Sn8ke_iis

Unless you really want to spend the money for a 9700K, new motherboard, and possibly new RAM I would just get a 3700X, your motherboard already supports it. You might need to upgrade your BIOS for your motherboard to recognize it. Updating BIOS and changing out the CPU is a lot cheaper and easier than building a whole new system. I can't speak to the performance differences in VR for DCS between the two but the 3700X is the more economical option. Sell your 2700 and save the money for a new graphics card later in the year.

Unless you want to do rendering and video editing going from a 8700 to a 3700X wouldn't really be an upgrade. An 8700K is a good chip and still beats a 3700X in most gaming benchmarks and won't really get you a performance bump in DCS for 60 fps using TrackIR. Wait till the build season in November/December when there will be new chips out from Intel and AMD. New graphics cards should be out before then if Nvidia sticks to their typical timeline. New graphics cards are in the works from AMD as well so hopefully prices will be relatively reasonable. https://www.pcgamer.com/best-cpu-for-gaming/

I'm glad you are using a cooler because if you weren't your CPU probably would have melted years ago, lol. Intel determines their specs based on an open air test bench, there is no requirement for a computer to be in a case. It's more for aesthetics, dust, spills, and to keep kids and pets out. Airflow does help draw away the heat of course, but you can just use any household fan to do that until you have your case set up the way you want it. I use an open air case but everything is on a custom loop with the only fans on the radiator. With a 4790K you want to keep below 80-85 C as well. There is a +/- 5 degree differential of accuracy on the CPU thermometers. T junction max is listed as 100 C like the current gen. But with 22 nm chips you need to be more conservative on voltage, keep below 1.3 Vcore and VID. I have read in guides online that VID is determined by Intel for sorting purposes, which is true but it can still vary from chip to chip and your BIOS settings. I recommend adaptive voltage if your BIOS supports it. Auto voltage settings usually give your CPU more volts than necessary which is why OC guides will tell you to fine tune the voltage lower. But manual can then give your CPU more volts than necessary even when at idle. Adaptive does all that for you. Here are some good general guides that I still reference. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/intel-temperature-guide.1488337/ https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/80807/intel-core-i7-4790k-processor-8m-cache-up-to-4-40-ghz.html I found this guide specifically for 4790K, he uses a Gigabyte motherboard/BIOS. https://www.tweaktown.com/guides/6486/intel-4790k-devil-s-canyon-s-spec-sr219-cpu-overclocking-report/index.html For Overclocking, monitoring, and utilities I use: MSI Afterburner (Free and works will all graphics cards) -good on screen display to check temps while gaming CPU-Z (free) HWmonitor (free) OCCT (free) Cinebench (free) Prime95 (free) AIDA64 (Payware but has a free trial period) ProcessLasso (Donation ware) I went years without learning to overclock as I didn't want to lose my warranty or fry my components. But nowadays OC is very safe and accessible. Intel even sells an extended warranty for K chips.

I looked up your cooler, I would concur with Bit that a bigger cooler (240-360mm) would be more appropriate for a 9900K but looks like the double fan push/pull configuration of the H80i makes very efficient use of the surface area of the radiator. I'd be curious to see the voltage drill down on HWMonitor. Relevant stats are Vcore and VID. It looks like you got a winner my friend. I bought a 5.0 all core binned chip last year and had it delidded but had to pay a premium for it. You could definitely increase your multiplier without hitting 85 C. But with the 9900K you definitely hit diminishing returns for just a little more OC. The voltage will put out a lot more heat with a more aggressive OC. T junction max spec is 100 C but only get close to that for short periods for benchmarking or stress tests as it can degrade your chip over time. The standard rule of thumb is below 85 C and 1.4V for daily use gaming for 14nm Intel chips. The lower the better for a given OC. I usually keep voltage on adaptive per this video. It's the best reference guide I've found for OC in video form. It's helpful for everybody but is focused on 9700K/9900K with Asus motherboards/BIOS. It's a long one but worth the time investment, I don't have a timestamp but somewhere in there he talks about core ratio overclocks for less than 8 cores. I have my chip at 5.2 on 2 cores, 5.0 on 4 cores, and 4.9 on 6 and 8 cores. You will be able to OC higher with Hyperthreading off and only 2 cores for DCS. Hyperthreading on and OCing all 8 cores will get you better synthetic benchmark scores but show no benefit for DCS, lower your OC headroom, and just use more volts and put out more heat. Bonus, it makes a fun drinking game for every time he says "essentially" :drunk:

What he ^ said. I usually use Afterburner even though EVGA cards have their own OC/fan curve software. They both have an autotune that will set the voltage curve for you. You can check in the overclock.com forum for your card and get an idea of what clock/memory are typical for the 1070 Ti. Sometimes the stock boost clock is about all you'll get if it's tuned for the fans and heatsink that comes with the card. And for CPU it's called the 2 core ratio in your BIOS versus all core synced or something to that effect depending on vendor. And then you can leave the other cores at a lower frequency multiplier of the base clock. And the Turbo boost feature will boost those 2 cores that DCS uses and leave the others alone. Make sure you have adequate power supply as well before you get too crazy with overclocking. It will have to transform a lot more current. Double check if things seem hot around the connections or if the cables are getting hot. The voltage drop can cause instability as well. I blew a cheap power supply that I was running too many GPUs off of for a miner a couple years ago.

What problems are you having exactly? In my experience a lot of the problems are caused by user error and/or not deleting fxo and metashaders folders after an update. ED has it plastered all over the place what the Open Beta is. And I'm downloading the update as we speak, I attached a screen snip of the torrent download window. It fluctuates but it bounces between 3 and 8 MB/s. That's a capital B for bytes not bits. Should take roughly 10-15 minutes. Some of you guys need to check with your ISP if they are throttling torrents or maybe use a VPN during the download. I had problems with Comcast at one point blocking the download.

Like Bit alluded to if you overclock the 9900K above stock clocks it can put out A LOT of heat. Good paste and good cooler will make a difference. I've seen it draw 200w + during benchmarks even though the TDP is listed at 95w. TDP is more of a guideline for the minimum cooler and not indicative of how much current it can actually draw. Most of the overclocking videos and guides focus on OCing all the cores which is really not necessary for DCS. All core OC is mainly for rendering. You can just OC 2 cores and you'll get higher clocks with less voltage and less heat and still be stable. Prime 95 is the gold standard for stability testing but I don't feel it's necessary for DCS and typical gaming use cases. It's more if you want to render something overnight. It really pushes your CPU with heavy AVX workloads that rendering software uses. I'm not aware of any game that uses the AVX instruction set. There's usually an AVX offset in BIOS to lower your clock for that kind of software to maintain stability. I've played DCS for hours with no issue on an overclock that will crash Cinebench and the CPU-Z stress tests.

I use a 4 bay PRORAID enclosure that was less than $100 and use "archive grade" drives in a redundant raid array as a share drive for movies and storing irreplaceable photos. Easy Peasy. Haven't had one drive crash yet and going on 4 years now. You can hook it up to your your router directly via USB. But I've found it writes movies faster hooked up to an old gaming laptop I use as a media/HTPC. That hilarious video Demon posted reminded me of when I have to reboot it as it still has the OS on an HDD. I just stare at the screen "COME ON, this is taking FOREVER". You get spoilt when the OS is on NVMe. It boots so fast you only have a couple seconds to tap F2 to get into BIOS. The new ones for PCIe 4.0 on the new AMD chipset are supposed to be faster, but apparently they get even hotter. The NVMe drive and PCH are the hottest parts of my motherboard.

I don't know if you've already bought a SATA but the price on NVMe has really come down in the last year. If you have an ASUS Z-370 I assume your Motherboard supports it. If not they make ones that you can put in a PCIe slot. 512 GB is currently $70 on Newegg and Amazon for the M.2 form factor. That's enough for Windows and DCS. Your system will boot and DCS will load faster than you've ever seen it. Definitely worth $70 bucks.

Couldn't agree more with the what's already been said about the pricing. I wasn't planning on jumping on this right away as I plan to spend most of my jet time in the F-16. But as a Tomcat and Hornet owner, I can't pass up the carrier for $25 bucks. Sold! Good decision, I think you will move a lot of units for people who were on the fence like I was.

Blasphemy! ;) It's for the old Falcon series. IIRC this came with a Special Edition of 3.0 from the early 90's. Pete Bonanni was a USAF Fighter Weapons IP who became one of the lead SME consultants for Spectrum Holobyte and Microprose. I have the book version of Art of the Kill and it's still very relevant. I think he was still a reserve F-16 pilot when this was produced but he didn't want to break any regs and took all his patches off. I have no idea who the audience is. Maybe some employees of Spectrum? Pg. 93 "The Slice"

YEEEEEESSSSSS!!!!!!!! :pilotfly: Pappy would approve...

Radial, I'm not sure how big you want to go (40 inches?) but if you do have the itch to get a new toy there are gaming "TVs". Most of the latest TVs can display at 120 Hz and are either OLED, VA, or IPS panels and essentially just big mass produced monitors. I'm not aware of any with display port connections but they are limited by the bandwidth of the current HDMI connections to 60 Hz @ 4K. I think some of the new ones coming out for 2020 might be using the new HDMI standard with increased bandwidth. They might be limited to 60 Hz native input but they can do a neat trick called frame interpolation which can take a 4K signal and calculate an in between frame to make it appear to your eye as 120 Hz without any extra use of your PC's GPU. They have their own chip in the TV that does it. It works really well on my Samsung and keeps TrackIR smooth with no noticeable increase in input lag. It's just a few milliseconds. You can check out this website: https://www.rtings.com/ They tell you more than you ever wanted to know about your TV or monitor and they do the most thorough impartial tests that I'm aware of. They test specifically for input lag on the gaming settings and with frame interpolation on and off. Perhaps a bigger size might make it easier to see?

I just did a quick test of Sobek's thesis on 2 and 4 cores with HT on and off. This was at 1440p High settings. On 2 cores with HT disabled the cores were both pegged at 100% the whole time and the frame rate varied between 110-120 fps and was kind of choppy on the frametime graph. On the rest of the tests frame rate rate varied between 110-120 fps as well but was smoother frametime wise and the cores never pegged to 100% and the utilization bounced around on the Afterburner OSD between the logical and physical cores. No noticeable difference in the 4 core HT on/off scenarios. I never said you were wrong and I'm not arguing. I said you were confusing terms and that's not what multithreading means in this context. We're talking about hardware multithreading and why for DCS and a lot of games it doesn't really make a difference. Hence you can save money buying the 9700K instead of the 9900K. I understand that DCS isn't a single threaded application. It definitely has more than one thread. From Intel's website: "Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) uses processor resources more efficiently, enabling multiple threads to run on each core... Processors with both Intel® HT Technology and Intel® Turbo Boost Technology (or Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, available in Intel® Core™ i5 processors and above) deliver better performance and can complete tasks more quickly. The combination of technologies enables simultaneous processing of multiple threads, dynamically adapts to the workload, and automatically disables inactive cores. This increases processor frequency on the busy cores, giving an even greater performance boost for threaded applications." https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/hyper-threading/hyper-threading-technology.html From wiki: "Hyper-threading (officially called Hyper-Threading Technology or HT Technology and abbreviated as HTT or HT) is Intel's proprietary simultaneous multithreading (SMT) implementation used to improve parallelization of computations (doing multiple tasks at once) performed on x86 microprocessors." It also states farther down that the process is transparent to the OS but performance improvements are application dependent. From HP's website: "According to Intel [1], hyper-threading your cores can result in a 30% increase in performance and speed when comparing two identical PCs, with one CPU hyper-threaded. In a study published on Forbes, hyper-threading an AMD® processor (Ryzen 5 1600) showed a 17% increase in overall processing performance [2]. Despite these results, hyper-threading your cores isn’t always the go-to solution. There will be tasks in which the speed of your processor does not increase despite hyper-threading. This is due in part to the fact that not all applications and strings of data can efficiently load into a multi-thread core. In an experiment carried out by bit-tech.net, a hyper-threaded Intel i7 Core was compared to a single thread Intel i7 Core after being put through a few different tests [3]. When it came to image editing, multitasking, and power consumption, the hyper-threaded counterpart did worse than the single thread. However, it performed the same or better when it came to Handbrake Video Encoding, the Overall Custom PC Benchmark Score, and playing the popular game Crysis. Hyper-threading the cores in your CPU improves performance and speed on a case by case basis depending on which tasks are compatible with a hyper-threaded core." https://store.hp.com/us/en/tech-takes/hyper-threading-everything-to-know#! I'm just going by what these websites say but if you want to only use multithreading in the software sense that's fine. And according to my tests it only seems to help when restricted to 2 cores. So if you are playing on a 2 core machine that is HT capable I would keep it on but as always YMMV from other variables.

No need to get rude. Just making a suggestion. I'm not sure why you would get offended or take this personally. Perhaps something is getting lost in translation. I didn't realize you were a moderator. You aren't listed as one. I like to build PCs, overclock, and benchmark them. I like to help people with their new builds as it can get a little intimidating for some people.

Never asked for your help and I don't recall anyone else on this thread asking either. I was responding to the OP's question about Intel and AMD CPUs and the advantages and disadvantages for the DCS use case. I'm not an expert in Youtube or Wikipedia. I've yet to make a YT video but I'm learning Blender so I can. I've never made a Wikipedia page either. But they're good to reference for people who have never built their own PC before, are confused about the terminology, or who don't understand that Hyperthreading is just a trademark name for multithreading.

Oh, you're a coder, that's great. I just know a little R and had to take a class in C++ once. I actually need to learn Python. That's the common language in Finance and Economics. Have you thought about helping out with some of the community modules like the A-4? I bet they'd love to have your help. Or maybe put your resume in with ED so you can help DCS do multithreading in future builds.

I had to look up your card real quick as I wasn't familiar with it. That's a really cool hybrid design. I put a hybrid kit on my Titan but it was an AIO. This time of year my ambient room temps are about 19 C. And the GPU starts out at about 30 C at idle and gets up to maybe 50-55 C after a long gaming session. My CPU and GPU are on the same loop though. For DCS I usually play with my CPU OC'd to 5.1 on 2 cores and it hits about 1.3 V in CPU-Z stress tests. That can easily hit 60 C. And the GPU seems to lag about 10 C behind it. I can't recall what it hits after a long VR session in DCS. I've only used EK blocks and fittings but they make great stuff. I use their thickest 360mm rad too for the extra surface area and water volume. Been very happy with it so far. It's not cheap but if you can sell the waterblock whenever you upgrade it's mainly a one time cost so I think it's worth it.

The OS sees a higher number of logical cores, not physical cores. There's nothing abstract about it, it's very straightforward. If you buy a CPU with Hyperthreading, DCS won't utilize the logical cores effectively as it's not currently implemented in DCS. Hopefully with the Vulkan API it will. But they have to convert 4.3 million lines of code so it's probably going to take awhile. You can easily test this yourself by disabling and enabling HT in BIOS and you will see no significant performance difference. The developers can confirm this as well. It's also likely you can overclock to a higher stable clockspeed with less voltage with hyperthreading disabled. But there's variance in clockspeeds and voltage from chip to chip.

This guy explains it really well for those that are confused by all this. He uses a simple program that calculates prime numbers on a single core Raspberry Pi and a 4 core PC. It shows why a monitoring program like Afterburner will show percentage utilization bouncing around from core to core and higher single core utilization while still showing lower utilization for the whole CPU. And this is a great explanation of Hyperthreading (hardware multithreading) which DCS does not do currently and why a 9700K will get you the same approximate performance as a 9900K in DCS.

Even with a 2080 Ti it's hard to push 60+ fps at 4K with all the eye candy turned up. If you use TrackIR to change your views it doesn't work very well in the 60-120 fps range even with Gsync/Freesync. It tends to stutter as you pan around the cockpit. You have to lock it at 60 or 120 to keep the animation smooth. So it might be worth it to keep your current monitor until something new and shiny comes out. With a new gen of graphics cards we might be able to hit 120+ fps consistently at 4K on a single card.

Make sure you check that everything is on stock overclocks and voltages as well. Thermal paste and TIM definitely drys out over time. You might have lost some of the thermal conductive properties. Let us know how it goes.

DCS does not use CPU multi-threading. That is what Intel and AMD call it as well as the definitions I've linked to. The OP's question was in relation to "Intel or AMD". I correctly stated that Intel's 9700 and DCS do not use multithreading. This is why there is no advantage to buying a 9900K or a 12 core 3900X just for DCS unless you just have to have the the highest single core IPC. This could potentially get you a few frames in VR, but given that for TrackIR you have to lock to 60 or 120 fps to keep the frametime smooth I'm not sure what it would get you other than being able to turn up some settings like draw distance or shadows. We already knew DCS has more than one thread. No one in this forum thread has said otherwise. The prefix multi simply means more than one. So by that rationale this forum is multithreaded too. :D I tried running DCS on one core. Windows boots but painfully slowly, and DCS does run but you wouldn't want to play it. It's a slide show on 1080p low. This is Intel's product description of the 9700K: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/i7-processors/i7-9700k.html In the description it says that it is 8 cores and 8 threads. How can a CPU have a thread unless they are referring to hardware threads? This is from the wiki definition for SMT: "Simultaneous multithreading is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of superscalar CPUs with hardware multithreading." https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/simultaneous-multithreading-definition,5762.html "Simultaneous multithreading, abbreviated as SMT, is the process of a CPU splitting each of its physical cores into virtual cores, which are known as threads. This is done in order to increase performance and allow each core to run two instruction streams at once. Intel branded this process as hyper-threading, but hyper-threading is the same thing as simultaneous multithreading. For example, AMD CPUs with four cores use simultaneous multithreading to provide eight threads, and most Intel CPUs with two cores use hyper-threading to provide four threads." So obviously I am not the only one who uses that term. I used to work in IT myself but I don't think anybody really cares. It's common in benchmarking videos to refer to cores and threads for example in the case of the 9900K as 8C/16T. That is the established convention so that's why I'm using the term in that sense. If you guys want to use the term exclusively in the software sense that's fine.