Origin PC's Custom, Professional Overclocking Will Push Your Kaby Lake Chip Past 5GHz (pcworld.com) 94
An anonymous reader writes: Intel's new Kaby Lake desktop processors may not be huge improvements over their Skylake predecessors in terms of raw speed, but they've got it where it counts in one enthusiast-friendly area: overclocking. Now the high-end custom PC builder Origin is putting its (and your) money where its mouth is. Origin's has offered professional overclocking as a $75 option in its systems for a while, and now the builder is touting that Kaby Lake desktops chips will go up to -- and potentially over -- the 5GHz barrier. Hot, hot, hot, hot damn. Intel's chips haven't hit such lofty heights since the Sandy Bridge days and the Core i7-2600K. Since then, Intel's processors usually tap out around the 4.5GHz mark. While the current wording for Origin's professional overclocking doesn't guarantee a set frequency due to the silicon lottery -- promising only that "Origin PC's award winning system integrators will overclock your processor and squeeze out every last megahertz" with every overclock "stringently tested and benchmarked for ensured stability" -- the company must feel darn confident to market that 5GHz number in big, bold numbers in a press release.
Re: (Score:2)
Most people don't even need a desktop PC. But some people really do have practical application for a high performance computer. (Although I have my doubts that any of Origin's customer are doing anything practical with their machines)
Re: (Score:3)
overclocking is third party binning. When IBM sells you a 4.5 GHz POWER chip, it's not called overclocking. When a small company takes a batch of Intel chips and tests them, it's called overclocking.
You can find professionals that run overclocked workstations. It's not that uncommon, at least among my coworkers.
Coworkers... (Score:2)
My coworkers would burn me at the stake or worse for overclocking one of our work machines.
They're mostly Dual Socket 2011 with as many cores as possible, and all the memory they can hold.
Not really conducive to cranking around on stuff, lol.
The computer is the cheapest part of that setup; the software is over 100k a seat, the guy in the seat, much more, lol.
OTOH, My personal gaming PC has been running an i7-3930k at 4.7GHz since about 2011 until now on a heat pipe cooler, ~63ÂC max.
I bought myself a c
Re: (Score:2)
Well it's a different company culture. My company is very research oriented and also very into gaming (not that we're gaming at work, but a lot of people are PC gamers).
We develop a fair amount of the tools ourselves, and it's ran on a cluster of custom hardware. A lot of the hardware design tools we license are also thousands of dollars per seat (I don't know the exact price, probably around $50k), yet they benefit from having a really fast single core system. You can trim an hour off the turn around time
Re: (Score:2)
Overclocked systems are more likely to have computational glitches, and are likely to fail sooner. Not what you want in a business.
False. If done incorrectly and without proper validation tests, then yes you would have an unstable system. But correctly done there is little difference between a third party overclocking and the vendor's own SiVal and binning.
You personally may not wish to choose this route, but people do exist in the professional world that have used overclocked systems as engineering workstations or for academic research. And I don't think you can easily dismiss their decision to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is that these days, pretty much anything you buy isn't slow. 98% of computers sold are more than up to the task of every day use.
Seems to me these things are like guys modding their cars. For instance taking a stock v6 mustang, removing the governor, adding a supercharger and replacing various bits and pieces to make a 160 MPH car out of one that will already easily go fast enough to get yer ass put in jail.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems to me these things are like guys modding their cars. For instance taking a stock v6 mustang, removing the governor, adding a supercharger and replacing various bits and pieces to make a 160 MPH car out of one that will already easily go fast enough to get yer ass put in jail.
There seem to be two classes of PC modding, where one is functional and the other is cosmetic, and then there's every shade of grey in between. You know, just like cars. These fancy liquid cooling setups with their glass pipes are fruity AF, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's less of a waste of time and money than doing the same stuff with a car, and if it leaks it only leaks on your desk and not on the road.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Sluggish isn't the only problem with Windows 1 (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Windows 10 might actually be able to run on it with out feeling sluggish.
Try defragging the hard disk.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
you don't just go about defragging an SSD YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
Hard drive != SSD
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
you seem to be ASSuming that the OP is in fact using a spinning disk.
Based on the initial description and my experience as a help desk technician, a fragged hard drive was a likely cause. If the OP has an SSD, my advice would be irrelevant.
Also, defrag on non-SSDs has been an automatically scheduled weekly task since Win7.
As I pointed out to someone else, that may be true for the Home version. Most Fortune 500 companies I've worked at disable automatic defragging in the Enterprise version, as it would interfere with something else during the maintenance window or slow the down a program running overnight. I still do manual disk frags at home because my Wind
Re: (Score:2)
That's an automated service on Windows 10. Try replacing with an SSD.
Re: (Score:1)
That's an automated service on Windows 10.
I'll have to double check that. I use Auslogic Defragger to defrag my Windows 10 systems.
Try replacing with an SSD.
When people complain about Windows being sluggish, it's usually because they haven't defragged their hard drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Not on Windows Vista and up.
Re: (Score:2)
Not on Windows Vista and up.
Maybe the Home version. I've done quite a few defrags on Windows 7 systems in the corporate environment. Automatic defrag is typically disabled by group policy.
Re: (Score:2)
Automatic defrag is typically disabled by group policy.
If so, that's not by default. Someone decided to manually push out that policy. Or worse, have a policy of shutting down systems at night and preventing any maintenance overnight at all.
Re: (Score:2)
If so, that's not by default. Someone decided to manually push out that policy. Or worse, have a policy of shutting down systems at night and preventing any maintenance overnight at all.
That seems to be the default policy for the Fortune 500 companies I've worked at. The rational for disabling automatic defragging is that it interferes with other stuff going during the maintenance window or programs being run overnight. This might be a non-issue now that newer PCs have SSDs instead of HDDs. My two-year-old work laptop with an SSD card has never ever ran defragger.
Re: (Score:2)
The rational for disabling automatic defragging is that it interferes with other stuff going during the maintenance window or programs being run overnight
While that's true, you can set scheduled tasks to run with a timer - if it takes longer than its allotted time it can be stopped to make way for the next item. If it's running weekly on schedule, it shouldn't take long to run anyway.
This might be a non-issue now that newer PCs have SSDs instead of HDDs
Complete non-issue. In fact, it's recommended to not even bother defragging, because that will just increase the write cycles.
Re: (Score:2)
A SSD might look like a HDD to the OS and perform the same operation but under the hood the technology is completely different.
When I cloned my HDD to SSD, Windows changed a registry setting to mark the SSD as a USB drive. Never mind that I booted the SSD from SATA after replacing the HDD. It prevented the Windows 10 Anniversary update from installing.
Not saying Slashvertisement... (Score:5, Informative)
Aaaand it's Slashvertisement!
Re: (Score:3)
News for nerds.
Not saying its aliens... (Score:1)
Well the stock clock is pretty high... (Score:5, Informative)
4.5 GHz is not only achievable, it's actually a speed i7-7700k will run stock, air-cooled in turbo mode. So 5GHz on Skylake would have been about a 20% improvement over stock, on Kaby Lake it's 10%.
Re: (Score:1)
4.5 GHz is not only achievable, it's actually a speed i7-7700k will run stock, air-cooled in turbo mode. So 5GHz on Skylake would have been about a 20% improvement over stock, on Kaby Lake it's 10%.
We could make sell these things rated for 6GHz if we wanted to, but we wouldn't rate them to survive more than a couple of years.
Re: (Score:3)
Golly, Miss Molly... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you use the fancy new Abit jumperless motherboard?
I went with Tyan motherboards back in the day.
Re: (Score:1)
Last I did was the almighty Celery 300a OC'ed to 450 on an Abit board. Good times!
For gamers (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you're running Dolphin (Wii emulation). It can use up to 3 cores, but it's mostly limited by the single-core speed on the main thread. 10% isn't much, though.
Origin PC? (Score:1)
I would have expected there might be some trademark issues between EA and these guys, especially since both seem to be related to gaming on PC's (and their logo's are somewhat similar in terms of being swirly circles).
Domain-wise, it looks like origin.com was first (Dec 1993 VS Apr 2009)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Origin Systems was a game studio EA purchased. They produced Ultima, Wing Commander, and System Shock. They were absolutely awesome and I loved everything they did prior to EA buying them. Then they ruined both Ultima (with Ultima IX) and Wing Commander (with Privateer 2), and shuttered the studio. It's one of the many corpses of once-great game studios EA as left in its wake.
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah... so many good names.
Westwood studios was another good one.
Re: (Score:2)
When I first saw the article I immediately thought "EA" and was ready to come on here and say: "there is sure as hell no way I'd buy any PC related to EA after all their spyware, and DRM debacle that disabled people's devices".
Rather an unfortunate name. I wonder how many people won't even look at Origin's products because they think it's related to EA.
Real world benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can anyone name a single real-world benefit of doing this? Even in the gaming world, are there any cases in which this would change anything at all? This just seems like something people do "because they can." Which is cool and all, but not worth paying extra for.
Re:Real world benefit? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure myself. I have a 3570k Ivy Bridge system for when I feel like some gaming (not often these days) and for a while I had it up to 4.5 GHz. Everything seemed smooth, but one day it overheated so I just said to hell with it and went back down to the stock 3.4. Lo and behold I could not tell the difference. Games had about the same frame rate and the overall system felt just as responsive. Maybe you have to be at the edge of the CPU performance envelope and typical video gaming just doesn't do that yet. BTW, I game on Linux and Windows and I noted this on both sides.
Re: (Score:2)
Bitcoin?
Re: (Score:1)
Not a chance. Specialized hardware is required these days.
Re: (Score:2)
Bitcoin?
No one mines Bitcoin on CPUs.
No one who pays a powerbill anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
A faster processor, sure, who wouldn't want one? Would most people notice the difference? Probably not, day to day it would be a micro second saved here and a microsecond saved there.
Would I pay way over the odds to save microseconds here and there?
No. But it's still nice to have a faster CPU for the 1% of the time it actually would save noticeable time. I assume gamers would want one, although the GPU is probably the most common bottleneck for games.
Re: (Score:1)
Hear, hear. I'm just contemplating the heat increase in my little Kaby Lake-powered laptop. No thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Even in the gaming world
Nope. Games are not generally CPU constrained. I can think of others, video, photographic etc, but games will likely see a speed boost form GPU overclocking only.
Re: (Score:1)
I disagree with this, it's only really the case for FPS games. The likes of Factorio and Cities:Skylines are CPU bound.
Wrong way of handling it (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Right way of generating more profit for them. It's a lottery and they are running the casino.
Ehh, so what are they offering? (Score:2)
Ehh, so what are they offering? For extra $$, I'd expect an integrator to cherry pick the CPU's they get to provide me with one that can do 5GHz (which is not that huge of an overclock anyway, I mean I was around during the Celeron 300A era!), otherwise they are offering nothing. There is no such thing as "professional overclocking" when we are talking about a simple air-cooled system that lets you control clock speed and voltage, you simply try to go higher and run a benchmark to check stability and it all
Missing the point (Score:2)
Will take the AMD ZEN with more PCI-E maxed out (Score:2)
Will take the AMD ZEN with more PCI-E lanes maxed out for same price or less.
Confidence is a Warranty, Not A Press Release (Score:2)
If you have confidence in this, then provide me with a warranty to replace and/or refund. I'm not talking about 90 days either, at least a year, preferrably 3. Any idiot can overclock something, it takes a bit of skill to do so and have it sort of work, and a whole lot of skill and engineering for it to be robust.
manishs == crap (Score:2)
Dear chappie, you appear to have been leaving out jolly old thing that is belonging to Origin.
Practical significance? (Score:2)
Overclocking 33mhz 386 to 40mhz was a solid bump in practical productivity. In what work or fun activities will CPU be a bottleneck in this case? Are GPU, RAM, flash and so on speced and overclocked to accommodate increased CPU speed?
I can imagine solving an NP-complete problem for which no parallel algorithms are known. For everything else, multi GPU setup or a box full of inexpensive compute sticks will probably provide better bang for the buck. Games and productivity apps are usually written to avoid ser