Upgrade to i7-6700k from i7-920 - lower performance?

V

verylostindeed

Gawd
Joined
Dec 27, 2004
Messages
660
Hi all:

Having a weird drop in performance after upgrading from my i7-920 @ 4 ghz to the i7-6700k @ 4.xghz (stock and overclock seem to have the same performance).

Here is the background:

I was running the 920 at 4ghz for many, many years and finally upgraded to the 6700k. I have a custom water loop and a 980ti hydro copper. I was running 290x in CF for a while, but went to the 980ti when I still had the 920. With the 920, the 980ti performed great - 125+ fps on battlefront, battlefield, etc. at 1920x1200 (which I'm running until I get my 27" after ditching eyefinity).

Anyway, I went with:

6700k
Gigabyte gaming 7
G.SKILL TridentZ Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 3200
Kept the same 1200w XFX power supply

Got the new setup up and running and was experimenting with various overclocking setting. But between stock and ~4.5ghz, regardless of speed, I was noticing that performance in Battlefront and BF4 was across the board worse with the same 980ti as compared to the 920 @ 4 ghz. Like in the 60-90 fps range rather than consistent 125+, and even stranger, at some points even seeming to choke down to 30-50 fps. Even playing a graphically simple game like world of warships, sometimes the 980ti will drop to 20-30 fps as well.

Performance shouldn't be WORSE than the 920 with the same video card, right? I'm thinking something is going wrong here, especially in light of the big drops I'm seeing at times. Temps seem fine, and I've tried reinstalling video drivers, etc. Kind of at a loss. Anyone have any thoughts? Any help very much appreciated.
 
Is this on a fresh install? Have you installed all the proper chipset drivers? Are you sure the ram is running dual channel? Do you have the same BIOS settings as the previous board?
 
Going from the 920 to the 6700k does drop you from 3 memory channels to 2. Maybe you're memory bound?
 
Darakian said:
Going from the 920 to the 6700k does drop you from 3 memory channels to 2. Maybe you're memory bound?
Click to expand...
It shouldn't make THAT much difference. Even then the 6700k is miles ahead of a 920 per clock and should boost fps back up to reasonable levels.

I'm betting its a motherboard configuration or O/S issue. Either that, or he didn't change some graphics setting back to the same way he had it before (e.g. forcing AA thru the driver instead of the game, etc.)

OP, when you tested, were you using the same driver version and O/S as you did before?
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
It shouldn't make THAT much difference. Even then the 6700k is miles ahead of a 920 per clock and should boost fps back up to reasonable levels.

I'm betting its a motherboard configuration or O/S issue. Either that, or he didn't change some graphics setting back to the same way he had it before (e.g. forcing AA thru the driver instead of the game, etc.)

OP, when you tested, were you using the same driver version and O/S as you did before?
Click to expand...

Not a fresh OS install. I did install all the chipset drivers though. Ram is confirmed running in dual channel.

I've tried the same video driver, different video drivers, etc. All same result. All the same settings within video driver as before.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
It shouldn't make THAT much difference. Even then the 6700k is miles ahead of a 920 per clock and should boost fps back up to reasonable levels.
Click to expand...
I agree, but memory bandwidth is the only thing that the 920 has over the 6700. If he's loosing frames I can only imagine it's because his application want more memory bandwidth.
 
verylostindeed said:
Not a fresh OS install. I did install all the chipset drivers though. Ram is confirmed running in dual channel.

I've tried the same video driver, different video drivers, etc. All same result. All the same settings within video driver as before.
Click to expand...

Whoa Whoa...

You upgraded your chipset by 7 years and you DIDN'T reinstall windows!? I'm surprised it booted!

186312-Well-There-s-Your-Problem.jpg
 
KazeoHin said:
Whoa Whoa...

You upgraded your chipset by 7 years and you DIDN'T reinstall windows!? I'm surprised it booted!
Click to expand...
I agree. While its technically feasible to swap chipsets, motherboards, and cpu's without reinstall (especially with Win7 and newer), I still don't recommend people do it since there are a lot of chances something will go wrong. Windows should also be barking at him to re-activate due to the completely different motherboard and CPU.

Honestly, I think you are right. Start with a fresh install of Windows to remove that potential variable, then work from there.

Darakian said:
I agree, but memory bandwidth is the only thing that the 920 has over the 6700. If he's loosing frames I can only imagine it's because his application want more memory bandwidth.
Click to expand...
Memory bandwidth is not going to cut his performance in half like that. Corsair did some benches a while back going from DDR3 1600 to around DDR3 2133 (or approx I don't remember specifically) and got around 10-15 fps increase. He is literally dropping performance in half from 125+ fps to 60fps. These games are sensitive to memory bandwidth, but not THAT sensitive. That is a massive performance loss indicative of another problem. I get better fps than he does on those same games (BF4 and Battlefront) using a 2600k and a GTX760.
 
Last edited:
CaptNumbNutz said:
I agree. While its technically feasible to swap chipsets, motherboards, and cpu's without reinstall (especially with Win7 and newer), I still don't recommend people do it since there are a lot of chances something will go wrong. Windows should also be barking at him to re-activate due to the completely different motherboard and CPU.

Honestly, I think you are right. Start with a fresh install of Windows to remove that potential variable, then work from there.

Memory bandwidth is not going to cut his performance in half like that. I get better fps than he does on those same games (BF4 and Battlefront) using a 2600k and a GTX760.
Click to expand...

Memory bandwidth isn't even better on the X58 platform, as the near-tripling of the clockspeed would increase the overall bandwidth far more than the 33% drop in memory bus width would hurt it.
 
Ugh, I just reinstalled the goddamn OS like 3 months ago for an unrelated reason. Was hoping to avoid doing so again, but might have to give it a shot.

Another thing I was noticing is that vdroop seems to be pretty bad on this motherboard. Might need to bump voltage all the way around.
 
KazeoHin said:
Memory bandwidth isn't even better on the X58 platform, as the near-tripling of the clockspeed would increase the overall bandwidth far more than the 33% drop in memory bus width would hurt it.
Click to expand...

lol. Damn you are right. I didn't see he went from Triple channel DDR3-1333 to dual channel DDR4-3200. I thought he was running run of the mill DDR4-1866. 3200 is almost 2.5 times the speed of 1333.
 
verylostindeed said:
Ugh, I just reinstalled the goddamn OS like 3 months ago for an unrelated reason. Was hoping to avoid doing so again, but might have to give it a shot.

Another thing I was noticing is that vdroop seems to be pretty bad on this motherboard. Might need to bump voltage all the way around.
Click to expand...

That mainboard should have some form of Load-Line Calibration. Just set it to the most aggressive LLC and call it good.
 
verylostindeed said:
Ugh, I just reinstalled the goddamn OS like 3 months ago for an unrelated reason. Was hoping to avoid doing so again, but might have to give it a shot.

Another thing I was noticing is that vdroop seems to be pretty bad on this motherboard. Might need to bump voltage all the way around.
Click to expand...

I did mine recently and it honestly didn't take that long including building two raid arrays and moving files. Sit back, eat a meal, and have a drink.
 
Wow I was scared for a moment. About to upgrade to 6700k from i7 920 as well lol. Just waiting for them to be restocked.
 
Checked usage while gaming to see what occurs during slow down?

Is it your CPU utilization?

Is it your Hard Drive usage?

Is it your RAM utilization?

Etc
 
ToddW2 said:
Checked usage while gaming to see what occurs during slow down?

Is it your CPU utilization?

Is it your Hard Drive usage?

Is it your RAM utilization?

Etc
Click to expand...

This thread has come to a conclusion: the OP swapped out the X58 setup for a Z170 setup without reinstalling windows. Im guessing he/she is reinstalling the OS now and will soon discover the performance promised by a 7 years younger setup.
 
Lol at people believing that going from triple channel ddr3 memory to dual channel ddr4 memory would cause performance drops. If that were the case people would have noticed it right away when sandybridge dropped. Instead performance stayed the same or went up. It would have surfaced years ago and would have been well known by now.
 
KazeoHin said:
This thread has come to a conclusion: the OP swapped out the X58 setup for a Z170 setup without reinstalling windows. Im guessing he/she is reinstalling the OS now and will soon discover the performance promised by a 7 years younger setup.
Click to expand...

I guess I am going to reinstall Windows tonight to see how it goes. I'm not completely convinced this is the issue, but we'll see.
 
It's fairly rare that you can get away with a chipset swap without reinstalling the OS. Usually a best case scenario is exactly what you experienced - severe performance degradation.

There's people that will swear up and down it worked for them, but I've tried in both directions (upgrade/downgrade in chipset) to test out what will happen, and it never works quite right. If you're going to go out of your way to purge all the old entries in the device manager, drivers, and registry, you might as well just reinstall anyways.

Unless there's a hardware fault with one of your new components, you're going to see a huge difference after you've got a fresh OS.

The other thing to keep in mind is that traditionally, BF is not fond of constant changes in the settings menu. Sometimes wiping out your config .ini files for a clean slate can help.
 
Vittra said:
It's fairly rare that you can get away with a chipset swap without reinstalling the OS. Usually a best case scenario is exactly what you experienced - severe performance degradation.
Click to expand...

Right - back in the day, it would be completely out of the question to do it. Operating systems have become a lot more tolerant of this sort of stuff recently, though, so I thought maybe I could get away with it, especially since I had just went through the hassle of reinstalling the OS recently. But something ain't right, so I'll give the reinstall a shot. I'm obviously hoping it is that rather than some component issue, which would be much more annoying.
 
Its really not that rare.

I went p67, to z77, to another z77, to z87, to another z87, and a third z87, to x99 without reinstalling windows...Also while migrating SSDs along the way as well.

biggest hangup is usb drivers and storage drivers. But in this case it is certainly possible that your OS is borked a bit.
 
verylostindeed said:
Temps seem fine...
Click to expand...

Meaning?

What kind of temps are you actually getting? What kind of cooling are you running? How do you know that the clock speed is not throttling because it's getting too hot, or like you said, downclocking because of vdroop or whatever?

There are a whole lot of factors to consider when going from an ancient setup to a just released modern one. Obviously the first being the OS. Has to be a clean install. Next up is to ensure that everything is actually stabilized and running as it should. Then you can game on.
 
ajm786 said:
Meaning?

What kind of temps are you actually getting? What kind of cooling are you running? How do you know that the clock speed is not throttling because it's getting too hot, or like you said, downclocking because of vdroop or whatever?

There are a whole lot of factors to consider when going from an ancient setup to a just released modern one. Obviously the first being the OS. Has to be a clean install. Next up is to ensure that everything is actually stabilized and running as it should. Then you can game on.
Click to expand...

As mentioned in the OP, I'm running a custom water loop. Temps never cross 70C under full prime load and I haven't seen any throttling in that instance. While playing the games where I've noticed this, I haven't been actively monitoring for throttling but I would be very surprised if that is what is going on.
 
Perform a fresh install. Clone your current install in case the fresh install doesn't help, so you can revert back easily.
 
I also went from an i7-920 to a 6700k and did have the same issue when I used a certain profile associated with the xmp. I was getting consistent ~1400 in cinebench r15 then adjusted the xmp memory profile and was down to ~450ish. I am guessing that is exactly what you are seeing?

After changing the profile back to normal I believe, it was back up to the normal ~1400 in cinebench. I'll double check this evening for you on the profile and report back.

I have the exact same MB and Ram you are using, different power supply which really isn't relevant to the equation.

Did you make sure you updated to the latest bios on the Gigabyte site? I am using the latest Beta bios on the site on my system, running a clean install of Win10 Pro. Currently just using the built in video as I havent fully switched over to the new PC yet and my old one is still being used.
 
I've been a fairly loyal GB user, but I would never rely on XMP.
Even today, I would still manually enter your latencies/voltages. Just not worth it leaving that to chance.

Those CB results (1400 down to 450) are pretty ridiculous too. Definitely something that requires a second look haha.

Let us know what happens. I think a lot of this may just be teething pains for a new platform. Skylake's been out for a while now, so I'm a bit surprised that this is still going on.
 
confusionisbad said:
I also went from an i7-920 to a 6700k and did have the same issue when I used a certain profile associated with the xmp. I was getting consistent ~1400 in cinebench r15 then adjusted the xmp memory profile and was down to ~450ish. I am guessing that is exactly what you are seeing?

After changing the profile back to normal I believe, it was back up to the normal ~1400 in cinebench. I'll double check this evening for you on the profile and report back.

I have the exact same MB and Ram you are using, different power supply which really isn't relevant to the equation.

Did you make sure you updated to the latest bios on the Gigabyte site? I am using the latest Beta bios on the site on my system, running a clean install of Win10 Pro. Currently just using the built in video as I havent fully switched over to the new PC yet and my old one is still being used.
Click to expand...

Hmm, interesting - I am indeed using the XMP profile. Maybe I should set the same manually?
 
I went from 3770k, temporarily to a x79/3930k, then to a 6700k all on one install of 10 and I had a lot of weird sound driver/cpu usage problems. Reinstalled 10 and they went away - so don't rule that out.
 
FWIW

I'm still on my original install of Win7 pro from release 6 years ago. I've dragged this install across from an AMD FX-55 setup to a Intel Sand Bridge P67 system and now my X99. I've done similar with Win2k. As long as you get the drivers installed correctly and clean up the registry occasionally you should be fine.

If a fresh install fixes ya lemme know, I'll go shut the hell up. :p
 
Darn. I was hoping that the clean install would help also. Is GPU-Z reporting the 980ti as running in a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot? Also might want to monitor the load on the card on a second physical computer monitor if you have that available to you to see if it is running at full speed or fluctuating. Using a different Nvidia driver might help also.

Have you checked the memory to make sure there aren't errors? Just tossing it out there as a possibility.
 
Maybe OP should now run some benchmarks (as averse as I am to it) to ensure that at least things are running how they are supposed to, because then we can narrow it down to it being something system-bound, or the game.

Are you sure Battlefront is running the same quality settings as you had previously? As in, not automatically boosting based on your system specs?
 
QuiteSufficient said:
I went from 3770k, temporarily to a x79/3930k, then to a 6700k all on one install of 10 and I had a lot of weird sound driver/cpu usage problems. Reinstalled 10 and they went away - so don't rule that out.
Click to expand...

I'm surprised it ran at all. I never use an existing Windows install on a new motherboard.
 
OFaceSIG said:
I'm surprised it ran at all. I never use an existing Windows install on a new motherboard.
Click to expand...

My friend did a i7 860 >> 4770K Haswell upgrade.
(I somehow always convince my friends to upgrade muahah)
He literally did nothing software wise to prepare. Just switched out the mobo/CPU and then stuck it back in his case.

I couldn't believe it worked. He didn't contact me once about any system performance issues at all and was basically running the same Windows 7 install since his Lynnfield install (2009/2010).

Only a few months ago did he update his OS to 10, and like I said, didn't hear a single complaint since the switch.
 
Well the OP reinstalled Windows and that's not the issue as it still does the same thing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top