Clamibot

As an owner of an Optane 905P, I feel qualified to answer this question. Depending on what you're doing and your setup, you may or may notnotice a difference. If you use Optane with something like an i7 7700K, you probably won't notice a difference vs a standard m.2 SSD. If you are however using Optane with a recent platform (like 14th gen or current gen), you will definitely notice a significant difference. I currently have an Optane 905P installed in my system with a 10900K in it, and the difference is significant. The first thing you'll notice is that the system feels more responsive. I can't assign this particular metric to a number, but it feels snappier vs using a standard SSD. For everyday usage, programs load significantly faster (provided your CPU isn't a bottleneck on load speeds). You can also open a ton of programs at once and the Optane drive will just blast through your file read requests. Optane also excels at small file copy speeds due to the much faster random write speeds vs a standard SSD. Optane also doesn't slow down as it fills up vs a standard SSD, so you can load these babies to the brim and not see a decrease in drive performance. The most major difference I've noticed is in file search speed. When doing development for my job, I osmetimes have to look for particular files. With Optane, I can search the root directory of a Unity project using windows explorer file search (mind you, our projects are pretty big for VR games, at least 30 GB or larger for the repository), and my 905P will have already returned a bunch of results after I snap my fingers (it's still searching, but at least it found a few files right off the bat). File searching is so much faster on an Optane drive. If I were to perform this same task on a standard SSD, it would take a bit before the file search returned any results, even the initial few. For my development workloads, code compiles faster, asset imports complete significantly faster, and builds complete a bit faster. For gaming, games load faster, especially open world ones. Any game that does heavy asset streaming also has loading microstutters gone. Both development workloads and game load speeds will continue to scale with ever faster CPUs on Optane whereas they've already kinda hit a wall with standard SSDs. Oh yeah, also hibernate and wake from hibernate is far faster on Optane vs a standard SSD. So Is file zipping/unzipping. So overall, Optane is a must as a boot drive if you want the snappiest experience, or if you're a developer like me, or just want the best game load times, or if you do tons of file operations (especially with small files), or if you want some combination of the 4. Optane benefits newer platforms far more than older ones as newer CPUs can really take advantage of the throughput of Optane random read and write speeds.

The 9800X3D seems like a really good candidate for Intel's Cryo Cooling watercoolers. Fortunately it's now possible to run those waterblocks and AIOs using modified Intel Cryo Cooling software that doesn't have the stupid artificial CPU restriction check from here: https://github.com/juvgrfunex/cryo-cooler-controller

Looks like Christmas is coming early for someone. What a lucky individual!

Update on my shenanigans: 1.52v on the RAM was not enough to stabilize my memory overclock. It appeared to be stable but crashed. I tried 1.53v and it still crashed, but took far longer. 1.54v has not crashed after an entire work day doing heavy multiplayer testing on our newest VR basketball title. I'll consider this stable as I was also able to load Mass Effect Andromeda without my system crashing, which usually means my CPU or memory overclock is stable as loading onto that game is a very CPU and memory intensive process. 4200 MHz CL15 DDR4 on a 4 DIMM board is pretty impressive. I don't know if I want to take the IMC voltage any higher than 1.5v long term, but I know these current voltages on the memory and IMC are for sure safe long term. Heh screw it, I'll allow up to 1.55v on the IMC and 1.6v on the memory. Nothing should go wrong, right?🤪 I'm begrudgingly going to be moving to a WIndows 10 22H2 install due to software incompatibilities starting to creep up on me. The WindowsXLite downloads brother @Mr. Fox linked me to seems like they'll perform as well as my 2019 LTSC install, so I'll be satisfied if that's the case. I'm happy windows 10 support will be ending soon ish because I don't want any more dang updates! They're incredibly annoying, and my computers always get these updates and force install them when I'm using the machine, usually in the middle of me working or playing a game. I know that's not supposed to happen, it's supposed to update when I'm away from my machines, but it updates during active use for me, so I'll be really happy when the updates stop for good. The updates don't ever contain anything I care about anyway. Having tested multiple versions of windows myself in games, I can confirm that all this marketing surrounding windows 11 is complete BS. I've tested on multiple laptops, a desktop, and my Legion Go. My framerates are around 20% higher in windows 10 LTSC vs windows 11 across all those devices. It does depend on the game, but that's the performance increase I found on average, with most of my newer games showing a slightly greater than 20% increase in framerates. I'm hoping WindowsXLite Optimum 10 classic gives me that LTSC grade performance. You all know I will be doing my game benchmarks to compare. This is gonna be a fun weekend.

Woo hoo! I tried my hand at memory overclocking for the first time today and was able to successfully get a 5% overclock on the memory speed on my 4 dimm motherboard from 4000 MHz to 4200 MHz. IMC voltage is at 1.5v and the DRAM voltage is at 1.52v. This seems stable. I did at first try my hand at tightening timings but ultimately gave up for now as I couldn't get it stable after messing with them for a few hours, so I instead opted for the brute force approach, which I was successful with. I probably should've gone witht he brute force approach first with me being new to memory overclocking. I'll try my hand at tightening timings again another time. After having used a system with an AMD dGPU for a while and getting used to it's idiosyncrasies, I much prefer AMD graphics cards now. Turns out, my black screen driver crashes that I've spent moths trying to figure out weren't because of AMD's drivers sucking. That was merely a symptom of the root cause, which was memory instability. My XMP profile was unstable at stock IMC voltages. Raising the voltage by 10mv made all the stupid crashes go away. So PSA to those with AMD GPUs, if you experience random black screen crashes, consider raising your IMC voltage just a tad. This made all my headaches go away.

We are on page 666 after all.

So I got the Asus XG309CM, and I'm absolutely loving the 220 Hz refresh rate. It's so smooth! Significant improvement over 144 Hz in smoothness and it's starting to get close to looking like real life in terms of motion smoothness. My original reason for getting one is so I can have a flat ultrawide screen since I hate curved screens, and having used a curved ultrawide screen for a while, this flat ultrawide is far better. It's much more comfortable to look at since there's no image distortion (since there's no curve, yay!). Unfortunately because I have now adjusted to the 220 Hz refresh rate and really like its smoothness, my performance requirements have gone up yet again. However, this means I may have a use for dual GPU rigs again, which will be fun to play around with. Lossless Scaling works with a multi GPU setup, so you can render your game with one GPU and then run Lossless Scaling's frame gen on a different GPU. It's essentially like SLI/Crossfire, but better since you get superlinear scaling in most cases (since the frame gen generally takes significantly less processing power than actually rendering a frame), and it works in pretty much any game. The only caveat is input lag, but you probably won't be bothered by it much if your raw framerate is already sufficiently high (in excess of 120 fps), and you will notice the increased smoothness from the higher interpolated framerate much more at this level. Since there's no singular GPU powerful enough to render every game in existence at hundreds of frames a second @ ultrawide 1080p, this is my ticket to lifelike motion in all the games currently in my library, and games I'll be playing in the future. This kind of setup will be especially useful when I inevitably move onto even higher refresh rate monitors (I saw a 480 Hz one, like dang!). Motion clarity at 220 fps is pretty dang good. It's super smooth, but still not as smooth as real life. I don't know what my perception limits are, but I know I'm still not there. Ahh, the sweet dream of planning yet another new build. I guess we're never done here are we? I am currently satisfied with this 220 Hz monitor, but you guys know me and my extremely high requirements. You all KNOW I will eventually get an even higher refresh rate monitor because I want video games to have the exact motion clarity real life does. I demand it because for me, motion smoothness increases immersion for me much more than better colors or higher resolution. Lifelike motion smoothness or close to such is incredibly immersive to me.

Personally I always do my overclocking through Intel XTU so I don't brick my machine if I apply bad settings, plus you can perform adjustments so your setting dynamically. This will depend on your chip's silicon quality, but I can apply a 20mv undervolt at 5.3 GHz with the 10900K currently installed in my laptop (5.4 GHz for the better binned chip in my desktop) and it remains stable for me. Up to 1.5v is a safe 24/7 voltage on this CPU within this laptop. Up to 1.6v is safe if you have really good cooling (like custom water cooling, which we can do on this laptop), so I wouldn't worry about the voltage being 1.3v on your CPU as that's not a super high voltage for this specific generation of CPUs. To answer your question on the sign of the offset (whether it is positive or negative), I'll have to jump in the BIOS and take a look to see where that can be identified. I'm pretty sure there's an option to set the offset sign somewhere. I also have not done that memory overclocking I was going to do over the weekend just yet. Unfortunately enabling the realtime memory tuning option in the BIOS causes the system to not boot, so I can't do that on the fly withing Intel XTU unfortunately.

I'm definitely gonna try that out as I'm starting to run into sofware compatibility issues (both for games and work) with my V1809 LTSC install, so I now have a genuine need for a newer version of windows. Thanks for posting this! I also got an Asus XG309CM monitor and absolutely love the 220 Hz refresh rate. I don't like that the max refresh rate isn't perfectly divisible by 24 or 30 though so I've been looking into some monitor overclocking (which I've done before), but am running into a bit of a snag this time. Apparently, there's a refresh rate limiter on this monitor according to CRU. Does anyone know how to bypass such a thing? I've never seen something like this before on a monitor. I just want to overclock it to 240 Hz, which I think will be doable on this panel.

Stained copper is actually ideal as copper that has had liquid metal leech into it is more thermally conductive than regular copper, although I think this has more to do with the gallium that bonds with the copper filling up the pores on the contact plate, thus making the contact more flat. With the heatsink screw mod performed by zTecpc + my delid and full copper IHS from Rockitcool + liquid metal between the CPU and IHS + liquid metal between the IHS and heatsink + a 20 mv undervolt, I can go up to about a 220 watt load on the CPU side indefinitely without thermal throttling. This is enough of a power and thermal budget to sustain a 5.3-5.4 GHz all core speed in games on either of my 10900Ks indefinitely. And no I don't live in the arctic, I live in a temperate climate. Yeah the only way to get the most out of the CPU in this laptop is through mods. You won't get that stock, but you can get a massive improvement from stock if you put in the effort to do said mods.

I have the PremaMod BIOS on my system but do CPU overclocking through Intel XTU. I do plan on doing some RAM overclocking this weekend as I think I'm starting to get the hang of it from doing it on my desktop. We'll see how it pans out.

Haha yeah that's a good approach in the absence of demos. This really highlights the importance of demos, and I'm not really sure why those mostly went away. After my boss decided we should start offering demos for our games, we got a significant bump in sales. It didn't even require that much effort to make the demos.

My personal policy regarding this matter is to buy the games I want so it pays the devleopers who wrote the game, then I download a cracked version that I can play forever (if necessary) and add that to my vault of offline backups. No moral issue here since I already paid for the game. I'm simply downloading a backup copy that will work forever. As a game dev myself, I have absolutely no problem with people doing that with my games. Fortunately not all games have DRM, so this process isn't necessary for all games. I don't use DRM on my games and never will. It doesn't even prevent piracy so why bother? People who don't want to buy things will never pay for that item. No reason to make things harder for everyone else. DRM is more of a headache than it's worth as it negatively affects honest customers.

Nice RAM overclock! What RAM voltage and what IMC voltage did you need to achieve that?

Good thing I have some Noctua 3000 RPM iPPC fans.🤪