GPU Disappointment

[Nala Spires]

well actually the ivi bridge is the refresh of the sandybridge and clock to clock  you have around 5-10% more perfomance ... not a big deal  between the i5 and the i7 the only diference is that  i7 have hyperthreading witch seems to not affect second life at all  also i5 have 6 mb instead of 8 mb of l3 cache witch in general does not seem to slow down a bit i5 cpus ... so the 2 best cpus for your buck you can have are actually the i5 2500k and i5 3570k  ...now to increase perfomance fearther than that  i guess you can buy a cooler and push your cpu to 4-4,2  witch is kind of "safe" with a good cooler  but again do not expect miracles     also if you want wait  for me to do it .... i am just waiting for my cooler to arrive but is still not available  ...

 

hmmm well sl is not only about fps you can increase the "Smoothness "  by making a ramdisk and moving your texture cache there that made my experience way more smooth when i had only hdd drives  if you have an ssd i guess you are already good on the matter

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

I'm quite happy with performance as it is, I won't make any changes to this computer any time soon.

"Upgrading" to cache on a RAMdisk didn't make any real difference for me, it was on an SSD before that. The only time I really notice any real difference is on startup, the "initializing VFS" is instantly. A friend of mine got a boost in fps though by going from a mechanical HD to a RAMdisk, a big increase even.

And for SL the 3770K won't be the best choice no, but SL is not the reason I bought it, same for the GTX670. Would be nice to see if anyone with an overclocked CPU got any real gains in fps in busy places, rather than a loss by underclocking. I'll keep my eye on this thread.

[Nala Spires]

well as i sayd you shoud not see diference if you move to a ramdisk from an ssd to ramdisk

my previews pc setup was phenom 2 x3 @ 3,3 ghz with 4 gb ddr 2  on windows 7 32bit and the gtx 460 that i use now also
and hd drives no ssd .... so i made a ram disk 768 mb and i tossed  the cache there 700 mb set in size just to be safe

so my fps did not improuve but sl was more fuild  the problem was getting better when i was defraging my hard drive but after 2-3 days again i had the same problem and i was really bored defraging so often on high trafic areas when i was spinning around my camera checking at people etc reading profiles  ... the time i was spinning the client was  freezing for 1-2 seconds really often like 2 times in 10 seconds and often crashes in a ration of like once in 1 - 1/2  hour ... when i moved the cache to the ramdisk i had no more 1 second freezing and less crashing into desktop 

i will test the overclocking that thats a promise but right now over my cpu sitting the default intel cooler witch i am not willing to do overclocking with  

 

about the 3770k and the gtx670 you did well to buy em ... i highly recomend someone to not build a pc just for sl 
hyperthreading can be a real benefactor on video editing and programs that using it  as for the gtx 670 can give a lot of years of maxed out gaming

 

right now i have 8gb ddr3 ram but 3 of em is ramdisk 2gb for windows swampfile and 1 gb for sl cache ...what can i say i am a freak trying to save even a little bit on my ssd  lifetime ...witch i guess is not needed but on the other hand i have hard time utilizing more than 3-4 gb of ram so i have no loss using my ram that way

 

 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Yes I noticed the fragmentation of cache on my previous computer aswell, saying it's pretty bad wouldn't cover it, I'd call it terrible.

Still the loading speed of cache, apart from mechanically "finding" the files, should be faster from a RAMdisk compared to even an SSD. Doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference in performance though as I noticed, meaning something else holds performance back. I now keep my cache there for the same reason you have it there, being paranoid about my SSD lifespan.

I didn't get the 670 for gaming btw, typical games I play are mahjongg and freecell.

My computer is my workhorse and one of the main reasons to buy what I bought was shortening render time for 3ds Max. The 3770k with hyper threading should make a big difference, although I have nothing to compare it to (I can see 3ds Max uses all 8 threads when rendering). The 670 I got for the GPU render, that was a bad decision, since the gpu renderer and the kepler chips still don't work together, that probably won't be fixed before the end of this year when the professional kepler cards come out, the Quadro ones which I thought were too expensive for my use.

If you want to get affordable cooling for the CPU, I can recommend the Scythe Mugen, either 2 or 3. I have the cheaper 3 version and at stock CPU speed I haven't seen temperatures over 45 C I think under full load. It idles in the low 30s. After full load (45 C) it takes about 1 minute to get the temp down to under 40 and about 5 minutes to 36. From there it doesn't go down really, I think the fan speed is the cause of that.

I also read turning off the hyper threading allows higher overclocking at the same temperatures.

[Nala Spires]

mugen 3 is what i am waiting but is out of stock curently i also ordered 2nd pair of fan clips since i have an extra 12 cm fan sitting around left over from my old pcs ninja 2   well the if i stress with prime  my cpu now with intels default coller hits 75 celcious   

 

i am not targeting 4,5-4,6 ghz witch is the limit for the cpu i am targeting for a "safe" 4- 4,2 ghz

 

just call the shop 1-2 weeks ..... at least is not something that i am in desper need ^^

 

[Nala Spires]

so after 2 weeks + of waiting the mugen 3 arrived !!! yay happy etc etc .... but what the hell is this mounting system ? took me 2,5 hours  to install it thank god i managed it i was getting really desperate ! so with a  wide smile on my face i realised that i was 18 celcious bellow the factory cooler ... ok time to overclock ! more or less right now i am at 4,3 ghz and 5 celcious below the factory cooler ...  so my oc stops here ... didn't even need to add extra voltage anyway i promised i will test sl default speed  and after oc so here we go

 

3.5 ghz turbo core off 

min:31

max:35

average:33.5

4.3 ghz turbo core off 

min:36

max:42

average:39.7

thats 18,5% increase with 22% increase on my cpu bear in mind  +-5% margin of error i can't stop people from moving around or tping out .. i can onlybe at the same place with loads of people trying to look exactly from the same angle same height etc etc also this test i did not close sl using intels extreme tuning utility i was able to do it on the fly

again fraps was used benching 1 min each time