Hey guys,
A rather unorthodox set of questions / request here. I am still trying to use Intel HEDT CPUs as my gaming CPUs, due to the excellent chipsets (X299) and all the other bells and whistles that come with the HEDT platform.
Unfortunately, starting with Skylake-X for me, it has just become an absolute pain to maintain the frequencies across all my cores, and with AVX instructions that sets everything back further. To be clear, I have a 7900x with 2 cores disabled and all cores running @ 4.8GHZ with -1 AVX and -4AVX512. I can deal with AVX at -1, but AVX512 for gaming, it's just a disaster - with these clockspeeds the CPU would want to gobble up 400W+.
I'm also a programmer, so I would appreciate AVX512 when compiling (especially after seeing some benchmarks.) However, the bottom line is, as a GAMER, when running Windows 10, you never know when some background process is going to kick in AVX512 intrinsics, and that's going to ruin your benchmarks. Having an option in the BIOS similar to VT-X to disable the CPUID bits for AVX, or especially AVX512, would do wonders for people wanting to game on Skylake-X without the risk of AVX512 kicking in.
I am aware of using bcdedit to disable XSAVE, though that's not a perfect solution. XSAVE is meant to optimize context switching, and goes beyond just AVX and AVX512 (it has some SSE it stores), plus again many of us are fine with AVX1/2 . The Linux kernel already supports full granularity of what XSAVE features to disable, meaning it can do just AVX1/2 and AVX512 (
https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/768884/ ).
If anyone wants the mod the BIOS to trap these CPUID bits, I'll be happy to help and be a guinea pig. I really want to stay on HEDT, but if I'm staying with Intel (foregoing AMD for the moment), their desktop CPUs are becoming no-brainers for gaming performance.
Thanks all, I will have a signature with my rig details up soon.
- Dresk
- Motherboard : ASUS Rampage VI Apex
- Processor : Intel 7900x (2 cores disabled, 8C/16T @ 4.8Ghz, -1AVX, -4AVX512)
- Grapics Card : NVIDIA TITAN RTX
- Cooling : Custom Waterloop w/BlackIce Quad 140mm GTX Radiator and Swiftech Dual MCP35X2 Pump
- Memory : (4) G.Skill DDR4-3200 @ 14-14-14-32
- PSU : Corsair AX1600i
- Case : Corsair OBSIDIAN 900D
- Monitor : ASUS ROG PG258Q
- Drive : (2) Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TiB NVMe
- OS's: Win7 64bit Gaming; Win10 64bit Working