Gadgetory

last week Intel's 8700 k-6 core 12 thread coffee-like cpu launched and with it a very curious question from Twitter asking why all of our benchmarks were so vastly different linus and i had nearly identical benchmarks where Paul and Kyle had lower benchmarks and someone was wanting to know what the heck is going on well it was actually noted that anyone running ASUS motherboards were seeing a significantly higher score why is that well it's because ASUS motherboards launched with something called MCE or multi-core enhancement enabled by default which is actually causing some low level or high level depending on the way you look at it overclocking to take place the question is whether or not the consumer is aware of that and whether or not it's something that consumers should be concerned about having something like this enabled when they're not actually aware of it coolermaster is going back to their roots with the new cosmos II 700p featuring a dual curved tempered glass side panel all-metal construction built in RGB case illumination USB 3.1 type seen on the front panel and an open internal layout that is fully modular and reversible learn more about cooler masters cosmos see 700p by heading to cooler master calm now to be fair this is not new multi-core enhancement has been around for a long time in fact you can find threads going all the way back to 2011 2010 and sometimes even older about multi-core enhancement and what it does on the motherboard a lot of people seem to be very confused it makes no sense to buy case qcp you would not overclock it so what asus is kind of done by default is enable MCE and when it recognizes that it's got an overclocking friendly CPU in there it will go ahead and allow it to run all cores at max turbo clock when applicable when things like temperatures and whatnot are actually taken into account so what we've got right here is my 8700 k bench that we put together last week the only thing that's different as I threw a Titan XP on there because yellow but anyway I know is really annoying I know what we've got right here is the exact same test bench 16 gigs of Dominator Platinum 3000 megahertz which as we've talked about before you know if you are not actually overclocking your memory or even enabling the XMP profile you can see we're only at ten sixty nine Mecca remember it's that times two so we're only running at twenty one thirty three on the memory but if I take a look at our CPU you can see right now at idle we're sitting at point six eight eight point eight point six eight volts going back and forth extremely power efficient its sipping the power but MCE as I mentioned is enabled by default on caseview CPU so what exactly is it doing well if we go ahead and bring this to the bench arc-15 if you guys can download this yourself you can follow along at home it's an absolutely free it's a nice little utility just to play around and see what kind of scores you get when you play around over clocks you can see our voltage jumps up to one point two four eight technically one point two five which is higher than the standard voltage that you would see on a non MCE motherboard also - you can see all of our cores went to four point seven gigahertz which is something that typically only the main core whichever core is being loaded the most would go up to four point seven so that on a very basic level is what MMC or multi-core enhancement is doing it as allowing the overclock or the turbo clock to apply to all cores and it's allowing the voltage and a load line calibration and all that stuff to sort of self adjust to go with what it thinks would be stable for an all core overclock because technically turbo boost is an overclock so with our optimized defaults and all out of box settings we got a 1557 now that's the score that prompted a lot of some people on Twitter to be like hey what the heck's going on why is your score higher well again MCE like we talked about now if you recall I am running a water-cooler on here this is the Celsius s 36 the 360 read with three fans because the moment I started to push the over clocks on this core or this chip whatsoever even a little bit it started to get hot so that's why I was concerned about MCE and whether or not the audience or the consumer should know about this because most people don't know that this is actually happening and if it's bumping up things like voltages and you're not running adequate cooling it could cause some problems over time you are actually putting more of a load on your power delivery than you are on the chip and if your motherboard isn't up to snuff then that's something that could cause long reliability issues and that's where companies like Asus really have to draw the line on which motherboards should have MCE enabled or even such a feature if the components aren't up to such a task so if you take a look at our voltages here it looks like 1.3 to 8 volts was the max peak who we saw temperatures we went all the way up to 71 high 7 or low 70s high 60s on water with defaults so keep that in mind and that's one of the reasons why I ended up putting the water cooler on here where I still have the air cooler on the rise in system particularly yeah this is Verizon right yeah 1700 X because this wasn't seeing those types of temperature spikes because until once again with their shitty thermal paste in between the the the heat spreader saving a buck by not soldering that goes all the way back to what has well we've been complaining about this and until it doesn't care about our opinions but I digress these temperatures right here remember are on water so what happens if we disable MCE what's gonna change let's find out so here's a UEFI BIOS here and the asus motherboard if you're running a modern asus board this should look the same pretty much across all of their motherboards it just may not say rog but look right here XMP is disabled that's fine for now we're going to do is hit f7 go to our Advanced Settings because if you if you notice when we're in the basic settings here the easy mode you don't actually see any of that MCE or multi-core enhancement stuff I mean here's your rapid storage technology for running often you can turn that on there easy system tuning this is where you can one-click overclock right you can set it to different settings and then hit apply but we don't want any of this we just want to leave it as is but look at that no there's no mention right here whatsoever of multi-core enhancement if you go into advanced mode f7 and you go over here to AI Tweaker core ratio limit set to auto correlation all cores that's normal asus multi-core enhancement is set to auto now what if we go ahead and set that to disabled right oh yeah we disable it now we get some of our settings that come back but we're gonna do it right now is all we're doing is disabling it we're gonna go back into windows very first thing we're gonna notice right here is check this out look at the core clock see how the four point seven numbers bouncing around they're not just locked at 4.7 the other went all the way down to 4.3 yeah the mac score and all of them at some point will say 4.7 because they're bouncing around but check that out we are not seeing the same level of just pegged at 4.7 because that's what MCE does it applies the max turbo speed it's nice should overclocking beyond the turbo but it's applying the turbo to all the course let's take a look at the voltage right here though if we go up here we can see the voltage came up to where to go 1.37 - okay but we're sitting right around 1.6 it'll peg up to right you can see it's moving around a little bit more diam find it dynamic can't talk dynamically but it's still sitting much lower and remember we are still running we are still running the balanced or the recommended mode right there so if we just go ahead and run this now let's see what happens to try previous scores we went from what a 1577 I think it was forgot to save the score I can obviously impost take a look at it but check it out now we are seeing our voltage come down a little bit 1.21 six remember before it was running almost 1.3 if we look at our core clock check that out it actually drooped down to 4.3 under load not 4.7 which is what we saw last time so now if we look at our score this is probably gonna be closer to what Kyle and Paul were experiencing fourteen hundred and five that's still higher though that's still higher than what cutting Kyle was down in the 1200 range which I still cannot answer that but they were definitely not running aces motherboards I think one think they were running Oris or something like that but you can see we definitely saw a reduction in performance now what if we go ahead and enable performance mode what's gonna happen okay performance mode is now enabled you can see everything still looks roughly the same right the four point seven core is jumping around we're seeing some 4.6 s and four point five if we run the score again put this under load it comes back down to 4.3 it doesn't sit at 4.7 voltages are still the same 1.2 1 6 and have a feeling we're gonna see a roughly identical score so looks like you about 10 14 15 we're with the 1405 so we came up to 14 15 voltages seem to love a lot about 1.2 volts and the memory of course is still running 21 33 so although this is still not as low as like we saw with Kyle system I don't know why his was down into the twelves but we are obviously seeing something happened with multi-core enhancement we're seeing some higher voltages all the way up to 1.3 6 so in a very high level that's what MC is doing it's applying a little bit more voltage so that you can get your turbo clock across all of your cores in fact I think it even works with non K CPUs as well if there's a turbo clock involved don't quote me on that I'm pretty sure that's the case but something else just to be fair though asus is not the only motherboard manufacturer that does this but it's my understanding that as of today i believe that the only motherboard manufacturer that's applying it by default because auto is technically on auto basically says if you see the cpu that it can go in there and play with its gonna do it it's gonna raise the voltage just to do it now what I would like to see actually is that off by default but XMP on by default because you know many people out there don't understand that the speed written on their memory is not the speed it's gonna run out I say this all the time because every time I say it someone comes back and says well I didn't know that thanks for sharing I'm on a mission to help everyone understand your RAM is gonna run at the base clock unless you enable XMP which is actually a ram overclock I'd rather deal with that than dealing with VRMs getting hotter more voltage being applied to my CPU and higher cooling needs when the average consumer isn't gonna be aware of that because check this out if we go in here right now this is that this is the easy mode which we've already showed and we enable profile 1 check this out would you like to apply the Alcorn Han sment remember MCE with the XMP settings for improved performance select no for Intel stock operation sufficient processor cooling is required under all core enhancement they just warned me about that when enabled XMP but they never warned me about that when I booted the system the first time or assembled it if you as a consumer are not aware that this is gonna apply more voltage and it's gonna require better cooling it I feel like this this warning that you're seeing on the screen right here should be applied whenever MCE is enabled especially on a first boot on a system that's applying it by default that's my rant now with all that said it doesn't all fall on the motherboard manufactures oh this is what's important for reviewers like myself to start testing for this in both case scenarios if it's gonna shift by default it's worth talking about it's not like I said but well whatever the same thing right if it ships by default then it's an out-of-box experience that the consumer is going to experience with drinks at a valid test but also it's important for us to test both methods so for all reviewers testing ASUS motherboards it's important to make or any motherboard again it's important to make sure that those types of features are turned off it's one reason why AMD during the rise at launch had recommended that anyone using ASUS motherboards on Intel platforms to compare disable MCE simply because it is not the typical out of box experience that you get in an Intel processor so it makes perfect sense that that was a request of theirs and going forward I think if we're gonna use Asus boards we have to test both which is fine honestly I mean it's it's it's nice to have one button click for extra performance the important thing here is that the consumer isn't being notified about it that's where my rant really lies with all of this I mean I know I sound like a broken record here but it's important transparency is important in fact I just looked at the box again and it doesn't mention MCE anywhere on the box it doesn't mention as a feature of mentions five-way optimization which is not new either that's something that's been out for a while but five-way optimization is something that you typically will let it go through and do its testing and it's like a whole procedure not a overclocking function that's on by default so what do you guys think sound off in the comments below do you think that companies like issue issues Asus I can't talk today what the heck do you think companies like Asus should be shipping this sort of function by on by default or do you think it should be a prompt similar to like what you saw when I enabled XMP allowing the user to say hey this is an option but also here are some risks involved or or what sound off in the comments let me know what you guys think should be happening and as always thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one