Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsAre you risky enough to go for medium price MB and beast 9900k?
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2019
At first I ordered the 9700k and Asus Z390 Prime-A motherboard.
You may ask Why ASUS board why not Gigabyte etc? I used to use Asus all my life (beginning from core 2 duo processors or even Pentium 4).
So, the system was ready to go and it was fast, quiet desktop with Fractal Design R4 case and Noctua D15 cooler( with two fans).
No more fans than stock ones in my FD case (one for intake and other for outtake at the back).
I OCed the system to 48Ghz at 1.26 Adaptive voltage or so (I don't remember exact number of voltage but 100% it was lower than 1.3v).
And I created my computer and I looked at it and it was nice :)
But then I started to view benchmarks, assessments in syntetic tests and noticed that 9700k is faster than 8700k in most cases. It faster than 7820x in most scenarios but....
But 9900k is much more faster in rendering, photo editing and streaming tasks. In two words, in those cases where multithreading takes place and all real cores + virtual cores are used at their 100%.
And ... I made a decision to purchase 9900k.
It's a costly investment but I thought I would sell my current X99 5820k computer + sell 9700k processor.
It's as good as done.
My 9900k was in my hands and....
And only then I discovered from various reviews about bad VRMs out there for medium line ASUS Z390 boards.
I was frustrated.
How come?
Why ASUS did so?
Should I buy new motherboard now?
My Z390 Prime-A is a medium line MB (in one line with Strix and maybe a little worse than Z390 Maximus Hero).
I started to research and came to conclusion (having tons of sources in the net, including video reviews + comments to them, articles, reviews from community etc etc) that my ASUS Z390 Prime-A will be suffice for 9900k with moderate OC. To which extent - this is the question.
Will I surrender or try?
Am I a risky person?
No I am not.
But... how hard I wanted to try... I could not control myself and I did it.
So... ASUS z390 Prime-A + 9900k + 32Gb 4x8 Corsair Vengence + Noctua D15 + PSU Corsair 650X + two more 140mm fans for my case (one for upper outtake and one additional for front intake)
Thermal paste I applied to the processor is Arctic MX2
Also, I must specifically note for people who will use the config. I used discreet graphics card (XFX RX 580), I did not use internal graphics. Maybe usage of internal graphics may cost you more in temperatures and wattage.
When I first started my computer I entered BIOS and
I STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU TO IT: TURN MCE OFF IN BIOS.
This is the most important thing you can do.
Why?
Main reason to do so is the MCE puts very high default voltage to the processor.
Then increase power limits:
Long Duration Package Limit is 190W
Package power time window is 2sec
Short duration power limit is 220W.
Current CPU capability is 170%
CPU SVID support Enabled
VRM Spread Spectrum Disabled
SVID Behaviour Typical Scenario
IA AC and IA DC load lines to 0.01
CPU Load Line Level 5 (not sure this parameter works at all due to set previous ones to 0.01)
VT-D enabled (ignore if you don't use virtual machines like VmWare or Virtualbox)
VMX enabled (ignore if you don't use virtual machines like VmWare or Virtualbox)
Now, I played a lot with core multipliers and voltages and came to these results:
Core mutlipliers for 2 first cores: 50
Core mutlipliers for another 6 cores: 49
Cache multiplier 43
AVX offset: 3 (I strongly recommend to put this offset)
Voltage: Adaptive (I know, many reviewers and commenters do not like adaptive voltage. I like it.)
Adaptive Additional Turbo voltage 1.25
Adaptive Offset : +0.015
For memory I set XMP I profile (3200Ghz 16-18-18-36 2T)
For your system these voltages may not be appropriate, all depends on your die's quality.
Also I played a lot with offset for the Adaptive voltage (see below why).
Now the system is ready to go.
My ambient temperature in room is 22 C
Tests I used:
1/ Prime95 Small FFT non-AVX version.
30 minutes with 4900 on all cores.
CPU package temp (hottest core as usual): 75 C
Total power to processor according to hwInfo utility: 177W (max)
2/ Prime 95 Small FFT AVX version
30 minutes with 4600 on all cores
CPU package temp (hottest core as usual): 76 C
Total power to processor according to hwInfo utility: 179W (max, though I notices some peaks to 181W rarely)
Where I played the most was the Prime95 with AVX enabled.
The issue was that some cores stopped intermittenly (one or two cores) during full load (in 5 minutes or even in 15 minutes).
The community recommend to increase VCore a bit in that case.
In the continuous process of playing with all this I came the above voltages.
I suppose I could put 50 to all cores and 3 AVX offset and get 80 C temperatures but I did not do it as I don't like so high temps.
Of course, with regular apps and even other stress testing apps like Cinebench, Realbench, Aida or Asus Exteme Tuning Utility you do not get those temps at all.
I double you can actually load the processor that hard (16 threads with 100% load) with any regular app. Let alone for so continuous time...
Also I tuned my fan curves so they spin at 90% when CPU temp goes upper than 65 C.
So at high load even so super silent case like Fractal Design R4 is loud like a rocket.
This all makes me conclude that all those talks about loose VRMs on these boards are no more than just talks.
Of course I don't know for how long the processor + MB will last in my scenarios but it works nice so far (3 weeks) with regular loads: compilation, photo editing, virtual machines etc.
From this point I can compare my old computer (Asus X99-E + 5820k overclocked to 4200Ghz) to this new one.
Forgot to mention, by the way, I use NVME Samsung 960 EVO 500Gb drive in my system.
On older one I used Samsung 860 EVO 500Gb.
Everything runs faster, and works blaze faster on newer PC.
The system with 5820k even OCed at 4200 was somewhat meditative at moments (maybe old Win7 OS with bunch of trash slowed it down or what).
I will make additions to the review when I will have something to add.
