Was about to upgrade my old PC that crashed in games but then I disabled all OC settings

[o]

Not an informative post, just a little thought for those with older rigs, especially with motherboards that overclocked by default.

TL;DR: your old CPU might not handle the clock rates it could back in the days and with CPU hungry "new gen" games you should prioritize stability.

I never get rid of old rigs, my previous one got me through the entire 2010's and I like to test its limits with newer games.

And it crashes, a lot.

Whether it is BSOD (system_service_exception, irql_not_less_or_equal), application crashes or crash to desktop.

Specs:

- MB: Asus P8Z77-M (Z77 chipset)
- CPU: Intel i5 3570K (3rd gen), with that "K" that stands for "Killer".
- GPU: EVGA GTX 1080 8GB SC2
- RAM: Corsair 16GB DDR3 (edited mistake)
- PSU: EVGA 750W
- Storage: Samsung EVO SATA SSD

Sometimes framerates were perfectly fine, until it crashed or sometimes became increasingly choppy or sluggish (thermal throttling, I bet).

Not all games though:

Unstable:
Starfield, No Man's Sky, Last of Us Part 1, Cyberpunk 2077...

Stable:
Prey, Dishonored, Bioshock remastered, Metro 2033, Ark, RimWorld, Elite: Dangerous, Oxygen Not Included, Grim Dawn, The Forest, Prison Architect, Homeworld Remastered, Stellaris, Battlefield 1, FarCry and Crysis series...

I can't give up on my old rig. So I checked the BIOS settings and that punk "AI Overclock" and "Auto" RAM timings had been enabled for years with some Asus performance profile on top. So I set it to the CPU and RAM's base clock with a normal performance profile and the crashing ended.

Note: I also tested my RAM, replaced thermal compound on the CPU and reinstalled the OS a few times.

So yeah, I'm not leaving modern games and their devs off the hook when it comes to performance and bugs, but we don't know what all those errors are exactly.

I think overclocking became the default when the market was still obsessed over gigahertz. If an older CPU does only few calculations per clock cycle, it's less effective and it's not worth boosting it until it's unstable. And you can still bash new games for being botched, while enjoying more uninterrupted playtime :)

I don't know much about computer hardware but it's my observation at least. If you know more, please enlighten!

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Nothing wrong with OC'ing.
The community still does it.
Your PC was just setup all wrong.
When you had issues you should have checked everything in the BIOS right away.

Modern hardware basically auto OC's ~ There is hardly a need to do it the way we did back around the days of Intel 7th Gen; or older hardware.

[_I_]

2nd-3rd gen is ddr3

can be an unstable oc, oc, test repeat til its stable

[nikin_2021]

hello

[ChickenBalls]

the minimum requirement for Starfield is

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K

cant imagine a 4core 4thread i5 from 2012 would be able to run that game very well

[Agent]

Another is ignore these "optimise nvidia control panel" nonsense videos.

An old friend of mine kept having stuttering in his game, and there was nothing obvious as to why until I had a look at his control panel.

He had set his PhysX to use the GPU instead of letting the programme automatically assign it.

The moment I switched it back to the default state of auto, his stutter disappeared.

So don't follow these clueless youtubers tinkering with settings unless you know exactly what it does.

[Phénomènes Mystiques]

If I do not OC my system while using XMP, the PC will continuously restart itself...

[o]

Wynters の投稿を引用：

If I do not OC my system while using XMP, the PC will continuously restart itself...

I think that's what I have to do with the Intel processor to get the right clock for my RAM, I think XMP the most straight forward setting to get it right.

[o]

ChickenBalls の投稿を引用：

the minimum requirement for Starfield is

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K

cant imagine a 4core 4thread i5 from 2012 would be able to run that game very well

Yeah that's right 👍 I wouldn't advise others to buy Starfield without a capable rig for it.

One could say I am running those new games at my own risk lol

[o]

Stacked の投稿を引用：

Another is ignore these "optimise nvidia control panel" nonsense videos.

An old friend of mine kept having stuttering in his game, and there was nothing obvious as to why until I had a look at his control panel.

He had set his PhysX to use the GPU instead of letting the programme automatically assign it.

The moment I switched it back to the default state of auto, his stutter disappeared.

So don't follow these clueless youtubers tinkering with settings unless you know exactly what it does.

Ohhhh yeah.

I'm not sure how much garbage is on YouTube because I never click on them when I Google stuff (it's always 8 minutes of chit chat for 5 seconds worth of how-to).

I prefer searching with the keyword "reddit" so I know there's a chance the nonsense has been downvoted to oblivion. I read a lot of explanations for each NVCP setting and bottom line is, application-controlled and defaults are right for most situations.

[Agent]

Nicky the Hutt の投稿を引用：

Stacked の投稿を引用：

Another is ignore these "optimise nvidia control panel" nonsense videos.

An old friend of mine kept having stuttering in his game, and there was nothing obvious as to why until I had a look at his control panel.

He had set his PhysX to use the GPU instead of letting the programme automatically assign it.

The moment I switched it back to the default state of auto, his stutter disappeared.

So don't follow these clueless youtubers tinkering with settings unless you know exactly what it does.

Ohhhh yeah.

I'm not sure how much garbage is on YouTube because I never click on them when I Google stuff (it's always 8 minutes of chit chat for 5 seconds worth of how-to).

I prefer searching with the keyword "reddit" so I know there's a chance the nonsense has been downvoted to oblivion. I read a lot of explanations for each NVCP setting and bottom line is, application-controlled and defaults are right for most situations.

There is still good informative videos out there that actually explain what each configuration does, but those generally have less views and don't show on the algorithm.

Like you say reddit is the safe bet or the official forum for the product you are tinkering.

On another note, is there a reason you like to hold onto your PC's instead of just selling them or converting them to a server / media center?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Games have not used PhysX for years but yes no reason to change that setting. Leaving that on Auto is fine.

[o]

Stacked の投稿を引用：

Nicky the Hutt の投稿を引用：

Ohhhh yeah.

I'm not sure how much garbage is on YouTube because I never click on them when I Google stuff (it's always 8 minutes of chit chat for 5 seconds worth of how-to).

I prefer searching with the keyword "reddit" so I know there's a chance the nonsense has been downvoted to oblivion. I read a lot of explanations for each NVCP setting and bottom line is, application-controlled and defaults are right for most situations.

There is still good informative videos out there that actually explain what each configuration does, but those generally have less views and don't show on the algorithm.

Like you say reddit is the safe bet or the official forum for the product you are tinkering.

On another note, is there a reason you like to hold onto your PC's instead of just selling them or converting them to a server / media center?

I like redundancy and flexibility!

I thought of that a lot but servers or don't suit my daily usage. No media server beats the user experience of browsing local drives and double clicking on video files associated to VLC 😄

Selling is chore, storing all the parts just takes more space than a PC case and I prefer having two possible spots I can game if ever I feel like it.

[hawkeye]

AI overclocking can be unstable. Better to do it manually.

I think your cpu is unlikely to play Starfield,. 3 reasons -

1) the Bethesda game engine can crash if the pc can't handle the load
2) the cpu is way below the minimum requirements
3) the gpu is way below min requirements.

Your cpu is a 3rd gen i5. That means it has 4 cores each with 1 thread.or 4c/4t. i7's are 4c/8t. More stable, less stuttering etc. That's possibly the reason for choppy performance.

You could buy an i7-3770k on ebay but it wouldn't be worth it.

I still play many games on an i7-2600. But Fallout 4 just makes it to 60 fps downtown. No way I would try Starfield. RDR2, AC-V and other rpgs run without issue.

[o]

_I_ の投稿を引用：

2nd-3rd gen is ddr3

can be an unstable oc, oc, test repeat til its stable

Ahh! Thank you for correcting that. Yes, it's not even DDR4.

hawkeye の投稿を引用：

AI overclocking can be unstable. Better to do it manually.

I think your cpu is unlikely to play Starfield,. 3 reasons -

1) the Bethesda game engine can crash if the pc can't handle the load
2) the cpu is way below the minimum requirements
3) the gpu is way below min requirements.

Your cpu is a 3rd gen i5. That means it has 4 cores each with 1 thread.or 4c/4t. i7's are 4c/8t. More stable, less stuttering etc. That's possibly the reason for choppy performance.

You could buy an i7-3770k on ebay but it wouldn't be worth it.

I still play many games on an i7-2600. But Fallout 4 just makes it to 60 fps downtown. No way I would try Starfield. RDR2, AC-V and other rpgs run without issue.

Interesting thoughts about the i7's! Back when I picked i5 3570K my reasoning was that 2010's games would remain GPU intensive for a while and the difference with hyperthreading for gaming would be insignificant. That stopped being true.

i7-3770K is that the best that can fit on the Z77's motherboard's socket? I could google that though. But it would have to be cheap, very cheap because the real issue with this oldie rig isn't that I can't play RDR2 or Cyberpunk 2077 comfortably but that it's RAM is capped at 16GB DDR3 memory which is getting really tight. Also I can in no way install Windows 11 whenever Windows 10 reaches end-of-life.

So to keep this rig viable it needs a whole refresh to current generation on the motherboard and RAM too, leaving behind the LGA1155 socket and any processor that goes with it.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

I5 was fairly terrible all the way up until 8th gen stuff anyways. I can't believe you could game this long on a very terrible 3rd gen i5. At the very least you'd need a 4th gen i7 or AMD 8350/8370 just to play some of the more demanding games after 2016 or so at 1080p

I still have a family member playing using my old AMD 8350 build and it's working out just fine, but it also has 32gb ram, gtx 1080 Ti and 2x large ssds using Win10 22H2. It runs games like CP2077 and RDR2 perfectly fine all day long no problems.