Prime95 AVX - Worth It Not Worth It?

[SlackROG]

I've read so many conflicting things over AVX, but hey, Welcome To the Web of Disinformation Chaos! LOL 😉

1. If you're not going to use the tool and it's full potentional it's not worth it.

2. If you don't use AVX code you don't need it.

3. It damages hardware, at least it was, or suppose to of been a baddy for Haswell. Hmm Knight Rider and Hasselhoff came to mind when reading all the so called Info on Haswell. Hasselhoff Haswell, Haswell Hasselhoff, Hasselhoff Haswell... LOL

4. I don't like AVX it makes my CPU to hot.

4. AVX is not real world, nothing is going to use this, and apps like RealBench are more realistic real world usage.

Anyhow you all get the idea, go out there and look it up and you'll see over and over, this story, that story, hell, what story do you trust...

One thing I do know, I have a stable OC @ 4.7ghz 1.315v with RealBench, but on Prime 29.4b8, forget it, errors, crashes, reboots...

Oh the joys of stress testing, and trying to figure out what apps to use.

Oh almost forgot, the best I've read regarding AVX, it's because Prime95 is suppose to of undercovered a bug in Skylake regarding AVX.

What do you think about all this?

[Silent_Scone]

Current draw is not an issue on a low power platform like Z170, so Prime is still a possibility. Keep the voltage below 1.4v where possible. As has already been said, however, if you don't plan on running AVX workloads you're limiting your potential overclock considerably. AVX offset alluded to by posts on the first page is not a function of Z170, so a little more forward thinking is needed.

Personally i would settle for Realbench as a more real world test.

[SlackROG]

Ok on delid, and yes temps went down a little with the OC @1.28...

I have these Noctua fans for the case;

Noctua NF-A14 PWM x 2 (Front)
Noctua NF-F12 PWM x 1 (Rear)

I wonder without getting to noisy, if there's better fans, that will move more air and cool better?

If I'm going to do something intensive, then I put the case fans on Max Speed.

[aceisme]

SlackROG wrote:


I have these Noctua fans for the case;

Noctua NF-A14 PWM x 2 (Front)
Noctua NF-F12 PWM x 1 (Rear)

I wonder without getting to noisy, if there's better fans, that will move more air and cool better?

If I'm going to do something intensive, then I put the case fans on Max Speed.

Those fans are pretty good. I use 3x140mm Thermaltake Ring intake and 1x120mm exhaust. While they have the same static pressure as your Noctuas, the airflow is only half as yours. I do have 3 of them on the intake side though and the CPU is liquid cooled blowing air out with 2x140mm high static pressure fans on the radiator. All fans are software controlled and fan profiles are set to CPU temp. The entire setup is almost dead silent unless I game. Then the VC fans kick in. Not much I can do about that.
In your scenario, the only way to improve temps inside the case is to go liquid cooled CPU but I doubt it'll be worth the extra cash unless you do a lot of CPU intensive tasks.

As per Silent Scone's post above, AVX offset function is not available on Z170 platform.

[SlackROG]

Silent Scone wrote:
Current draw is not an issue on a low power platform like Z170, so Prime is still a possibility. Keep the voltage below 1.4v where possible. As has already been said, however, if you don't plan on running AVX workloads you're limiting your potential overclock considerably. AVX offset alluded to by posts on the first page is not a function of Z170, so a little more forward thinking is needed.

Personally i would settle for Realbench as a more real world test.

AVX not a function of the Z170, the 6700K has AVX support, so what about that?

As far as volts I'm at 1.27... 🙂

aceisme wrote:
Those fans are pretty good. I use 3x140mm Thermaltake Ring intake and 1x120mm exhaust. While they have the same static pressure as your Noctuas, the airflow is only half as yours. I do have 3 of them on the intake side though and the CPU is liquid cooled blowing air out with 2x140mm high static pressure fans on the radiator. All fans are software controlled and fan profiles are set to CPU temp. The entire setup is almost dead silent unless I game. Then the VC fans kick in. Not much I can do about that.
In your scenario, the only way to improve temps inside the case is to go liquid cooled CPU but I doubt it'll be worth the extra cash unless you do a lot of CPU intensive tasks.

As per Silent Scone's post above, AVX offset function is not available on Z170 platform.

Ok on the fans and cooling, this Noctua NH-U14S does a great job cooling the cpu, and I'm real happy with the case fans...


Hmm like I was saying before, what about AVX on the 6700K then? If I run a bad OC and try to stress with Prime95 I'll crash because of AVX, so if the board isn't supporting it, then how am I crashing? That makes no sense... hmm

[Silent_Scone]

SlackROG wrote:
AVX not a function of the Z170, the 6700K has AVX support, so what about that?

As far as volts I'm at 1.27... 🙂

Read the post again, I said AVX *Offset*, not AVX. AVX offset is not part of the instruction set, it's a multiplier offset implemented by Intel to lower the CPU frequency when AVX workloads are detected.

IMO the answer is fairly simple, stop running Prime and run tasks you intend to run on the system. Realbench is as close as you'll need to get for most scenarios. That voltage likely isn't enough to pass Prime consistently at the frequency you're using.

[SlackROG]

My bad about Offset on the board you were talking about.

I know the board doesn't have AXV offset, I wasn't talking about this, I was only talking about the CPU, and it's support of it.

Also you can never say to someone 'run tasks that you intend to run on the system', because no one knows what they might do in the future. This all comes down to skill set and experience.

I do a lot of things with encoding, so to be honest, I'm not sure if AVX is going to popup somewhere down the road.

1.27v on the OC I have runs the latest Prime95 fine, well at least it did at two different times for 2 hours.

Prime is also not roasting my CPU, so I don't see it as a negative to do.

I also use RealBench and it tests fine too.

Intel ARK 6700K
https://ark.intel.com/products/88195/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz

Instruction Set Extensions Intel® SSE4.1, Intel® SSE4.2, Intel® AVX2

[Silent_Scone]

If you do a lot of encoding then test with encoding. Nothing will pull the same amount of current as Prime will, so it's up to you. If you want to make sure you're Prime stable then do so. Personally, I don't use Prime on any platform anymore. 🙂