something else for case airflow, CFM at low rpm is tough subject, needs lot of research. For z370/z390 I would say spend more than 300, preferrably 400 and no worries, it sucks that at 200 which used to buy really solid motherboard, at this time of increasing core counts one don't get much anything good for that 200. Few years and I think hardware finally is starting to get serious speed jumps as all this power nonsense gets sorted out, that is then where BeamNG really gets it's place in sun as so much more is possible.
You spend 400 bucks on a motherboard, it's not going to be for mainstream desktop processors with a K slapped on them. Best to buy into X299 / successive iterations of HEDT, or Threadripper (possibly the 3xxx versions might fix the core-to-core or other latency with cache misses). I entirely feel for you though, 200 bucks used to buy some top-dollar stuff 10 years ago. You'd be hard pressed to find GOOD reason to spend over 250$ on a motherboard. Sure they DO have mainstream motherboards (even one from Asus and one from SuperMicro that have PLX chips for more lanes for people like me that must slap an LSI MegaRAID card into their computer), that cost 400$ or close to it, but you shouldn't feel you have to need one to have a *STABLE* computer. That's just ludicrous. Chalk up another reason to have my pig of a 4790k, after all these years. It's not just good for blowing up explode-on-death rats in what is now a VARIETY of different games. Yes - explode-on-death rats are a thing, whether Boomrats in RimWorld or (object #) 6046f8c Legendary Rad-Rats in Fallout 4 (which I prefer to spawn in the hundreds near enemies with the placethere command). They're here to stay. Let's hope Explode-on-death motherboards aren't. --Cheers! Offtopic EDIT for Fallout 4 fans: "Placethere 6046f8c 600" command into the console with the target for your weapon pointed where you want them to spawn, in Fallout 4. Warning: Do NOT save game after this, it will WRECK your saved game by drowning the script engine and eventually cause it to permanently crash after a set time. Game must be restarted to before you did that if you spawn over 70 or so as it runs out of reference links in an array limited to 128 objects. Brownie points for spawning them on top of the molten metal bucket on top of 'The Forge's Iron Works' from on-top of the slog. Wait a few seconds and they all start exploding, it's like fireworks. Again, lets hope Exploding rats stay a thing, or even exploding pianos, but not exploding motherboards - especially not knowing what to say when I hand the data recovery place my 'smelly' drives after I have to pee out another computer fire - because that's the closest water source!
That's why I used thick, soft, high performance thermal pads that fit somewhat snug to the shape of the SSD and cover the controller. Good to know all this, but don't worry, I did realise that the controller is what actually gets hot.
