Aurora R1, Spectre/Meltdown, RTX 2080 Ti + Power Supply

Only here for this one post to supply info then gone again.

My current specs:

Aurora 2009, i7 990x oc to 4.14, Corsair 12GB CMT12GX3M6A1866C9 memory, 2TB 860evo SSD,  Corsair Hydro Series H80i V2 Water / Liquid CPU Cooler. 120mm, Two push/pull NF-F12 iPPC-3000 PWM Fan with Focused Flow, RTX 2080 EVGA.

I intend to replace the memory above with CORSAIR Vengeance 24GB (6 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ24GX3M6A1600C9. I'm aware it will run at 1333 but will attempt to overclock it a bit as the "Amount of Ram" is more critical with running RTX video cards than the speed.

Currently running BF5 at "High Fidelity" (all ultra settings), 120hz on the monitor limiting fps to 60 fps. Tomb Raider Shadow also at max settings.

 

First of all the 2009 Aurora i7 900 series of chips will not work with an RTX series of card or even most new games unless you disable the Spectre/Meltdown fix that was installed during Window's update. These older chip's performance was reduced by 30 to 40 percent by this software. After disabling the Window's "fix" my 990x performance increased close to 40 percent allowing me to run BF5 as described earlier. My router and virus protection plus some common sense will keep these bugs from causing any issues.

To turn off these two protections and increase your processor performance visit this site:

https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

The 850 power supply will acommodate the RTX 2080 ti. The cards do come in various sizes from length to slot size (from 2 to 2.75, or three slots). The cards work hard and will generate considerable heat especially when the Aurora case is closed as the heat escapes into the case as opposed to a blower type card. I leave my case open and temps on the card are reuced up to 10-15c. Some of the cards can be heavy and may strain the PCI slot so take that into consideration. I currenty have the EVGA 2080 XC and I found no problem with the card putting any pressure on the PCI. The 2080 ti, especially the Ultra models, are much heavier and their pressure on the PCI should be considered when installing.

The RTX 2080 series card has eight GB of ram. This is sufficient for today but BF5 uses all of it. To compensate the game(BF5) and card will allocate system memory. At 12GB of 1866 ram the CPU has been starved on occassion and a crash can occure. The CPU needs more ram at the higher game settings for rendering or the i7 900 series chip will bottleneck serverly.

Currently with the setup I have I only have a three percent bottleneck which is excellent. I am stepping up to the EVGA 2080 ti Black XC so that will increase the bottleneck some but the 2080 ti extra three GB memory will hopefully prevent having to allocate system memory to the card.

New 990x chips are about exhausted but were selling for 499 recently. Used 990x chips are plentiful. The link below is from a good seller:

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Core-i7-990X-Extreme-Processor/dp/B004NRQDQQ

You will still need to overclock the 990x although at lower game quality settings it would not be necessary. Cass-Ole posted this information a while ago for OCing the i7 980. It works for the 990x as well but I adjusted a few things and will list them separately:

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-General-Read-Only/Alienware-aurora-r4-overclock-help-i7-990x/td-p/5562651

 

The Area 51 and Aurora "manual" settings have some differences. The Aurora only had one OC setting so I fused the 51 and Aurora a bit with some personal modifications for the 990x. My system runs very stable until I run low on system ram. With the 2080 ti extra ram and soon to be installed extra 12GB of system ram the 990x will have plenty to render.

Differences I made:

1) Set Vcore Offset to 140mv

2) Increased Turbo Ratio Limit to 31 (all cores)

3) Left Intl Turbo Mode enabled (this allows 990x to return to non OC condition when not needed)

4) since running XMP memory set the QPI and Uncore voltage to +200mv

5) leave the CPU BLCK at 133

With these settings I'm getting 4.14 on the 990x. I had it upto 4.27 but it would crash while gaming.

 

Again, none of this will be possible unless you disable the Spectre and Meltdown protections.