Upgrade or not...need honest opinion

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cryogenic419

n00b
Joined
Dec 23, 2006
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Heres my setup so far (parts that matter anyway)
Asus Crosshair V Formula NOT THE FORULA Z
AMD FX 8150
16GB Corsair ram
Antec 850 watt PSU
Antec 1200
Corsair H80i cooling

I hear that I can put the 9590 chip into this board provided I have the latest firmware. I'm not much of a gamer anymore but I am currently converting all my dvd's and blu rays into mp4's for a HTPC setup. Encoding seems to take forever. I've overclocked this as best as I can up to 4 ghz and higher no matter what I do and it will crash or anomalies happen. I'm convinced its the chip itself. Stock speeds it runs fine. If there is truth to me being able to put the 9590 in this board and having it work, is my cooling solution going to be enough?
Are there any other issues I would need to worry about? Would there even be any noticeable performance gains?

I ask because I have a line on a NIB 9590 for an insanely low price.
 
If if it is an insanely low price, yes! If not, go with an FX 9370 or 8350 instead. I have my 8350 up to 4.6Ghz and my 8320 at 4.4Ghz.
 
Please tell me how to convert DVDs and blurays to MP4's. I have an XBox one I would like to play them with.
 
jmilcher said:
Really man? Completely off topic and equates to thread crapping.
Click to expand...

What the Hell is your problem? I actually offered a solution, you come in with nothing and you accuse me of thread crapping?

Also I see he knows how to do the conversion. Therefore, it is only logical to ask.
 
cryogenic419 said:
Encoding seems to take forever. .
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Forever is subjective. For Blu Ray use Vidcoder or Handbrake, 720p, high profile, crf=18, preset slow and see how it goes. If you use ultrahigh settings at 1080p, of course it's going to get very slow. DVDs should not be an issue, unless you 're doing something terribly wrong. Or your CPU is throttling and you 're not even aware of it.
 
Whats ''insanely low price''? It all really depends on that.

RIght now the performance gain isn't worth the investment if that low price is over $200, I suggest just overclocking what you have further. Something is wrong if you can only hit 4ghz. What Vcore are you using? And are you overclocking with just the multiplier?

If you just overclock your 8150 to ~4.4-4.6ghz you'd be around stock 8350 performance and give you a nice increase in speed. With an H80i you should be able to easily hit 4.6ghz I would think.

The last bios update only shows supporting the 8350. I mean, the 9590 is only an overclocked 8350, but there still is no official support for the 9370 or 9590.
 
If you have a Microcenter nearby, the FX-8320 is only $100. Higher IPC plus lower power consumption should help gain higher performance, and you can probably sell the 8150 for around $60-80 or so.
 
Have you checked your temps while doing the encoding? I wouldn't think encoding would max all cores all the time. Maybe it does though. 4Ghz should be a cake walk for your chip and up to 4.3-4.4 stable on anything. Maybe check your cooler to see if its tight and has thermal compound. Check your bios setting and make sure all is ok. These new uefi bioses have a lot of settings. I prefer the old style myself. This board is a first one with it for me, My Gigabyte ud5 didn't have it. I thought these chips were good at encoding DVDs? If all checks out to be ok with your setup as far as encoding speed goes compared to others using the same chip and software then I would get an Intel setup if its faster at doing it rather than upgrade to another fx.
 
Are you using a multicore encoder? If its only using a single core then it will be slow.

What encoder are you using?

Can you check task manager to see CPU utilization whilst it is running?

Also what are you converting to?
 
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GPU encoding generally sucks and can even produce unplayable media. Maybe NVENC is better, but the quality is still not going to match CPU encodes. FX can be pretty fast at video encodes -- what encoder are you using and what settings? You can always encode more video on a second PC if you can do more than one video at a time.
 
To answer a few of the questions

I am using Handbrake, high profile, none of the filters turned on, CQ set to 21,1080, slow speed (one step below medium) using auto passthru for the audio. To give you an idea Pearl Harbor bluray took a little over 5 hours to encode. Zakk and Miri which is going right now on those same settings is at 2.5 hours with 45 minutes to go. CPU utilization is between 93-100%, all cores being utilized. I know encoding takes some time, but jeez.

I have it OC'ed to 4ghz using only the multiplier and voltage. Voltage is at 1.412, temps with Coretemp show 16c idle, 44C under load with Handbrake, right about 50C when using Prime95 with the Large FFT's. Northbridge seems to sit at 52C when running at 4, if I go to stock speed it sits at 46C. If I go any faster than this I get weird errors from Prime95 and while cpu temps seems to stay in the low 50's the NB temps according to HWInfo64 show it at 66C. I'm not even going to attempt I have to claim all kinds of know how when it comes to OCing, I know enough to get by and get myself a small enough boost. Which is why I got this chip to 4 and said good enough, its stable and heat is manageable and everything is nice and quiet.

As far as I know everything is the bios is good, all the power saving crap is off, turbo mode is off. Unless it was something I had to manually change I left it on auto. I'm sure somebody would take one look at my bios and just go to town and this things running like a raped ape.

The price is half of what you can get it on Newegg for. I figured if all I had to do was drop in a new CPU and get a noticeable boost it would be worth it. Not really looking to overhaul this system or drop all kinds of cash into all new parts knowing we are not far off from DDR4 and that this is probably the end of the line for the AM3+ socket. I know the 9590 is going to generate more heat and I'm hopeful the H80i can handle it without needing to run the fans at full blast.
 
9590 would've cut your encode time down from 5h to 4h 15m 20s .. not really all that great. If you want to encode significantly faster (why?) you need a much faster CPU.. or a multi-socket box.. or several PCs encoding at the same time.
 
Is the time really an issue? Just set the thing going overnight and it'll be done in the morning, or when you leave for work and it'll be done when you get back..
 
The H80i will be enough to cool a 9590, but I'm still unsure if your board will run it because there's no official support. The latest bios release is dated before the 9590's release. You may be stuck with buying an 8350 and just overclocking it. But honestly, it's really not worth the price over the 8150 at this point.

Well perhaps you can only run 4ghz at 1.41v, you just need to increase voltage to go higher. I would try 1.50v and 4.4ghz.
The 8150's value is crap, so juice that chip and don't look back. I've heard plenty of people running 1.50 daily so I wouldn't be scared doing that at all. The extra 400mhz may cut ~15 minutes off your time. Nothing jaw dropping, but the 8350 upgrade wouldn't be jaw dropping either since the most you could probably drop with that upgrade is 30 minutes.
 
Depending on where you live, try to look on craigslist for a used AMD CPU. Up here in the Seattle, I found my used AMD 8350 CPU and Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 for $240 after I chatted the guy down in a few emails from his asking price of $280. I am now (slowly) in the process of putting a "Mantle" system together to have some fun with on the cheap.
 
I think that your VRM temps may be holding you back on your overclock. When you have a conventional tower cooler, the fan on it blows air over the VRMs and keeps them cool. With the H80i and other similar water coolers, you've eliminated that fan. I would suggest mounting a fan over that area to cool the VRMs. I have used the original CPU fan that came with my FX-8120 and I've used a 120mm case fan. As soon as mine get into the low 60c range, my system starts acting flaky. The fan lowered the temps by 20c.

As far as support goes for the 9690 or 9370 goes, my Asus Sabertooth 990FX version 1.0 doesn't have official support for those chips. So I read the ROG forums and found out that Asus changed the VRMs on the newer motherboards. But as long as you have proper cooling and the latest bios, they work perfectly fine. I can run my FX-9370 @5.0GHz if I want to. I just leave it @4.7 so that the heat doesn't kill me. :) I paid $200 for my FX-9370 when I ordered it from Amazon.

Also for some reason AI Suite II makes my fans speed up and slow down. I exit that and Ez Update as soon as they load. Otherwise my PC's fans are steadily speeding up and slowing down over and over. My CPU speed is steadily fluctuating from 1.4GHz to 2.0GHz, 2.0GHz to 3.0GHz, and so on all the way to 4.7GHz. If I exit that program it stays at a pretty constant speed, although I do run most of the saver settings. With AI Suite II on it was actually locking my PC up at times. All I was using it for was to watch temps while playing BF4.
 
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Well, the way I read it was that he didn't increase Vcore when he tried higher clocks, or atleast didn't say he did. 4ghz at 1.41v and needing more to go higher sounds like an average to sub par chip to me, which could be very likely.

You can feel the VRM heatsinks to see if that's the case. If they are overheating it's going to get very hot to the touch. If it's just getting warm, no problem. But I find it very hard to believe on such a decently mid-upper end board that the VRM is over heating (even with no air passing over it, it's such a huge heatsink) with only a 4ghz overclock no extra voltage.
Like I said, just take it to 1.50v and 4.4ghz.
 
Yeah but does it really matter if you encode a video in 4h 30m or 5h? Either way it's a long time and it's not a time sensitive task. The only way to get a worthwhile improvement is to go to a 2P/4P system or encode multiple videos on multiple systems at the same time, the small increases from frequency scaling are IMO not worth it. That is of course up to him, but I'd rather it take 5h and be at a somewhat reasonable power use/heat generation/noise level than 4h 30m and be screaming and tossing out nearly twice as much heat. Even my 2P system would be hard pressed to beat 3h encoding like that..
 
I somewhat agree, which is why I said to just overclock what he has higher just to cut 15 min off. No need to spend a couple hundred bucks to cut 15 more off.
Something is holding him back, whether it's Vcore or the VRM (doubt that though). Must be some settings somewhere.
 
I also recommend the FX8320. mine was super easy to overclock to 4.2ghz which puts you pretty close to the higher up chips. I was able to get 4.9ghz out of my 8320 but it took so much voltage it was only good for benchmarking. 4.4-4.5ghz should be easy with proper cooler and a little time.
 
The 8150 at 4.4 VS an 8320 at 4.4, there will be nearly no real noticeable difference. Probably like 5 minutes off his time.
 
Hrm, pretty sure something is wrong w/ the 8120 setup, unless there is a *huge* leap between 83xx and 81xx. Using Handbrake, my 8350 will do a main movie encode from a BR rip (dvdfab) in ~20 minutes. A dvdrip encode is usually around 6.

8350, CF-Z, no overclock, antec something or other aio wc


(just finished encoding The World's End, 21m29s)
(started a home plex server after the kids started ruining all of their disney & veggietale dvds, love it)
 
A 9590 would destroy a stock 8120, but your 8120 isn't stock. So I would just stick with your 8120 unless the 9590 really is an amazing price.
 
Just a couple handbrake tips..

Normal - not high profile, but make sure you do tick Large File Size
CQ - 16 or 17, I use 16


The main purpose for high profile is to intermediately convert your video from YUV to RGB during processing, which is then converted back from RGB to YUV for actual compression. The only reason to use it is if you were using any of the HB filters (deint, detelec, deno, debl, etc). Image adjustment is cleaner and more accurate in RGB colorspace over YUV, but YUV is much easier to record, display and compress. If you're not editing the image by way of the filters that conversion adds a lot of useless compute.


If space is an issue change your Picture Width to 1280 (so a 720p encode). A higher quality 720 encode will 10 times out of 10 look better than a lower quality 1080 encode. Using above, a 1080 encode can run 8-15GB, 720 encode 3-6GB.
 
Like I said, if there wasn't going to be a huge speed increase its almost like whats the point. Going by what everybody has said here and elsewhere so far even if I went to that chip its not going to make a huge difference. It is what it is, its not like this chip doesn't do what I need it to. I'll just save my pennies til the next gen stuff comes out.

I will have to give the Handbrake suggestions a whirl. I've just been doing what the person who showed me how to do all this did, it worked so I never really questioned it.
 
When you tried overclocking further last time did you increase the voltage?
 
I tried...I would bump it up a tick at a time and give it a whirl. Once I found where the chip peaked out at speedwise I bumped the voltage back down a touch.

Where its at now is the best its going to do with what I've thrown at it. I mentioned before that weird anomalies pop up. I do a lot of music recording, when the CPU gets cranked up higher than 4, some side effects I get are weird buzzes or pops in the audio. I take it back to 4 and problems go away.

Every bench/stressing program I threw at it would lock me up or crash me above 4. If I didn't run those I would be ok, but then theres the audio anomalies.

I honestly think its this chip, I was an EARLY adopter. It does what its rated for without issue, but not much over it. I've accepted it. I've built a damn near identical system (same board, chip, and ram) for a friend and was able to get him to 4.3 before temps became an issue
 
You do have the latest Bios installed on the board right?

What voltage did you try up to? If only like 1.45v it still may not have been enough. I'm talking to just push it straight to 1.50v and get 4.2-4.4ghz out of it. The H80i should be able to handle that.
 
pbassjunk said:
Hrm, pretty sure something is wrong w/ the 8120 setup, unless there is a *huge* leap between 83xx and 81xx. Using Handbrake, my 8350 will do a main movie encode from a BR rip (dvdfab) in ~20 minutes. A dvdrip encode is usually around 6.

8350, CF-Z, no overclock, antec something or other aio wc


(just finished encoding The World's End, 21m29s)
(started a home plex server after the kids started ruining all of their disney & veggietale dvds, love it)
Click to expand...

how long does your dvdfab rip take to finish?
 
pbassjunk said:
The main purpose for high profile is to intermediately convert your video from YUV to RGB during processing, which is then converted back from RGB to YUV for actual compression. The only reason to use it is if you were using any of the HB filters (deint, detelec, deno, debl, etc). Image adjustment is cleaner and more accurate in RGB colorspace over YUV, but YUV is much easier to record, display and compress. If you're not editing the image by way of the filters that conversion adds a lot of useless compute.
Click to expand...


Well, not just that. Let's see what one of the x264 gurus says on that:


Again: An H.264 Profile just defines which encoding features of H.264 are allowed and which are not. In "High" profile some additional and more sophisticated encoding features may be used that are not allowed in "Main" profile. At the same time, "Main" Profile allows some feature that are not allowed in "Baseline" Profile. And so on... There even are some features only allowed in lower Profiles, but these are "exotic" and can be ignored here.

Therefore, when your H.264 encoder is making use of more "advanced" encoding features, the resulting H.264 stream will come out at a higher Profile. For example, when "8×8 vs. 4×4 transform adaptivity" is used, then the stream comes out at "High" profile, because "8×8 vs. 4×4 transform adaptivity" is a "High" Profile feature. Thus, if you need to stick with "Main" Profile, you cannot use "8×8 vs. 4×4 transform adaptivity".

Using more "advanced" encoding features can improve the "quality per bitrate" ratio. Thus you might be able to improve the quality at a given bitrate. But, at the same time, by using encoding features that need a higher Profile, you also restrict the playback devices that will be able to play your stream. For example, a "High" Profile stream requires a "High" Profile capable player. A player that only supports "Main" Profile, cannot play "High" Profile streams.

That is no different between HD or SD content! However when compressing HD content and bitrate is scarce, the improvements you can get form using "High" Profile features (as compared to restricting yourself to "Main" Profile features) may be more important than for SD content. Nonetheless there is absolutely no reason why "High" Profile would be any worse for SD content.
Click to expand...

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=165686

Why does he say that? Well, because of the chart here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Profiles


You may use CQ 11 if you like, but if the rest of your settings is "low" (as it must be to finish a BR in 21 minutes), the result is dropped quality and huge file size. CQ doesn't guarantee same quality on DIFFERENT encoding settings. Is simply guarantees that on the SAME encoding settings, CQ 18 will beat CQ 19 in quality, albeit at higher file size.

High profile CQ 20, with umh:subme 9, trellis2 may very well beat Main proficle CQ 14 hex: subme6. It has been stated more times from Jason Garett-Glaser, that the encoder has been optimized to reach the biggest quality gains with subme9.


If you think that the only difference between the encode that a guy with high settings does and takes some hours to finish and yours with main profile and lower settings, even if you use lower CQ is just size, you are greatly mistaken. The settings don't dictate just the size, but also the quality. For example rd-aware deblocking kicks in only if you use subme=9 or above. Psy-RD is only extensively used from subme9 and above and is thoroughly used with trellis 2.

I really hope that 20 minutes is for 720p. If it's for 1080p, you 're completely throwing the towel. Anyway, these at the end are matter of personal tolerance. Personally i wouldn't touch even a 720p that finished in 20 minutes with a 10 feet pole.
 
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I would switch to an x58 motherboard and a 6-core Westmere-EP chip ..
or..
x79 + 6-core chip :)

It would be a noticeable upgrade.
 
Well...after much fussing about with my system and trying to push for more pretty sure it fried the chip or MB.Even after getting everything reset to default the system was not acting right. 8150 was showing it was running at 3.6, but everything it did was extremely slow, try to play an mp3 and it took like 10 seconds to start. Even wiped the drive and reinstalled Windows. Plugged the 8150 into another working system I have and ran into the same issues. Took the working CPU I had and put in the Crosshair V, tons of bluescreens doing non intensive tasks like surfing and mp3s.Did another fresh install of Windows, same issues.

I had it up to 4.3 and it was running Prime95 overnight, was running fine for the few hours I was awake and monitoring it. Temps were good on everything as far as HWinfo and Coretemp were showing. Just guess my setup wasn't up to the task. Maybe something was a weak link from day 1...shrug who knows.

Looking at Microcenter's website now, might have to take a drive up to Detroit today.
 
If you're building a whole new rig, MC probably has some good combo deals for motherboard and CPU with a 4770k. Even if not, a 4770k is only $250 there, and there's plenty of Z87 boards to choose from. I love my UD4H gigabyte. You truly won't be sorry going Intel. I like AMD, but intel is just faster at everything hands down.

I went from an 8320 to a 4670k, definitely not looking back. But since you do a lot of encoding ETC, definitely shoot for the 4770k.
 
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Yeah that place is really amazing when it comes to pricing. Pretty crazy that I can drive 70 miles each way $20-30 in gas, pay sales tax and still end up paying less overall than I can online.

I love AMD and have been running them as my primary system since the days of the 1333 Thunderbird. Kind of sad I did not go with them this time around but the reality is their high end chip really doesn't have the horsepower.
 
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