Mats wrote:
CoolColJ wrote:
you would think a 6 core 970 would be much hotter having more cores than the 930. And a larger die size than the 3930k, at a not much lower core speed.
The 970 is a 32 nm Gulftown core, and the 930 is a 45 nm Bloomfield, that's why the latter runs hotter.
The 3930K on the other hand is a hot running 32 nm SB-E, and it also has the largest die.
Maybe drop the speed to 4.0 GHz just for the summer? It's easier than changing board.

Next year you will be able to upgrade to IB-E.
Or, get some serious liquid cooling.
Wow, didn't know the i7 970 was that much better and smaller than the 930, good upgrade then, bought it second hand for half the price, 2 weeks ago
I currently have both an Gigabyte X58a-UDR3 and i7 970, running at 4 ghz (1.27V core), 12GB at 1333mhz - just stress tested with Prime, stable this morning.
When I render with all cores, it's not as hot as Prime, so Prime is like worst case scenario

Cooled with a Noctua NH-D14 with fans running around 670 rpm under motherboard control, pretty quiet, hottest core peaking at 66 degrees with 19 degree ambient, but it goes up and down a lot.
I never had the V core this high on this board, usually more like 1.24v at 3.8ghz and the same for when I had the i7 930 a 4 ghz.
It's a running a bit hotter, but not too bad at all for 6 cores, no worse than thequad core 930 at 4ghz. Idles around 33-35 degrees on the hottest core.
I also have the Asus P9X79 and 3930k, at 4.4 ghz (1.31v core when loaded, actual is more like 1.33v), 16Gb at 1600mhz. Cooled with a Noctua NH-D14 SE2011 edition
But only one Silverstone FT02 case, so this is sitting in boxes right now

The difference in speed when rendering the same scene isn't that much TBH
3930k at 4.4ghz does a shade over 1 million samples a second vs i7 970 a 4ghz for 850,000 samples.
970 at 3.85ghz, which is where I normally run it, hits 820,000 samples and runs 5 degrees cooler than at 4ghz
Considering the cost difference of the platforms, but x79 platform has much faster SSD read/write speeds though!

Like double the speed....
But my Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle USB3.0 video capture card doesn't work on the X79, needs an NEC chipset USB3.0 interface and was designed around the x58 chipset, so it's another reason why I'm thinking of staying X58 for a bit - sigh
