I bought my 4790k's ASUS TUF board awhile back because I wanted something basic enough and wasn't interested in overclocking or tweaking. The BIOS had other ideas. I had to manually configure a lot more things just to avoid overclocking, including setting RAM timing and going through each BIOS setting to ensure it wasn't overclocking in some way. The "optimal" setting would turn on aggressive changes like playing with bus speed multipliers, etc.
As others are pointing out, that "basic enough" CPU is in fact aimed directly at the overclocking market, as (likely) is the motherboard you put it on. This isn't basic at all, this is a high end tweaker rig. It's just a decade old tweaker rig.
There's not a lot, honestly. Pretty much all discrete motherboards are gaming rigs of some form. The basic computer for general users is now a "laptop" (which tend to work quite well for general gaming, FWIW). But the low end choices from the regular suspects (Gigabyte, MSI, Asus) are generally fine in my experience. You do occasionally get a weird/flawed device, like you do with many product areas.
Yeah it really seems the market has bifurcated into "DIY build-a-computer" targeted towards gamers, bedazzled with RGB and all that jazz, and "Buy a used/refurb Dell mini-atx office desktop computer", assuming they don't just default to 'buy a laptop' as you point out.
Few people buy a K processor who aren’t interested in overclocking and tweaking. I wouldn’t be surprised if the BIOS of a gaming mainboard sets the “optimal” defaults on that basis, since the gaming market is all about benchmarks.
I'm pretty much the same as OP. I almost always buy the K version of the processor, but never intend to overclock. I just figure I want the theoretical ability to, and the more volume they have on those SKUs the less likely they are to take it away entirely.
That or I'm just rewarding shitty corporate product segmentation behavior. I never can quite decide.
I do agree over the recent years getting a "boring" higher-end configuration is getting more and more difficult.
Yes, the overclockable chips are better-binned/faster chips even without enabling overclocking. (Unless you're talking about X3D chips, which have most overclocking features turned off due to thermal limitations of stacked cache.)
I bought a Ryzen 2600X with no intention of overclocking it, because it had a higher boost clock than a 2600 and it was on sale for almost the same price. I would guess similar lines of reasoning apply to K-SKU intel buyers.
Similarly I get them because that's what Microcenter includes in their motherboard/cpu/ram combos. Still cheaper than getting the non-K version with everything else individually.
"Few people buy a K processor who aren’t interested in overclocking and tweaking."
The opposite is true: Most people who buy a 'K' CPU dont do any tweaking, I would bet a majority does not even activate things like XMP.
The 'K' SKUs are
1) The highest SKU in the Linup in a given Class
2) They are faster then the non-'K' SKUs out of the box.
> I would bet a majority does not even activate things like XMP
I highly doubt that. XMP is pretty much mandatory to get even remotely close to the intended performance. Without XMP your DDR4 memory isn't going beyond 2400MHz - but you almost have to try to find a motherboard, memory, or CPU which can't run at 3200MHz or even higher. It has all been designed for speeds like that, it's just not part of the official DDR4 spec.
It's less critical with DDR5, but you're still expected to enable it.
nevertheless, both AMD and Intel refuse to warranty processors operated outside of the spec, including when done via XMP/Expo. AMD has gone so far as to add an e-fuse in recent generations that permanently marks processors that have been operated outside the official spec.
As much as enthusiasts would like this to be "normalized" - from the perspective of the vendor it is not, they are very clear that this is something they do not cover. And it will become more and more of a problem as generations go forward - electromigration is happening faster and faster (sometimes explosively, in the case of AMD).
But it is quite difficult to get a gamer to understand something when their framerate depends on not understanding it.
> GD-106: Overclocking AMD processors, including without limitation, altering clock frequencies / multipliers or memory timing / voltage, to operate beyond their stock specifications will void any applicable AMD product warranty, even when such overclocking is enabled via AMD hardware and/or software. This may also void warranties offered by the system manufacturer or retailer. Users assume all risks and liabilities that may arise out of overclocking AMD processors, including, without limitation, failure of or damage to hardware, reduced system performance and/or data loss, corruption or vulnerability.
> GD-112: Overclocking memory will void any applicable AMD product warranty, even if such overclocking is enabled via AMD hardware and/or software. This may also void warranties offered by the system manufacturer or retailer or motherboard vendor. Users assume all risks and liabilities that may arise out of overclocking memory, including, without limitation, failure of or damage to RAM/hardware, reduced system performance and/or data loss, corruption or vulnerability.
it definitely is, yes to both, for both CPU brands, including first-party marketing. There is always a giant "overclocking voids warranty" footnote on those slides/decks, but... there is often not a "at max supported speed" bar or anything either...
It is a scummy little area of technical marketing, it's even in first-party marketing still. I think a lot of ink has been spilled over some real trivial/dumb shit but at least don't lead off showing your product running in an out-of-spec state unless it's clear that's what is doing on.
Fabric overclocking is suuuuper normalized on the AMD side too and it has the same problem. It's higher voltages, and a lot of those "24/7 safe" voltages aren't. On the order of years, under heavy load (not idled down) they do wear out.
I strongly feel like the absolute performance difference is not worth messing around with it anymore. Run ECC at the max supported clock and be done with it. Memory events go into event viewer/dmesg.
> since the gaming market is all about benchmarks.
Why is that? I’m not a gamer so legit asking. It would seem to me that what would be most important is do the actual games that exist perform well, not some random, hypothetical maximum performance that benchmarks can game.
My impression is that people looking at gaming benchmarks are looking at comparisons of FPS and frame times taken from just running recent high end games, which sometimes have settings to run through a repeatable demo for exactly this purpose.
The K chips aren't just unlocked, they're also significantly faster out of the box. I'd guess very few K owners have any intention of overclocking, especially as the gains are very small, and instead just want the higher out of box performance
I bought my 4790k's ASUS TUF board awhile back because I wanted something basic enough and wasn't interested in overclocking or tweaking. The BIOS had other ideas. I had to manually configure a lot more things just to avoid overclocking, including setting RAM timing and going through each BIOS setting to ensure it wasn't overclocking in some way. The "optimal" setting would turn on aggressive changes like playing with bus speed multipliers, etc.