Water cooling and Games

[scwam]

My games seem to run a hell of a lot smoother with water cooling. I'm only 40-50 mhz higher than I was with air. I've played two games so far: Fear and NFS Most Wanted and the performance jump in fps seems to be more than going from a 6800gt to a 7800gt. I'm not kidding or exagerating this. How is this possible. Everything is still running the same spec except for maybe 40-50mhz higher cpu speed. I like this!

 

[BLiTzKRiEG]

You are experiencing much lower temps with watercooling...

Heat is a PC's worst enemy (other than a water leak)... It does affect PC performance... So if you are seeing better frames/smoothness in games, its because the temps of your CPU/GPU are much lower than on air.

 

[DFI Daishi]

how are you measuring your FPS?

unless you changed your clocks, there should be zero FPS difference unless you have thermal throtteling turned on.

 

[BLiTzKRiEG]

said he was 40-50MHz higher than he was with air.

 

[DFI Daishi]

said he was 40-50MHz higher than he was with air.

maybe he should clairify if he means GPU, vid card mem, or CPU.

40-50 MHz on the GPU: totally makes a difference.
40-50 MHz on the CPU: not such a big deal.

 

[scwam]

I'm actually not measure any fps, it's all subjective. I am certain that my games are running way smoother for the the short 1 hour that I played the two. I should actually say that the 50mhz increase is at the most as well. Because I remembered that I just recently gamed on air at 2844 last week and the experience didn't feel this smooth at all. But before that I would normally game at 2800. Either way 2800 or 2844 on air didn't feel as realistic and smooth as 2850 on water. The air (2800/2844) was also played at higher ram speeds because they were 280 x 10 with 333 divider and 316 x 9 at 266 divider. Today I played 285 x 10 with 266 divider because my ram simply wont go beyond 280 at 333. Despite the lower ram speed the game experience was noticably better. Also my timings are always set to the same 2.5/3/3/5 1T. I don't like it any other way. I have only installed my CPU waterblock and have yet to install the GPU water block. I'm going to shoot for 316 x 9 at 266 and see how it goes.

Oh, and to make myself feel somewhat justisfied in it not being just a subjective experience I actually ran futuremark 05 and scored the highest ever. It was something like 8200 to 8400 with a beefy 7100 cpu score. I've tested this card several times with the same driver and my highest score has always been 7400-7600 range until today. I can't pass it off as a coincidence that I scored that high on my first shot on watercooling. I'll run it again and see what it scores once more. I ran one instance of Futuremark 06 but it was the same score as air.

 

[DFI Daishi]

there is no way that you can tell the difference between you performance with your CPU at 2800 and your CPU at 2850. there is just no way. with the CPU clocked at 2800, it's not a performance bottleneck to begin with. seriously, there is just no way that you can perceive it besides optimism and hope. i'm glad that you are happy with your watercooling experience and all, but there is simply no way that human perception can pick up that small of a difference unless you were at some REALLY low FPS rates to start with.

there is a reasonable chance that your memory could run at less of a divider if you move to 2T timings. i know that it's not ideal, but after tinkering around to see what would work better, i found that 2T at higher speeds was more responsive in my games in terms of loading textures upon entering new rooms. my own memory peaked out at about 270 with 1T and then went up to 300 with 2T.

all of that being said, did you have cool and quiet disabled before and after watercooling? dynamic overclocking?

 

[scwam]

No, I'm not saying that the 50 mhz is resulting in the difference. I am saying that the games just seem to play much smoother on watercooling period. Which yeah, makes no sense to me too. I know 50mhz would not be noticable. I was just stating the facts of what I usually play at but not inferring that the 50mhz gave the game experience a boost. After installing water cooling the games just have a lot less studder and feel a lot faster and smooth, regardless of a wimpy 50mhz or not.

"there is a reasonable chance that your memory could run at less of a divider if you move to 2T timings. i know that it's not ideal, but after tinkering around to see what would work better, i found that 2T at higher speeds was more responsive in my games in terms of loading textures upon entering new rooms. my own memory peaked out at about 270 with 1T and then went up to 300 with 2T."

I've tried 2T but with ceilings of my fsb and cpu multiplier, 1T pretty much covers everything up to about 318-320 fsb. I've tried varying combinations of 2T and slacker timings after that but the cpu multiplier just drops dramatically after that. I believe my cpu multiplier/fsb combination is very limited from 318 and on.

"all of that being said, did you have cool and quiet disabled before and after watercooling? dynamic overclocking?:

I don't have cool and quiet installed. What is dynamic overclocking? I always use the bios or systool to do my settings depending on weather I'm already in windows or just turning the computer on.

 

[BillR]

how are you measuring your FPS?

unless you changed your clocks, there should be zero FPS difference unless you have thermal throtteling turned on.

You may well have hit the nail right on the head. Could well be his CPU dropped way back due to heat and that would be noticeable.

 

[madmat]

It could also be that his ram was giving out small errors at the higher divider and after slowing it down with the lower ratio the errors are gone and as a result he's getting higher scores and smoother gameplay.

 

[scwam]

How do I overide this "Thermal throttling"? Where is this located under the bios? I've never heard of it.

"It could also be that his ram was giving out small errors at the higher divider and after slowing it down with the lower ratio the errors are gone and as a result he's getting higher scores and smoother gameplay."

I also wondered if this was the case. I've also wondered if maybe heat was creating "non-lethal" errors so-to-speak on the cpu that still allowed gameplay but slowed the game down. I began to think about it more and the games seem to move as though a video replay that was previously set to -0.2 on the speed and now plays like +0.5 if that makes sense.

I just did another run of 3dmark 05, this time 316 x 9 @ 266 2.5/3/3/5 1T instead of of the 285 x 10 @ 266 2.5/3/3/5 1T I did earlier today. I scored the same range as ealier ~8250/~7050. And I remembered just now that I did an aquamark test earlier today too and it broke the 100k mark. I've run that test at least 10 times on these same drivers installed from day 1 and the highest I had yet to hit was 98000 until today.

 

[DFI Daishi]

cool and quiet should be an option in you bios. the location varies by brand. depending on the load that the CPU is under, and the priority of the thread that is putting the CPU undre load, the motherboard adusts the CPU speed to reduce heat load and allow for slower CPU fan speeds when the CPU is idle or near idle. i use thermal throttling interchangeably with this term because it's what a similar technology used to be called on AMD systems: if things get too hot, the motherboard down-clocks the CPU.

dynamic overclocking is what MSI calls this feature. AI NOs is what asus calls it. i'm sure that various companies have different names for it, inculding "high performance mode." simply put, it is a BIOS option that, when selected, gives your motherboard permission to OC the CPU and memory, depending on temperatures and CPU load. if this option is enabled, and the CPU temps are lower, as a result of you switching to watercooling, the motherboard will attempt to OC the CPU further than it did when your system was running warmer.