3.6Ghz to 4.5Ghz, 28% fps increase

[DannyV]

Everyone knows that Arma 3 is a CPU intensive game, but I wanted to find out just how intensive it really is. Ive seen reports of people upgrading from crappy CPU's to good CPU's and getting great gains, but what if you already have a "good" CPU? Is upgrading/overclocking worth it?

As stated, I already owned a pretty good CPU(i5 4570k 3.6Ghz), its good enough to run virtually any game I've come across(sans Arma 3) on Ultra, like most people I am GPU limited. So when it came time to pick a component to upgrade next I originally chose to get a Gtx 970. However these days I primarily play Arma 3 so I set out to find where my bottleneck was in Arma 3 specifically. I found an Altis benchmarking tool and obtained a baseline of 43fps (average). I then underclocked my GPU by 15%, I was shocked to find that I only lost 1 fps. Next I underclocked my i5 4570 by 15%, my benchmark result dropped by 7fps. So I found my bottleneck. I decided to pick up an overclockable intel chip and settled on the i5 4690k, the best of the i5's. Now, typically if you already have a good CPU overclocking wont really make that much of a difference. Ive seen tests done on a variety of games and the gains are usually only a few fps. But Arma 3 being the unoptimized beast that it is, I was hoping for more. After a few days of fine tuning the CPU, RAM and GPU overclock(CPU overclock affected the RAM and GPU) I ran the benchmark again. I went from 43fps avg to 55fps avg! Thats a pretty huge increase considreing all I essentially did is up the clock by 1Ghz. I havent noticed gains in any other games accept Arma 3, so this was virtually an Arma 3 upgrade only. Considering Arma 3 is pretty much all I play a 28% increase in fps is welcome and money well spent.

Additionally overclocking the RAM from 1333Mhz to 1866Mhz yeilded gains as well, but I never documented the gains. There are people reporting up to a 10% gain in fps, it depends on your machine. I didnt notice any difference going from 1866Mhz to 2000Mhz.

Final notes, if you already have a good K series processor then all you have to do is overclock it. I had to buy a new CPU because my original one was locked. Spend some time and oc your RAM as well, its free and you might get some decent gains there as well. Test your system out and find your specific bottleneck. I want to point out that depending on whats going on in Arma sometimes my GPU is maxed out and my CPU is not breaking a sweat, it depends. Im still going to get a Gtx 970 eventually.


TL;DR Results

My old setup:

- i5 4570 3.6Ghz
- Gtx 760 oc'd +135Mhz/+600Mhz
- 8Gb RAM oc'd to 2000mhz
-256ssd

*43fps on Altis Benchmark*

My new setup:

-i5 4690k oc'd to 4.5Ghz (1.325v, 212 EVO aircooled)
-Gtx 760 oc'd +110mhz/+500mhz vram
- 8Bb RAM oc'd to 1866mhz
-256ssd

*55fps on Altis Benchmark* 28% increase.

[Hash]

Nice got same cpu and cooler but thought be pushing it going over 4.0ghz, so 4.5 is stable?whats the heat at that rate?

[DannyV]

Originally posted by HashSlaYer:

Nice got same cpu and cooler but thought be pushing it going over 4.0ghz, so 4.5 is stable?whats the heat at that rate?

Its different for every CPU, some require more or less voltage for a specific clock. Ive seen people do 4.8Ghz on air, but my CPU can barely do 4.6Ghz if I push it, so I decided on 4.5Ghz. Give it a try. With my CPU at 4.5Ghz, 1.325v and 212 EVO the CPU doesnt go over 55c when gaming and if I stress test it with a realistic (NOT synthetic stress) test like Cinebench or x264 then it doesnt go over 80c. I dont recommend using synthetics like Prime 95, they generate a ton of heat and arent realistic or necessary imo.

[Hash]

Originally posted by DannyV:

Originally posted by HashSlaYer:

Nice got same cpu and cooler but thought be pushing it going over 4.0ghz, so 4.5 is stable?whats the heat at that rate?

Its different for every CPU, some require more or less voltage for a specific clock. Ive seen people do 4.8Ghz on air, but my CPU can barely do 4.6Ghz if I push it, so I decided on 4.5Ghz. Give it a try. With my CPU at 4.5Ghz, 1.325v and 212 EVO the CPU doesnt go over 55c when gaming and if I stress test it with a realistic (NOT synthetic stress) test like Cinebench or x264 then it doesnt go over 80c. I dont recommend using synthetics like Prime 95, they generate a ton of heat and arent realistic or necessary imo.

Cool cheers for info, if I set my pc on fire its your fault now lol jk.

[DannyV]

Originally posted by HashSlaYer:

Originally posted by DannyV:

Its different for every CPU, some require more or less voltage for a specific clock. Ive seen people do 4.8Ghz on air, but my CPU can barely do 4.6Ghz if I push it, so I decided on 4.5Ghz. Give it a try. With my CPU at 4.5Ghz, 1.325v and 212 EVO the CPU doesnt go over 55c when gaming and if I stress test it with a realistic (NOT synthetic stress) test like Cinebench or x264 then it doesnt go over 80c. I dont recommend using synthetics like Prime 95, they generate a ton of heat and arent realistic or necessary imo.

Cool cheers for info, if I set my pc on fire its your fault now lol jk.

I'll get my lawyers ready then :P Feel free to shoot me a pm if you want and I can give you some more detail on my settings and I can maybe help you out. This was my first time overclocking a cpu and learned a lot along the way. For example because I was a noob and did stuff in the wrong order I spent at least 10 hours messing with ram timings, cache ratios, i/o voltages etc trying to get a stable clock when all i needed was another 25mv vcore.

[Hash]

Originally posted by DannyV:

Originally posted by HashSlaYer:

Cool cheers for info, if I set my pc on fire its your fault now lol jk.

I'll get my lawyers ready then :P Feel free to shoot me a pm if you want and I can give you some more detail on my settings and I can maybe help you out. This was my first time overclocking a cpu and learned a lot along the way. For example because I was a noob and did stuff in the wrong order I spent at least 10 hours messing with ram timings, cache ratios, i/o voltages etc trying to get a stable clock when all i needed was another 25mv vcore.

Yeah kinda semi know bout that stuff but just used a preset that came with mother board one setting for 4 and enougher for 4.2 might try that first.

[iTraumatik]

When i was playing with clocks on my old system, i had my ddr3 ram at 1866 and then rebooted and set back up to 2400 after my stable overclock at 4.5 and it does make a noticable difference when i did it. Its too bad some dont listen and just say oooh its probably just in your head , when all the info is out there like this.... Thanks for documenting your experiences for the others

[DannyV]

Originally posted by iTraumatik:

When i was playing with clocks on my old system, i had my ddr3 ram at 1866 and then rebooted and set back up to 2400 after my stable overclock at 4.5 and it does make a noticable difference when i did it. Its too bad some dont listen and just say oooh its probably just in your head , when all the info is out there like this.... Thanks for documenting your experiences for the others

No problem, glad to contribute to the community. I think using benchmarking tools is key since they are reliable and easily replicable.

[Sparviero]

I am running whit a AMD CPU FX 6300 to 4.8 Ghz O.C whit boost to 4 core ,Plus a Cooler Master Hyper 612s http://cdn.overclock.net/8/85/8534f1be_0Xvtbv6.jpeg.

I am running whit average 50 FPS in MP in CLI mode in some nice servers...Tigres Blanc (FR) for example,but even in Chimera servers.
And yes....the difference from 3.5 Ghz to 4.8 it's been very evident in performance together with the boost from 6 to 4 cores.

The only thing is you have to be patient to overclock the CPU,to have a minimum of knowledge to do it right ,and with minimal expense to cool very well the CPU!

Personally, I highly recommend it for situations in videogames CPU bound ... and ArmA III is not merely bound but insatiably greedy for it! :)

[Coco]

i would just wait until BiS gets to the point where they say, the game is ready and the optimization patch/es get/s rolled out.

but go ahead, toast your cpu´s

[DannyV]

@Wasabi. Your ignorance is humorous.

First of all no one is frying their CPU. The temps I'm getting overclocked are the same that someone with the stock Intel heatsink would get with stock clock speeds. They are not even close to being dangerous.

Secondly, the Arma series never has been well optimized, neither is DayZ SA . If you think BI is going to fix long running performance issues with this series with a few patches then your sadly mistaken.

[danmatsuma]

Optimization doesn't work on this game. Many youtube videos have shown that. Overclocking cpu does seem to help. GPU performance is the same on a 770 as it is on a 1080 for Arma 3, which is BS but that's because of a 32bit engine, and poorly optimized. Seriously go google performance on a 1080 and a 770 and it's funny. It's a +/- 1 fps so within margin of error.

I love this game, but damn I wish the performance was better. I have a 1080 oc'd to 1910mhz (base was 1600ish) and it's the same performance I got on my 970 and 980ti. Makes no damn difference. Hell even a stupid 760 performs about the same. Doesn't that just make you so happy.

[White8shadow]

Non K versions of intel chips can be overclocked on the z170 chipset motherboards with an old versions of bios,