2017 Hardware Thread

CountMike said:

That Tomb Raider must be a very single threaded game. It reacts too little to core numbers.

Don't know of games that significantly benefit from 10 cores. Most are optimized for 4 or often less. Their BF1/ Watch Dogs 2 numbers aren't much different.

Also, seems the P state issue has to be worked out:

"I won't lie, the past two weeks with the Core i7 7900X and the X299 boards I have tested have been an absolute challenge. Memory XMP profiles would not stick, power consumption with one BIOS was OK, the other through the roof. But most of all the processor performance was all over the place. We've seen perf differences of up-to*20% in-between merely different motherboards. MSI however with it's latest BIOS seems to have found equilibrium. Now the biggest fight the two weeks was ironically game performance, it was severely lacking. Example a platform like this should run Rise of the Tomb Raider at 140 FPS at 1080p on a GeForce GTX 1080. We'd end up at 90~100 FPS. And that problem occurred with pretty much all games. I have been discussing this with the motherboard partners (as yes it is widespread) and we all agreed, it has everything to do with 'hardware P states' that Intel recommends to leave enabled for the new platform. Intel recommends certain power states to keep the TDP in line, as otherwise they simply cannot achieve that 140W TDP. For most overall tests that worked out okay enough, but specifically the toll on game performance was abysmal. Days before this launch MSI however released and provided a new BIOS, this restored the performance to what it needs to be. But as you have been able to see, the power consumption is certainly on that high-side. In the end though, the performance is there, but we do expect several BIOS updates that will have an effect in performance overall, in gaming and on power-consumption."*

essenbe said:

Stuff like that is pretty common on all new platforms. Give them a month and they will all have bios updates to fix most of the issues. If you are interested, I would think a weekend vacation to the US would be pretty cheap in the long run.

Yes I'm sure the P state issues will be worked out. Not sure any of it will make a difference on gaming, especially 1080P gaming. I suspect in time with all these new 6-10 core and up processors, game devs will eventually take advantage of it. I'll keep an eye on that. Should be interesting.

Don't see that a visit to the U.S. would help much other than avoiding a possible exchange rip off. Still would have to exchange my CDN $ for U.S.

specialkone said:

My enthusiast side just told my gaming side that it would only cost $1,000 EACH for those 2 additional FPS in ROTTR that the I9 7900X setup would give me.

The real question is whether or not you are doing 1080p gaming on a 144Hz model. If so, your current CPU is only allowing 138FPS, and thus not maxing out the monitor you have already invested in. Considering you are 6 FPS away from maxing out a 144Hz monitor, a 2FPS bump would be a 33% improvement. Looking at it that way, makes this a no-brainer.

essenbe said:

Yea, we finally won @pparks1 over. He's on our side now. Only a true enthusiast could use logic like that. I recognized it right away.

We absolutely have pparks1 on the dark side now. 25% of me is definitely on board with that logic.

Actually those game review FPS numbers are averages which mean little to me in terms of refresh rate. My 144HZ monitor does 60, 100, 120 and 144. I'll typically set it and in game for each game to the minimum FPS I get. For ROTTR that's 100FPS/HZ, GOW4 at 120 and I consider myself "lucky" to be able to set it at 60 for GRW. I think the only game I have that never goes below 144 FPS at 1080P ultra is the incredible Doom. Some games are all over the place with FPS (typically bad console ports) and for those I leave the monitor at 120 and set no controls in game.