Planning a new system

does anyone have any thoughts on the new i9 skylake-x series that is coming up for release? i too will be doing mb,cpu, ram upgrade sometime in 2018

 

I just have read that the new mainboards for the Coffee Lake S will not be on market before sometime in 2018. That is those mainboards with the new Z390 chipset. So much for christmas presents to myself.

Note that the new CPU fit into 1151 sockets, but they need new chipsets.

The new i3 apparently is only a Kaby Lake. They have the Kaby Lake's B0 stepping - whatever that is - where as the new i5 and i7 have U0 stepping and this means they indeed have a new architecture. The authors of those articles I read, say that the new i3 maybe are indeed old Kaby Lake i5's.

I read that the Z370 is just a Z20 chipset - with the ability to support the new CPUs, there is no further technical hindrance. In other words, the Z270 could have been supporting the new CPUs, but Intel added an obstacle to prevent that, needlessly. That is imo fraudulent business practice, since it is obvious that if there are no technical reasons to not have Z270 supporting the new CPU, this "solution" is only chosen to force people to buy new mainboard: and intel' partner being the ones benefitting from this.

I wait for the temperature reports and performance changes. If both are not dramatic, it could be that I still go for the 7700K, which I would expect to drop in price then, and so will its mainboards. Also, the ainboards there are now, I would expect to be now already proven designs.

Also, such business practices angers me for principal reasons. I can become very "difficult" over cheats like this.

 

I have seen some references to Ram in this thread. Questions suggesting/asking 'what use is more than 8 or more than 16 gb, for sim/gaming' use?

In games or sims that have 'regions', Tracks, or segments of content which are particularly large - often in a large singular datafile of some kind, I'd suggest storing these singular data-files or the entire game installation in a Ramdisk. As it can make a huge, night/day difference above and beyond even loading from an SSD.

Side benefits equally include the ability to put every non-gaming application's cache files into the ram disk, as well shifting the system environment variable /temp/ directories into the ram disk. Often creating an alarming, positive, increase in system responsiveness. Much like moving from a platter based hard drive as a system disk, to an SSD.

To squeeze the most out of such a thing in the context of a sim, game, browser, or OS one usually ends up fussing about with configuration files, .exe "-R:/temp" execution flags, and symbolic links. These symbolic links help the user tell a game/sim where it can find the '.dat' or similar file its expecting to find in location A but which in reality are being stored in location B - the ram disk. Equally, one generally needs to craft backups and copy scripts/software mechanisms to copy one's datafiles into the Ramdisk usually on initial system boot.

With the above in mind, you start to use/look at ram differently. The day/night difference to system responsiveness / track load times is amazing. Equally, one realizes 32GB is only barely enough
. Particularly with the install size growth of some apps/games in recent times. Conversely the value of 64+ gb system ram really starts to make a lot of sense for sim use.

 

Well so much for backwards capability and limited future upgrades. I bet AMD is loving this.

 

Vel,

thank you for bringing this to my awareness, I never thought about that before.

However, further investigation via yahoo/google showed me contradicting feedback by people, some say it makes a difference, some say the difference is not even close to what they hoped or were told to expect. Also, it costs even more money.

Personally I do not mind whether a sim loads 20, 30, or 40 seconds. But a RAM disk seems to make a lot more sense in any games that stream content a lot.

 

Yes. It's not a push button magical fix for all performance woes or expectations. It will not make FPS magically increase in software. However if one looks into the use of symlinks, proper system temp path re-configuration and various other similar techniques of leveraging a ram disk, they then really come into their own. Naturally, if you have a slow CPU or GPU, - these then become your bottlenecks. Yet presuming modern/good CPU/GPU and system RAM, load times of things like tracks or cache files can be day/night.

Think tracks like Lucaring, Lake Louise, Nords, or RF2 tracks in sim contexts. In non-simulator contexts- MMO's like Guild Wars 2, Eve Online, Wargamings' World of [war vehicles], you'll often find a 'data' file of some kind that hovers around + /- 20 gig. With a ramdisk you drop that file/directory into ramdisk and the load/save/read/write times are near-instant. No load stuttering while in game. Everything just appears. If the game is competitive, one might even have modest advantages in seeing the location of one's opponents before they see you load on grid (at least within the limits of mutual network / server ping).

 

The question is which files to load into RAM. 20 gig data file, how much memory do you need for this?
Certainly you cannot preload all AC content, and game and OS cache files they access in memory anyway.
Yes, there is theoretical benefit from having data "preloaded", but in practice you are limited by RAM Disk size, and need to know what exactly to preload.
Temp files and NVidia cache are probably good candidates.
Most of the times in AC load time (with SSD) is the least of the worries.
But good tech, might be useful for some startup time critical applications.

 

Very good post explaining in more details why in practice the benefit of RAM Disk is not really that great.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/have-you-used-or-are-using-ramdisk.2496610/#post-38672200

 

@Vel, do you use Content Manager?
Startup time is virtually non existent with it, plus it has a lot of other nice features.

 

No. I'm not comfortable with the idea of commercial mods and generally prefer to support Kunos directly for all things AC.

 

Sounds like a lot of hassle that I am not really in need for. Luccaring or Lake Louise may take their time to load, but once loaded in game there is no stuttering at all. Also not in other games where I notice disk acivity. So it seems this does nothing for me except decreasing load times. And as I said, whether I wait half a minute or a minute or 10 seconds for a track to load, is nothing I even take note of.

Still, thank you.

 

Ah, and now that I read this:

"1. If you switch your computer off every night then you're basically going to have to install / copy the game over anyway every day. Total loading time = copy time from HDD/SSD to RAMDisk + the time when you start the game off the RAMDisk + the extra "human time" you spend setting it up is actually longer than just running it off an SSD."

I feel confirmed in what I already wondered about, but did not dare to ask . The laoding time into the RAM. I do not leave computer switched on all time, I do not switch them off when interrupting only for an hour or so, but when I leave for longer time or am done with a session, I switch it off.

 

www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-core-i7-8700k-benchmarks.html

Looks good

 

What exactly looks good? I hope those figures change in gaming, cause as it is right now, it's not much of an upgrade from the 7700K

 

I react like Konnos: those numbers really leave me wondering what the drum-beating is all about. I wonder how temperatures are.

Single thread performance, for me quite of interest is, top, but not significantly better than that of the 7700K. A raise of 2.5% there. Not impressive.

A 21% raise over the 7700K in multithreaded performance. Sounds more like business. It sits exactly between the Ryzen 1600 and 1600X, just 1.2% less in performance than the 1600X.

However, 1600X looses to 8700K in single thread perfomrance, by around 18%.

8700K, or 1600X - one wonders which CPU will be the cheaper one. I fail to see that huge price differences are justified after this first test.

For my purposes, the intel CPU is slightly better suited (single thread over mutli thread performance). But that is in no way my buying decision already.

I really want to learn about temps in all these CPUs. The Intel consumes 95W. Sounds not cool to me.

 

Multiple times as higher costs for the i9 7900X than for the 7700K and 1600 range of chips. I pass on that price range (around 1000 coins).

 

The looks good comment comes from the fact that I misinterpreted your post about the motherboard issue, I thought that you had decided against going with the 8700k and decided to go with this generation of cpu. Going back and rereading the post you stated nothing of the sort so I just made a mistake sorry about that. A 2.5% increase over the 7700k and all of the unknowns about the new motherboards prices and their release dates makes the 8700k a hard choice to make right now. I am also looking towards a new build and now I think I am in a holding pattern just too many variables at this point.

 

Well those graphs are two extremes as far as gaming goes. We don't need a huge number of cores and we don't just need a single core working like a beast. This is why the 8700k has such good single core score. It has a turbo mode that clocks it higher if only one is used. Again kinda useless for our games, but we'll see soon.

 

www.guru3d.com/news-story/european-core-i7-8700k-coffee-lake-prices-spotted-in-germany.html

Core i7 8700K W€ 389


Amazon Europe r5 1600x £218.99