Today I want to talk about 'Celapaleis Reprise'. What is Celapaleis Reprise, why did I pick the parts I did, and how do I feel about the overclocking guides I wrote?
Reprise means 'second movement', a second playing of a similar theme from earlier on. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Celapaleis Reprise is the successor to Celapaleis. That brings up the question, what the hell is a 'Celapaleis'? The story is not nearly as interesting as I am leading you on. It's the name of a city in the video game, 'The Last Remnant', a JRPG by Square Enix (which you may know for their flagship franchise, 'Final Fantasy'). It is pronounced Sell-luh-puh-lay. I've used it as my screen name for a few games, and over time people have found interesting ways to mispronounce it, from the hilarious to the tragic. My favorites mispronunciations include 'Sell-a-see-saw' and 'Sellapotatosalad'.
Celapaleis Reprise is my third computer and the first computer I assembled from the ground up by myself. Originally I wanted to play some games, so I got 'Wizzie Machine' in 2008. It had the superb Q6600 and two 8800gt 512mb cards. 2gb DDR3 ram, but a crappy motherboard made overclocking very hard. Then in 2013 I transitioned to 'Celapaleis', a 4670k build with the 7970ghz edition card, along with 4gb of DDR3 ram. Now in 2015, 'Celapaleis Reprise' is a 6600k build with GTX 980ti.
Wizzie Machine was prebuilt by Cyberpower. Celapaleis was built with friends. Only Celapaleis Reprise is a true solo effort.
Now I will talk about my experiences with my guides.
When I wrote my Haswell Overclocking Guide, I have never overclocked prior to that (apart from dragging a slider in Windows), and there I was with Haswell... I had a lead with the ring bus, I pursued it, I tested the crap out of it instead of speculating and guessing what one should do with it, and I was the person that brought the idea that ring bus overclocking was a needless impediment to core overclocking to the mass audience. With over 18,000 replies, it is the largest Haswell overclocking guide on the internet. I even have more views on my thread than views Linus has on his video guide, and his channel has over a million suscribers. I started out with zero. When you Google 'Haswell overclocking guide', you see my name in the first result. You see it in the Overclocking subreddit. At the time of writing, googling 'overclocking guide' shows my two guides in 5th and 6th result. (This is tribute to Overclock.net's nice SEO, however.)
I am proud of the work I did. I am glad I could help people. It's always nice to see your work pay off. I know that in many ways, what I have done with my guides really aren't that special. In terms of content, I believe my guide is good - but yes, I am biased, but I also had the time and willpower to test things to the end - something most people do not have. I assembled nice graphs and I maintained a chart of overclocking settings.
And so, I helped bust the myth about the 1:1 cache ratio and Prime 'not being certified for Haswell'. To this day, Logan from Teksyndicate refuses to flat out acknowledge his mistakes regarding these two issues.
I skipped DC and with Skylake I wanted a repeat, so I wrote a new guide for Skylake. I've tried to make the Skylake guide better than the Haswell guide. I did do things like power draw testing, and some testing for time-to-crash for stress tests. This testing took far longer than I anticipated, and I got burnt out after an entire week of testing my computer instead of actually using it. While it was busy running tests though, I did read countless random Wikipedia articles and learned a few random things.
I still do charting of overclocking settings, but not much more than that. The guide will do what the guide will do. It still ranks #1 for Skylake overclocking. Most people seem happy with it.
Had you told me that I would make the most popular Haswell overclocking guide ever, with over 18,000 replies, before I bought my Haswell chip, I would have called you crazy. But one thing led to another and here I am. I sound pretty blase about this, because I sorta am at this point. After a while, I was focused on criticisms I've read about my guide. Dealt with some trolls, some idiots, and idiotic trolls. Charted people's overclock, day after day. There were quite a few compliments, and I do appreciate them. Quite a few rep points. But after a while, I'm always just focused on the negative: The burden of making sure my advice is accurate. It's not a good thing to make a thread, and then have some guy come in and be the overclocking expert. On some level it does hurt my ego a bit, but on the other hand, if I'm going to write a guide, it should be because I feel I can do a very good job - and if somebody can waltz in and know more than I do, then something is very wrong. If other people can do a better job than I can, they should be the ones writing the guide.
A guide with a chart is a commitment. Over time I got used to getting compliments. Getting compliments is the new normal, and not getting it is abnormal. It's not good. I guess psychologically speaking, this whole affair has had an interesting effect.
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The next section is very technical for some people, so feel free to skip it.
The parts:
-The CPU: The CPU is really the heart of the computer for me. While many games need much more graphics horsepower than CPU horsepower, the games I play tend to require more CPU power, and in a more specific fashion than just that: I need more single-threaded performance. It makes perfect sense... A game that needs more CPU power needs more because its coding doesn't allow it to use all the cores of a modern-day processor. This means I can't grab an 8-core and call it a day. What does this mean? This means overclocking.
With the last processor, I put the voltage too high for that last 100mhz and I subjected it to too much chess workloads, causing the chip to degrade. It was mostly held at bay by going down to 4.4ghz, a 200mhz drop.
Originally I planned to go with the 6700k but the gains are less than it appears. While the 6700k has more cache and hyperthreading and higher clock speeds, once overclocked the clock speed disparity is totally gone. Hyperthreading is for people who need more cores, which I do not, and hyperthreading with chess is still a major point of contention. The extra cache is immaterial. On the other hand, the supply of Skylake chips were so scarce, and while randomly refreshing the page at SiliconLottery.com at 3 in the morning, I found a chip that can go to 4.8ghz, a $300 4.8ghz 6600k? With the supplies as they were, $300 wouldn't be out of the ordinary for a normal chip. I grabbed it without tax and took the delidding service to get lower temperatures. It's a $50 service, but for the insurance in case something goes wrong and the resealing of the IHS to increase the resale value, I thought it was a bargain.
In the end I got it to ~4.84ghz.
Motherboard:
I wasn't digging the race car look of some of the Gigabyte motherboards. The use of Killer NIC was a turnoff for both Gigabyte and MSI boards. I don't want to have to deal with Killer stuff. Intel NICs are known to be rock solid. I decided to try an ROG board, and with a ram + motherboard deal between the ROG Hero and a ram package I wanted to get anyways, the deal was done. The plastic on the board was removed.
Ram:
DDR4 3000 15-15-15-35. More or less equivalent to DDR4 3200 16-16-16-35. I'll just stick with the lower latencies even though the 3200 kit was black. The red of the 3000 kit worked with the ROG board, but I wanted more black. It can be hard to lower that CAS by even 1. My sticks went to 3050 15-15-15-35 or so. Blegh. DDR4's not really much better than DDR3, even in terms of benchmarks, both in terms of relative price points and absolute best DDR3 kits vs absolute best DDR4 kits. Later on I realized going with DDR4 was the right choice. The DDR3L standard that Skylake officially supported is a low voltage version of DDR3. I thought it meant "low profile". The higher voltage DDR3 requires is detrimental to the CPU long term.
Drive:
The Samsung 850 Pro 256gb was bought because I wanted more space for 6man EGTB for chess. That extra room is great for putting more games, like GTA V and the like. The drive should be able to tolerate an insane amount of writes, so I can write in a carefree manner. It was on sale during Black Friday, but I jumped at the drive a few days prior, thinking the prices wouldn't go any lower. It did, and stayed that way ever since. Oh well. This drive is named 'Celapaleis Reprise' for obvious reasons.
GPU:
The GTX980 ti wasn't my first move. I went to the GTX 980. That was a very power efficient, cool, and quiet card. The 7970ghz had only 3gb of vram, causing me to crash in Skyrim. 980 was the difference between crash and pass at 4gb vram. The 980ti with 6gb of vram gave me a lot of headroom for the future, for games like Fallout 4. It's also over twice as fast as the 7970ghz. The heat was serious though.
GPU Cooling Solution:
I replaced the stock cooler with G45 bracket + x61 280mm AIO cooler, push pull with NZXT fans. This dropped temperatures by 30C at least. Managed to get 1500/8408 out of the GPU.
CPU Cooling Solution:
Reused the D14. Using a new x61 would complicate matters. For example, where am I going to mount the thing? I guess I could mount it up top. However, there's always the possibility of yet more pump whine and I don't want to risk it yet. I can decide on water cooling for the next build.
Case:
While I had a huge boner for the NZXT Phantom Full Tower's airflow and its dust filters, over time I found the traditional full tower form factor to just suck for air flow. For example, the intake fan has to pass through the drive cage. That makes no sense at all. With the Corsair 540 Air, the air is going in, hitting what it needs to hit, and immediately exiting. I highly recommend this case for airflow reasons if you are not a heavy watercooler.
The dual compartment design is smart. I can hide my PSU, SSDs, and a mountain of cables behind it. I also placed a fan controller in the back compartment. Maybe the hard drive can go there one day, that would be my suggestion to Corsair. Oh, and more dust filter options, plus compatibility for dust filters and push/pull out front.
Audio:
I really can't be bothered to go into detail here. I went with the Sennheiser HD800, x2 Rokit 6 g2 for speakers, and Odac/O2 for the dac and amp.
Keyboard:
Due to delays, the Kmac2 upgrade will be a part of the next build.
Mouse:
Reusing Razer Abyssus.
Backup Drive:
Phoenix Down is a 4gb WD external drive that is USB 3 compatible.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9xmgbdJGpA
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