Built my first gaming PC on a real tight budget today - Fractal Core 1000 EVGA 430w PSU Pentium G3258 Asus H81M-E 1 tb Seagate HDD 8gb Gskill Trident GTX 650 ti boost Windows 8.1 Pro Seems to be running fine but just wanted to query a few things with you Gurus. Firstly the memory is hard locked at 1333Mhz. (Board Restricted) XMP Profile sticks it at 10 12 12..... What timings and voltage can I change it to that will be ultra stable and reduce latency? Also, do you guys just stick power settings to performance or leave it on balanced? Same question regarding my Nvidia GPU. Adaptive or Maximum Performance? As, I'm on one system disk. Should I do anything with the page file at all? I've only tried Wow so far but seems very smooth @1080p Thanks for your help and looking forward to making some new friends on the site.
windows settings: max power, NVidia settings: max performance (at least for your games). basically you want to tweak as little as possible. the easier the installation the better. in the future some 2133 speed ram would be something to look at.
Thanks SLI, the ram is actually the 2400mhz variant but the board hard locks it at 1333mhz because of the Pentium. Just looking to alter timings on them to get better latency but unsure of correct timings?
ah very nice, then yes I imagine you'll be able to tighten em down good. what exactly is xmp profile timings, 10 12 12 ..and?
Going 2nd hand is a good way to get a decent system on a tight budget... But to answer your questions, timings should be stable at 8-8-8-24. If not then use 9-9-9-27. Pagefile can be disabled.
The graphics card was the only 2nd hand item. $80 CAD. The rest was new $450 including windows (work deal) Thanks for those timings Pill Monster, do I have to worry about secondary timings and what voltage should I use.? Actually I may just leave page file alone being a novice but will see if it causes me any issues down the line. @SLI - I believe it's 10 12 12 34
Excellent guys I'll try a few more games tonight and report back. Gonna be a long night Coming from an Xbox 360, even Wow looks like a frigging masterpiece.
nice one, some games have benchmarks, minimum frames per sec is the important number to judge gains by.
OK so last night I overclocked, only up to 4.2ghz as I'm on stock cooler. Used AIDA, IBT, cinebench, prime and all ran fine without a hitch. I changed the memory timings to 8 8 8 24 @1.5v and that has been running fine showing good improvement in AIDA memory bench. I tried a few different games after all of this - BF3 WoW Mafia 2 Trine Enchanted & original Oblivion Interestingly Mafia 2 is acting a bit weird. Max settings and GPU usage is all over the place (may have to start a thread about it) And Original trine is only using 90% GPU with frames predominantly below 60. Trine Enchanted Edition is running flawlessly . Is this a physx issue with those games? I'm running the latest driver. All the other games run fine, aside from Oblivion hitching a bit as it loads new areas. Benchmarks all seem to be showing improvement with the overclock and they are all smooth.
When you get a chance grab a 128GB SSD for Windows and run all your games off the 1 TB. You can find them for as low as 60 dollars now. It will help a bit with some of that load stuttering.
Go to uefi and enable XMP, I sure its supported even by Pentium Haswell variants. Edit: yep Click on XMP and Select profile1 like on the upper right picture if in EZ mode. In main advanced AI Tweaker it should look like so - by AI overclock tuner select XMP and set back main adv timings to XMP default also its voltage to 1.65v if not already changed @ auto XMP.
XMP profiles only gives 1333Mhz, its a combination of the chip with cheap board unfortunately. However I will be using it for my GF's build as I slowly upgrade my one. I'm not too fussed, it appears to be smooth and will be fully utilized when I get a decent Z97 board. Thanks for taking the time to post that though TJ @BiggerX - An SSD is first on my list of things to add but will wait until I can afford a nice one All things considered for a cheap as chips rig its running very well.