Hello Ivan (or anybody),
As you can see from my previous post, last addendum, I was about to hang it up with OC, the numbers not making any sense and not seeming to add much of anything anyway. Be it due to the effect of OC on my PC or my OCD, I didn’t like leaving something so messy in that state, so returned to it once more, and glad I did. I flashed CMOS to get back to base level. I spoke to ASRock techs on the phone, was advised to update BIOS to a beta version. This tech also answered a question that was bugging me. Though my i7-7820X cpu is rated at 3.6 GHz, I couldn’t understand why graduating cpu ratio from default 40X upwards wasn’t crashing my system, but also wasn’t returning improved performance using your benchmark.bat. I reset CMOS, was able to get back to baseline performance, but then saw CPU clock speed reported at roughly 4.0 GHz. I thought if max cpu core speed was set to 3.6, then how could this be? The ASRock tech said this was entirely normal, that I should count myself lucky to have a chip that outperformed its rating.
I didn’t only re-establish baseline performance, I actually saw a 2-3% improvement relative to the mean across 5 iterations of benchmark.bat, so that was comforting. As stated previously, this variance across the first 5 iterations following my hardware upgrades with nothing changed between each run was as high as a whopping +/- 15%, depending on which operation we’re talking about. For instance, alignment stayed rock steady at 26 secs each of the 5 runs, but model creation varied 32% between low high and simplify varied 41%! After CMOS reset and updating BIOS my overall performance not only returned to previous mean, but improved a couple percent as I suggested. What’s also interesting at this point is that the variation between these next 5 iterations dropped, e.g. model creation high/low was only 19% apart and simplify down to 9% difference.
Still perplexed about all of this, I had the thought, might the fact that my first 5 tests were run immediately after installing the new hardware itself have an effect? If so, maybe the smoothing out of the values reflects my “new system getting broken in”. That thought tempted me to try once more turning on OC. This time I used Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility (probably does the same thing as ASRock’s, but provides nice graphical GUI and live stats, which I checked against CPU-Z and Task Manager/Performance). I took the ASRock tech’s advice to heart, don’t go past 44X cpu ratio, then ran benchmark.bat twice. I watched cpu clock speed rise to roughly 4.4 GHz and saw overall performance kick up to 189% and 190% for these two tests relative to pre-hardware upgrade. Thermal climbed as high as 80°C, so feel like I should be happy all around that this config will perform its best with the 44X OC. We’ll just have to see how stable the system is when running much larger datasets, as the thermal wall may push me back to factory settings. Maybe, I should keep a bucket of liquid nitrogen handy ;^)
Anyway, glad to move on. All those other questions about an optimum build remain. I hope this project stays in motion, but if nothing else, I appreciate your providing the benchmark.bat, which really was the tool for the job in-house to see what time it is.
Best,
Benjy