So, ~7 weeks after the Coffee Lake release I finally got my i7 8700k.
I seem to belong to the lucky ones since most of the day one preorders in germany are still not delivered. I dont think that the delivery situation is getting any better in December or Janurary.
I ordered at 5 online retailers at the same time. One of them turned out to be a scammer and was selling CPUs via Amazon marketplace. Fortunatly Amazon has a good buyers protection and refunded dozens of buyers in Germany and UK.
Strangely this seller was selling stuff on Amazon for +1 year and had pretty positive reviews.... until now... reviews dropped below 30% meanwhile.
However, I got my money back and a CPU from a different retailer a few days later.
The new PC is meanwhile build.
My hardware did change a bit from what I have posted on page one of this thread.
Case: Sharkoon S25-W
CPU: I7 8700k
Board: MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon (without the AC -> wireless; I dont need such a crap)
CPU Cooler: Le Grand Macho RT
RAM: Gskill Ripjaws V 3400 cl16
SSD: Samsung Evo 960
Graphic Card: Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Extreme
Additionally to that from my old PC a Bequiet l8 600w PSU, 3 internal HDDs, 1 SSD, 1 external HDD, 1 internal card reader, 1 CD drive.
The costs increased a bit because that CPU is a bit more expensive than the original i7 7700k that I had in mind and the prices for the RAM pretty much exploded in the past few weeks (20% increase).
The 3200Mhz RAM I originaly wanted are meanwhile as expensive as the 3400Mhz RAMs so I simply took the faster ones.
However, since I had to wait that long I took care of the additional funding in the meantime.
I started building the new PC on Saturday and yeah... almost 4 hours... mostly because of the clean cable management I did.
I was a bit worried about getting windows 10 installed.
Originally I upgraded a few years ago from a Windows 7 OEM to Windows 10. New hardware means that I can not use the old OEM key (that only works on a retail version).
When Windows 10 got released back then, I bought a new Windows 7 CD for just a few €, so I was hoping that this one would work.
But there still was the risk that this Windows key would be accepted and that Windows 7 wouldnt install from that CD on a NvME SDD (since windows 7 never had drivers for such hardware).
Surprisingly the Windows installation went better then I thought, because I installed Windows 10 directly via USB and entered that Windows7 product key. Yep, you can activate Windows 10 with a Windows 7 product key meanwhile. My advice would be to see if you can buy such a key online for a few € if you intend to install Windows 10 on new hardware.
The past 2-3 days Ive spent installing software, doing updates (so many Windows updates) and doing thousands of detail settings. I have the habit that everything has to be perfect, so it takes alot of time to restore all the settings and configs and... omg... my game profiles and keybinds (oh fuck!). Ok, better now than in December because then I have alot of other work to do.
So far I only installed a few games that I regulary play and tested them for 5-10mins. A nice improvement.
Yesterday I went into overclocking and yeah... I seem to be able to boot Windows with 5Ghz.
I am not sure how stable it is. I decided against 5Ghz stress tests when I noticed that one of the case fans stopped working. The other 2 remaining case fans also didnt produce much airflow.
So, I replaced the broken Fan with one 120mm coolermaster Fan from my old PC in order to find the error source.
It looks like the sharkoon case fans are pure crap. There seem to be mechanical problems which stop the fans randomly. I guess there is a friction problem. Next to that, even when they are running at full speed they dont really produce a good air flow. You notice almost nothing when they are spinning. The coolermaster fan on the other side was working ALOT better.
But ok... if you buy cheap you get cheap.
The Sharkoon case itself is pretty good... it is big enough for such a massive CPU cooler and such a big graphic card, has the PSU tunnel, has cable management, lots of device mounts, etc.
But the preinstalled case fans are crap.
The Sharkoon case did cost me 50€... the next better case with similar features and dimensions easily would have cost 150-170€. In my eyes thats pretty expensive for a case.
I have meanwhile ordered a bunch of Bequiet Silent Wings to replace these case fans but that is still cheaper than going with a high-end case.
After noticing this small problem, it of course didnt make much sense to stress test the CPU at 5Ghz. The lack of airflow in the case due to the crap fans wouldnt have lead to any good results (probably even would have been dangerous).
I did a 30mins stress test at 4.5Ghz on ALL cores instead (thats about 5% faster than the official specifications for that CPU). Despite the not really existing airflow in the case, the temperature remained in a 70-75°C range. Thats actually not that bad. 15-20°C before it gets too hot (and that without a delidded CPU). None of the cores showed better or worse results than the other cores. I have no doubts that with new case fans I can get to 5Ghz or even 5.1Ghz.
That of course isnt a setting I would use all the time. During the normal daily use of the PC I most likely wouldnt need that much speed. (and the energy consumption at such speeds is much higher)
But it is nice to have an overclocking profile that can deliver that speed if needed in certain situations.
Another problem I ran into was the XMP setting for the RAM.
When I enabled the XMP option in the UEFI the system turns instable during boot and resets to the default settings of 2133Mhz. That is a bit strange since the RAM are listed as being compatible with the mainboard and should deliver the 3400Mhz without any problem. I already contacted the manufacturer to see if there is a specific setting I have to use.
Until I get a response, it turned out that I can run them stable at 3333Mhz and CL15 (which also is pretty nice).
It takes its time to get everything working the way I want.
Putting the minor problems aside I am very satisfied with this new PC.