High-End Gaming Kaby Lake Boost The Perfect Monitor
SLI Done Right
Dear Doctor, I finally joined the SLI club with a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Elite Gaming 11GB GDDR5X cards. I also have a trio of Asus monitors that I hook up via DisplayPort.
What is the protocol for connecting my monitors and retaining SLI support? Each cards has three DP outputs, totaling six DP connectors. – Jerry Franco, Jr
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: According to Nvidia’s Surround Configuration Tool, there are seven viable options for enabling SLI across as many as five displays. You need to use one DisplayPort connector on each card, then a third DisplayPort output on either the left or right card. This narrows the original seven possibilities down to three.
Just make sure your center (primary) display is connected to the left-most card, looking at their I/O brackets from the back of your PC.
Overclocking
Hi, Doc. I’ve been a reader of your magazine for some time, and I immediately head to “Ask the Doctor” each month. Being from England, some terminology is different, but the whole PC hardware scene is the same otherwise.
My question is simple, I hope. I have an Intel Core i7-7700K CPU, and I’m curious about overclocking. I’ve never modified a processor, but I’d like to get more performance out of this chip. The whole balance between higher voltages and non-standard bus speeds worries me, though. Is there an easyto-use app that facilitates adjustments without the danger of throwing too many volts at my CPU? –Ade Davis
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Just one generation ago, Intel’s Core i7-7700K was the company’s fastest quad-core CPU for LGA 1151-based mobos (now the Core i7-8700K gets that honor). A 4.2GHz base clock rate was unprecedented at the time, and Turbo Boost pushed the chip as high as 4.5GHz.
How much headroom is there left to exploit? An extra 500MHz, getting you to 5GHz, isn’t unreasonable. You need a good thermal solution, though. Consider a closed-loop liquid cooler, such as Corsair’s H110, or a big heatsink and fan, such as Noctua’s NH-D15. You also need a Z170 or Z270-based mobo. The enthusiast-oriented chipsets make it possible to adjust the 7700K’s multiplier, whereas Intel’s mainstream platform controller hubs are not designed for overclocking.
Now, you mentioned being concerned about non-standard bus speeds. Fear not! The best reason to own a K-series CPU is its unlocked multiplier, so you can leave the BCLK at its default 100MHz. Overclocking is achieved by fiddling with the ratio limits. You can synchronize all the cores to make them operate at the same frequency, or create a curve that relaxes the clock rate under more taxing workloads. In the former scenario, a 50x multiplier pushes four cores to 5GHz. The latter might specify 50x when one core is active, 49x when two cores are used, and 48x for three and four cores.
Reaching those frequencies (and making them stable) requires more voltage. It’s hard to say with certainty what’s safe. Up to around 1.25V works for experimenting with a big
heatsink/fan, while water cooling buys enough margin for a little more, say around 1.3V.
The Doc favors dialing in adjustments directly to his motherboard’s UEFI, locking them in. But if you want a Windows-based utility, check out the Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), available from Intel’s website. Its “Basic Tuning” menu lets you toy around with core and cache ratios, while the “Advanced Tuning” page opens up more detailed performance and voltage options. Built-in benchmarking and hardware monitoring panes are useful for testing your overclock before committing it to the BIOS.
Super Screen
Hey Doc, I wonder if you could help me pick out a monitor. My HP ZR30w is 10 years old, and I just built a gaming PC with a Core i7-7700K on an Asus ROG Maximus IX Hero, a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, 32GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro, 2TB Samsung 850 EVO, 6TB WD Black hard drive, and a Seasonic 1,000W PSU.
I want a new monitor, but there is not a single one that I would upgrade to. I know what I want: a 32-inch 3840x2160 IPS-based display, with HDR and 144Hz G-Sync. It doesn’t exist, though. I don’t want to switch between a 32-inch 4K panel at 60Hz for some games and a 27-inch 1440p one at 144Hz for others. This leaves me to choose between one or the other. Which would you pick? I don’t really want an ultra-wide monitor because I still play a lot of older games.
How have manufacturers messed up on sizing and resolution? Pixel pitch should be taken into account. A 4K monitor should never be less than 32-inch, and 27-inch is perfect for a 2560x1440 screen. I read about the Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ, and was disappointed in its size and DPI. It should be 32-inch.
I apologize for the rant, but it’s concerning when companies cannot make what gamers want. –Dave
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: If you’re unwilling to compromise on those specs, you’ll be waiting a while longer. Asus’s ROG Swift PG27UQ and Acer’s Predator X27 come closest, as you know. But their AU Optronics AVHA-based panels are limited to 27inch. And that size isn’t trivial to manufacture. Recently, both Asus and Acer announced their respective models are delayed until early 2018.
While it sounds like you’ve done enough research to know what you want, don’t write off smaller 4K screens. The Doc has a 28-inch Acer XB280HK and a 27-inch ViewSonic XG2700-4K in his lab for G-Sync/FreeSync testing, and despite their 60Hz refresh rates, games look great at 4K on both. If you’re worried about tiny icons/text in Windows, display scaling was greatly improved in Win 10, worked on more for the Anniversary Update, and made even better in the Creators Update.
Even if there was a monitor with all of your requisites, a single GeForce GTX 1080 Ti averages 60–100fps in many modern titles at 3840x2160, with details cranked up. Given waning support for SLI as DirectX 12 becomes more popular, a second card would only help in some of your older titles you enjoy playing.
Choppy Playback
Dear Doc, I have a Sony FDRAX53 4K video camera and recorded hours of content on a trip to Hawaii (in XAVC-S mode at 3840x2160). I want to play it back on my Samsung UN65KS9000 UHD TV, but it’s only smooth if I output from the camera to the TV via HDMI. If I copy files from my SDXC (Class 10/UHS-3) memory card to my HTPC (an Intel NUC), the content is choppy.
What is the best way to save and play back 4K (XAVC-S) content? Can I burn to a Bluray DVD and play from my 4K DVD player? Is a high-end NAS with Plex Media Server or Video Station on a Synology system the answer? I don’t want to store all of my content on memory cards and use the camera for playback. –Nick
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: 4K video playback is demanding. Have you tried monitoring resource utilization to gauge whether your host processor is struggling? Every generation of Intel’s NUC boasts H.264 decode acceleration. Since the XAVC-S format is based on the H.264 codec, your playback software should be able to offload some of the task.
Lacking enough information to diagnose your issue more thoroughly, rule out over-taxed hardware first. Then, make sure your software supports what you’re trying to do. There is no technical reason MP4-wrapped content shouldn’t play back smoothly, and moving those files to a networked device simply adds another variable to troubleshoot.
Troubleshooting RAM
Hi Doctor, I’m having an issue getting the memory in my PCs running at its rated speed, rather than the motherboards’ default. Both systems contain ASRock Z170M Extreme4 motherboards. One sports an Intel Core i3-6100, and the other is based on a Core i56600. Both sets of memory are from Corsair. The first is a 4x 4GB CMK16GX4M4B3000C15 kit, which is not on the supported memory list (though others in the family are). The second is a 2x 8GB CMU16GX4M2C3000C15 kit, which is on the supported memory list. Both motherboards are running the current BIOS (7.20).
The default memory speed is DDR4-2133, and both PCs are fine as long as I maintain that data rate. But if I try to use the XMP profile to get them going at DDR4-3000, I start getting random crashes and start-up errors. I’ve tried using different memory configurations, including swapping the sticks from one computer to the other, and using one stick on each board, but I get the same issues. I even RMA’d one motherboard, thinking that might be the problem (it wasn’t).
Is there any way to set up the BIOS to make these motherboards stable at the memory’s top speed? –Dan Z
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: Crashes and errors sound like they could be related to insufficient voltage. Corsair states that its DDR4 modules include two XMP profiles. One operates at 1.2V and is officially supported; the second specifies 1.35V and is not. Make sure you’re using the one with a higher voltage setting. If a kit is on ASRock’s compatibility list, it should work.
Start by experimenting with the supported CMU16GX4M2C3000C15 modules and your Core i5. The other kit was designed for X99 platforms, and may have other parameters that affect compatibility with Z170.