Core i7-5960X 5930K 5820K Overclocking & Performance @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Core i7-5960X 5930K 5820K Overclocking & Performance - We headed out to Microcenter and purchased two new Haswell-E processors, the Intel Core i7-5930K and Core i7-5820K CPUs. We have spent some time overclocking those and figuring out where the headroom is. Today we discuss overclocking these and what to expect with rock solid stability in mind.
 
Looks like the 5820k is the sweet spot.

The PCI-E lanes shouldn't be an issue for a 2 card SLI setup and you still have 4 lanes left over for a M.2 SSD (4xPCIe) unless I am mistaken...
 
You are right, I made a fully incorrect statement. Will fix that. Thanks for the extra eyes. - Kyle

Edit 2: OK, got into the numbers on this and I fat fingered the keys. I have made an update and left my analysis out on that benchmark, so you can draw your own conclusion. - Kyle

Cheers!
 
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Typo fixed. Thanks for the extra eyes. - Kyle
 
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Thanks for the review and highlighting the early days of this completely new platform, hopefully memory speeds will come up and its not due to a weak IMC in Haswell-E.

I do have a question about the bandwidth though, my setup below pulls 50.5 GB/s in Sandra. Is it lower on HW-E because of the increased latency and not very speedy 2666 DDR4?
 
psyclist said:
Thanks for the review and highlighting the early days of this completely new platform, hopefully memory speeds will come up and its not due to a weak IMC in Haswell-E.

I do have a question about the bandwidth though, my setup below pulls 50.5 GB/s in Sandra. Is it lower on HW-E because of the increased latency and not very speedy 2666 DDR4?
Click to expand...

Latency on DDR4 is going to be the biggest hiccup for the technology at lower clock speeds. Of course then scaling the clock speeds on DD4 is going to bring with it a huge upside. That said, I did NOT tune these DIMMs at all, using stock timings. I would suggest that all the memory companies are going to be heavily culling modules for the fastest ones and I would not expect to find a lot of highly overclockable sticks in reference to the speeds noted on the package you purchase.

As mentioned in the review, the ODMs are expecting speeds above 3000MHz are so to be very sensitive to the IMC quality on a per CPU basis.

I had no issues with 2666MHz or 2800MHz speeds on all three of these CPUs, and two of those were retail purchased.
 
Fair enough then, im just trying to figure out the benefits of the jump to X99. Great to see decent speeds out of all three of your chips though! as that was one of Haswell's issues, inconsistency of OC's.
 
One of the things I noticed when P95-ing my 5960X is that it would hover around 60C for the first round of the Blend test and then the second round would come and it would spike to 100C. I've just raised the TJmax up to 105C to deal with this condition.
 
I'm currently running a 3930k, so even just sticking with the same number of cores means buying a 5930K, motherboard and ddr-4. If I stick with the current 64GB of RAM, the new setup would cost me about $2k. Considering I could just drop a new E5-2687W v2 (8 cores, 3.4Ghz, 25MB cache) for just about the same price, makes the new platform slightly less enticing.

Obviously it will be worth looking at again when DDR4 comes down in price, but not just yet.
 
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. said:
Looks like the 5820k is the sweet spot.

The PCI-E lanes shouldn't be an issue for a 2 card SLI setup and you still have 4 lanes left over for a M.2 SSD (4xPCIe) unless I am mistaken...
Click to expand...

With 28 lanes in the 5820k wouldn't that leave you with 4 lanes left for an M.2 even with tri SLI/fire? 8x/8x/8x and 4x for the M.2? If that's the case then it is really tough to justify the 5930k unless you're going for a 4 way GPU setup. With 3 cards it would be identical at 8x/8x/8x yeah? I suppose with 2 way on the 5930k you would have he benefit of 16x/16x however slight that may be.

Oh, and Kyle you mention in the conclusion that the 5930k has more cache than the 5820k. I believe that is a typo.
 
Kyle - Were you able to keep the 1.0 BCLK multiplier on the Gigabyte X99-UD4 when running the 2666MHz memory speed? I'm currently using a Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 on BIOS F8c and using XMP settings or manually raising the memory frequency past 2133MHz will automatically set the BCLK multiplier to 1.25.
 
How thermally limited or sensitive to voltage are the new Haswell-E cpus?

Many of your Sandy-E reviews were in the 1.35 - ~1.4v and even your initial Ivy-E started at 1.35 and mentioned going to 1.4v to squeeze out an extra 100Mhz. Here though you seem to have stopped well short of even 1.35v, instead keeping it to a mere 1.32v.
 
Regarding the use of cores in games, I was wondering how others out there see the possibility in better subthreading in the next couple of years in titles as developers begin to stress out the lower clock speeds of the new consoles and being forced into smarter subthreading since the PS4 and XBO both have 8 cores.
 
Soooo... all I want to know is where should my $ go? I am running a 2700k which seems fast (4.4g totally stable for years) and a 670 video card. (Dell 27" 2560x1440) Should I worry more for video or CPU, or, frankly, as everything I run now is running very well, should I bother with anything and keep waiting?

In a way, this PC has been [H]ard so long in the $ savings area and stability, should I even think about upgrading yet? Are these CPUs and newer advancements enough finally to consider making the jump?
 
webdev511 said:
I'm currently running a 3930k, so even just sticking with the same number of cores means buying a 5930K, motherboard and ddr-4. If I stick with the current 64GB of RAM, the new setup would cost me about $2k.
Click to expand...

Again, unless you want to run 3 or 4 video cards you could go with the 5820k for 2011-3 as it is the same as the 5930k, minus the extra PCI-E lanes needed for top end multi-gpu.
If you aren't seeing significant fps drops, or don't need the extra speed for work etc then you're fine. If you need more speed it's probly just worth it to OC your cpu, and get a new gpu as well if needed.

Cantroy said:
Soooo... all I want to know is where should my $ go? I am running a 2700k which seems fast (4.4g totally stable for years) and a 670 video card. (Dell 27" 2560x1440) Should I worry more for video or CPU, or, frankly, as everything I run now is running very well, should I bother with anything and keep waiting?
In a way, this PC has been [H]ard so long in the $ savings area and stability, should I even think about upgrading yet? Are these CPUs and newer advancements enough finally to consider making the jump?
Click to expand...

If every game you play is running just fine then there is no need to upgrade! Since you have waited this long, imo you should just wait to see a 6Gb or 8Gb video card. With your monitor's resolution, consoles quickly using up all their available Vram leading to pc ports stretching that limit farther cause we want the best you're in a great position to get a nice long term upgrade that will rival your current gpu for time used.
 
Tych-0 said:
With 28 lanes in the 5820k wouldn't that leave you with 4 lanes left for an M.2 even with tri SLI/fire? 8x/8x/8x and 4x for the M.2? If that's the case then it is really tough to justify the 5930k unless you're going for a 4 way GPU setup. With 3 cards it would be identical at 8x/8x/8x yeah? I suppose with 2 way on the 5930k you would have he benefit of 16x/16x however slight that may be.
Click to expand...
If you went 3 card yes, if you go 2 it will be 16x/8x with 4x left over for other things (M.2, Raid card, etc...)

At least with the ASUS X99-Deluxe (click on the CPU 28 Lane 3-Way/2-Way)
 
my 5930K overclock very bad.
I have a H80i, cpu are always under 60c and with 1.3V I can't get a stable 4.3GHz.
1.275 at 4.2GHz is not stable.

I think that the problem is in the motherboard. Very bad bios or motherboard.
I have the latest Asus X99 running the latest bios.
 
sblantipodi said:
my 5930K overclock very bad.
I have a H80i, cpu are always under 60c and with 1.3V I can't get a stable 4.3GHz.
1.275 at 4.2GHz is not stable.

I think that the problem is in the motherboard. Very bad bios or motherboard.
I have the latest Asus X99 running the latest bios.
Click to expand...

you are probably using wrong settings.. what settings are you changing?.
 
Araxie said:
you are probably using wrong settings.. what settings are you changing?.
Click to expand...

I'm using 5 way optimizations from Asus.
I tried manual settings, by setting manual 1.3V to the cpu and increasing the cpu multiplier.

no way to go over 4.1GHz in a stable way. 4.2GHz is viable but not really stable.
 
From Article said:
As mentioned above we used the ASUS X99-Deluxe for all the core data shown to you here, but we did also spend a lot of time overclocking on both the MSI X99S XPower AC and GIGABYTE X99-UD4 motherboards in the last couple of weeks. All of these motherboards acted differently in terms of top end overclocking with our Haswell-E processors. I found that both the MSI and GIGABYTE motherboards required higher processor input voltages to get to the same overclocks.
Click to expand...

By input voltage, are you referring to the CPU offset? How much additional voltage are we talking about on the MSI and Gigabyte boards? Do you think that it is a BIOS issue or something else is at work here?

I suspect that with these early BIOS, there are stability and other issues. That may get fixed along the way with later versions. I get the feeling that motherboards probably are not going to be the bottleneck when it comes to Haswell E overclocking, at least on air and water.

Edit:
I presume that things work very similar to that of the original Haswell?

- CPU core voltage <1.35V
- CPU ring voltage <1.3V (lower when not OCing Uncore)
- CPU VRIN <2.2V

Lower the Uncore as well for additional overclocks?

Then I guess it's a matter of hoping for the best with the silicon lottery. It is looking like most CPUs do 4.4 - 4.6 GHz at 1.3V Core.
 
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my 4770k (4.7ghz 2666mhz ram OC) still outruns the 5820k in most of these benchmarks.

Will wait some more
 
sblantipodi said:
I'm using 5 way optimizations from Asus.
I tried manual settings, by setting manual 1.3V to the cpu and increasing the cpu multiplier.

no way to go over 4.1GHz in a stable way. 4.2GHz is viable but not really stable.
Click to expand...

I founded that 1.275V with LLC set to 5 is stable at 4.2GHz while test blend on Prime95.
Is there a way to lower the vcore while maintaining stability?
 
There are reports on youtube about overclocking i7-5960X above 5GHz with standard water cooling. Then there are reports about problem with overclocking above 4.3, 4.5, 4.6 GHz.

Are those guys and gals who climb up over 5GHz just lucky with their chips or there are some other secrets here why they can and others can not?

The reason of my question is that overclocking into 5GHz is twice the 2.5 GHz of standard clock of Xeon processors with 15-18 cores. That would mean that i7-5960X could get into the performance range of these very expensive processors just at the cost of higher electricity bills.
 
Cantroy said:
Soooo... all I want to know is where should my $ go? I am running a 2700k which seems fast (4.4g totally stable for years) and a 670 video card. (Dell 27" 2560x1440) Should I worry more for video or CPU, or, frankly, as everything I run now is running very well, should I bother with anything and keep waiting?

If you are gaming I would definitely keep the 2700K and swap out for a 4GB GTX 970. The newer games like shadows of mirror and enemy within will need 4gb of video to max out the graphics. I ended up buying two but I think you could get by with one easily. Hardocp just reviewed the MSI model that I purchased and it did very well. Mine are running Mordor very well even even with sli disabled.
Click to expand...
 
I got the i7 5820K and MSI X99S SLI Plus. The CPU is overclocked to 4.3GHz with 1.21V vcore, the cache frequency is 3.5GHz at 1.2V ring bus voltage. The setup can pass Prime95v27.9 and Aida64 stability test but not the Prime95v28.5. It's probably the P95v28.5 is using AVX2 and FMA instructions which put much higher load on the processor. I tried 1.23V but still can't pass P95v28.5.
 
Is there someone who can explain me why there is no way to get Adaptive working when XMP is on?
Can I use adaptive with RAM set at 2800MHz using BLCK 125MHz?

Another question.
When overclocking, is it better to leave the Turbo Mode off or on?

If I have a BLCK of 125MHz and a multiplier of 42, how turbo mode on could affect my frequency? Is it good or bad to leave it on when overclocking?
What about speedstep?

At the moment I have the Turbo mode off and speedstep on, is this good?
 
I still cannot decided between the 5930K or 5820K. I, myself still have a i7 920 @ 4.2GHz and the X58 EVGA Classified board which can run two PCIE 2.0 @ x16. This allows me to run SLI GTX 780 Ti's with little impact on performance, other then increased latency due to N200 chip. If I plan to keep this processor for 5+ years like I currently have and then want to run SLI that far down the road, it may make sense to have those extra lanes. If it was the matter of $100, there would be no question, but being that its almost double the price for the 5930K vs the 5820K I am not so sure.
 
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raidflex said:
I still cannot decided between the 5930K or 5820K. I, myself still have a i7 920 @ 4.2GHz and the X58 EVGA Classified board which can run two PCIE 2.0 @ x16. This allows me to run SLI GTX 780 Ti's with little impact on performance, other then increased latency due to N200 chip. If I plan to keep this processor for 5+ years like I currently have and then want to run SLI that far down the road, it may make sense to have those extra lanes. If it was the matter of $100, there would be no question, but being that its almost double the price for the 5930K vs the 5820K I am not so sure.
Click to expand...

if you don't need to use dozens of hard drive and you don't use many expansion cards on PCIe, 5820K is the best choice.
There is really no reason to buy a 5930K at double the price for lanes that you will never use, neither in SLI.
PCIe 8x is more than enough for current gen cards.

I'm quite disappointed to have choosed the 5930K since I will never use that lanes.
 
sblantipodi said:
if you don't need to use dozens of hard drive and you don't use many expansion cards on PCIe, 5820K is the best choice.
There is really no reason to buy a 5930K at double the price for lanes that you will never use, neither in SLI.
PCIe 8x is more than enough for current gen cards.

I'm quite disappointed to have choosed the 5930K since I will never use that lanes.
Click to expand...

True it is enough for current generation cards, but what about GPU's 4-5 years down the road is really the question. Will PCIE 3.0 x8 be enough then.
 
raidflex said:
True it is enough for current generation cards, but what about GPU's 4-5 years down the road is really the question. Will PCIE 3.0 x8 be enough then.
Click to expand...

the question is, will 5930 or 5820 be enough for cards 4-5 years down the road?
 
sblantipodi said:
the question is, will 5930 or 5820 be enough for cards 4-5 years down the road?
Click to expand...

My i7 920 @ 4.2GHz is still going strong today and that is a 6 year old CPU. I really do not have any trouble running any games for the most part. The big reason for wanting to upgrade is for the extra features like USB 3, SATA 3, and UEFI BIOS.
 
raidflex said:
My i7 920 @ 4.2GHz is still going strong today and that is a 6 year old CPU. I really do not have any trouble running any games for the most part. The big reason for wanting to upgrade is for the extra features like USB 3, SATA 3, and UEFI BIOS.
Click to expand...

This is questionable, I will never put my 1200€ SLI on a CPU like that.
I know that it is a very respectable CPU but people who spends a lot of money on GPUs want to push them at the maximum.
 
sblantipodi said:
This is questionable, I will never put my 1200&#8364; SLI on a CPU like that.
I know that it is a very respectable CPU but people who spends a lot of money on GPUs want to push them at the maximum.
Click to expand...

Well I bought these cards with the intention to upgrade the rest of the system in the near future. I had bought the LG 34UM95 monitor and my GTX 580 was not cutting it. So I was already planning on at least getting a Z97 platform. Really only games that are not well multi-threaded are the ones that I have more issues. Games are more GPU bond for the most part anyways at such a high resolution, so really I am still GPU limited in most cases.
 
sblantipodi said:
the question is, will 5930 or 5820 be enough for cards 4-5 years down the road?
Click to expand...

4-5 is a long time. Depends how reliant games become on 6+ core systems. With dx12 and mantle the push is less cpu reliance.

Today a handful of the big games use 6+ cores, fewer use 100% of those cores.
 
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