New
#471
If specialkone has a custom water loop it would be nice of him to put it in his specs.
I am fun. You are very welcome to join me for the Montreal St Pat's parade tomorrow. You will see. .
Speaking of water blocks (essenbe and Doorules) notice that Vellinious said the latest card he got performs better on air than the other two on water. "Me thinks" the silicon lottery is most important.
Not saying waters blocks aren't good, but I hit 2000 in games with no OC. I hit 2114 in bench, oced but no voltage adjustment. What would a water block additionally give me? For gaming I think not much.
Honestly ,I think the Lottery is a bunch of Yip Yap ,I have had many generations that said they perform a certain way and come to find out people were just tuning them wrong
I agree some chips do better than others but also i know for a fact certain MOBO's allow better overclocking even with a bum chip it's just that way it has for me in most cases
The only chip i ever returned to get a better one was my last build other than that i never had a bad performing chip i would imagine most of them are binned to reach a certain point unless you know what you are doing pretty much what i am saying they make them where even a novice can upclock with hardly any issue
Like cooling and number and quality of the VRMs, as I am learning(for voltage levels needed to raise the multiplier):
Definitely read the rest here: Actually Hardcore Overclocking: What makes a good VRMNow VRMs also include capacitors and many better VRMs will include more capacitors than cheaper VRMs. This is because you need capacitors to smooth out the voltage being produced by the VRM and the more capacitors you have the more capacity the VRM has and the less your voltage drops while your highside MOSFET is off. If you had very small capacitors and a very high current draw the capacitor could end up completely draining before the high side comes on resulting the voltage that your load is being provided reaching 0V. As we all know that is bad. Which is why high end VRMs have huge capacitor banks. Now capacitors also cause an efficiency loss and take a ton of space so just slapping 1F of capcitance on a VRM is not the best idea. However if you have VRM that has high ripple adding more caps can help.The other issue with capacitors is that some capacitors(electrolytes) have a maximum current that can be pulled from them, If you exceed this current the cap will fail.
The other way to lower voltage ripple is to increase how often you turn on the high side. This is dictated by the PWM controller's switching frequency. When you turn on the high side MOSFET your VRM output voltage starts to rise until the PWM signal turn it off again and your voltage starts to drop. The longer the wait between the on and off the longer the voltage will rise and drop increasing the minimum voltage and maximum voltage that your VRM outputs when trying to hit a set voltage. This is what ripple is. So if you cut down the amount of time you voltage spends dropping and rising by increasing the frequency of the PWM signal you decrease the ripple. This is why many overclocking centric boards have a VRM switching frequency option in the BIOS. The down side to this is that you need to charge your MOSFETs on and off more often and that lowers the VRM's efficiency. Which is why OCing GPUs like the Lightning are so damn power hungry.
The final way to lower voltage ripple is to add more phases. Because then you basically increase the switching frequency of the PWM because instead of cycling through X MOSFETs turning on and off in time Y you cycle through Z>X MOSFETS turning on and off. So you get more switching in time Y. Accompanied by that same efficiency loss as before.