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There are hundreds of reputable third party benchmark sites and channels....
Configuration Octane VI Laptop for Total War games
- Thread starter Jorge85
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debiruman665
Enthusiast
Based on my extensive testing, the laptops cooling ability throttles at around the same point as the available current starts to throttle. At the point the current starts to throttle you're looking at temps of nearly 100C in the processor.. See my display picture for the official clevo artwork for the octane chassis. This is a laptop that will run hot if you allow it to run freely. In intensive gaming you're actually better downclocking the processor down to about 4.2GHz in order to avoid hitting any kind of throttling and your framerates will actually do better.
I have the i9 and rtx2080 setup, at the point you start being upset about temperatures you are free to turn down your settings or etc to have a more sensible office mode. The laptop has a subwoofer so during gaming sessions when the fan is blowing you won't really notice it.
This laptop is good for tinkering if thats what you like to do. If you still want an i9, rtx 2080 laptop you are free to pay an extra thousand to get an alienware with the same spec and two power bricks but it will still run at 100C under a full load. and the dual bricks aren't rated 330 each on the alienware one but are in the 200ish region i I remember
Will i7-9700K and i7-8700K do better than i9-9900K as for thermal throttling? What about RTX 2070 vs RTX 2080 in the same respect? If you don't mind explain me... why do you need such powerful laptop?
debiruman665
Enthusiast
30 years old married double income no kids. Some men want to buy sports cars I'm a nerd programmer who likes to play strategy games.
I got on here and turned everything up to max and realised in a few months out of my spending money I could afford one.
I use it for work too, and I tend to have to have java, node js, etc running which it kinda helps.
I got the rtx 2080 because I like to watch VR movies. I'm not so sure that 16 threads at 5GHz are necessary but I wouldn't say that they don't help for normal day to day use. You can set the clock to around 1GHz for each core and the laptop will run fine since you can have up to 16 different things having their own 1GHz to play with. If budget was a concern, I'd go for getting a better RTX and a non bottlenecking CPU, unless you are planning to do some CIV/4x games which it sounds like you do, then the graphics card isn't so much a bottleneck and you want a good CPU.
the i9 in this laptop can blitz through 24 civs + 12 city states and an ultra massive map in under 30 seconds each time in CIV V.
i play total war warcraft one on it too occasionaly
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If just for gaming, the octane isn’t necessary, there’s no benefit to having the desktop cpu over an i7 mobile cpu.
If it’s just a gaming rig, then the vortex would be better suited.
If it’s just a gaming rig, then the vortex would be better suited.
debiruman665
Enthusiast
the octane is sort of when you want a mix between a laptop and a pc but something not quite as good as either.
Its not a great laptop and its not a great pc.
It's a bit retro in my opinion, I feel like one of those stoic people who first carted around those massive laptops in the 90s that were the size of briefcases.
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It definitely has it's uses, for media creation or editing, big datasets processing, VM's, it's fantastic.
And it's definitely not that it's bad for gaming in anyway, just a little overpowered.
My Vortex IV was definitely not a portable option, it's ginormous, but I wasn't after laptop portability particularly, I'm a big guy and can handle the extra weight and was solely after power, and I don't regret it one bit. The gaming was a secondary consideration and it suited that well also.
I guess mine was the Octane equivalent at the time before they started putting desktop processors in.
Total War games demands single core power. The reason is that most of them are not suited to use multicore, but just only 1 core effectively. There are complains everywhere, people who have desktops with GPU GTX 1080 can't run Attila Total War decently because they suffer fps drops to 20 or even 15 which makes the game unplayable. If you can show me proof that i7-8750H or i7-9750H (considered the top CPUs among branded laptops) can run Rome 2 or Attila with stable fps, I will think about that. Unfortunately, there is very little evidence of these CPU performance with Total War games.
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Obviously if they're on a 4th generation processor or something then it's going to struggle, but this is a current gen mobile processor with a hell of a lot more power.
I guess it depends which Total War game you're talking about, it seems that a lot of the newer ones are much better optimised these days, the problems with the early ones were that they were optimised poorly for the PC.
If you look at these results for Total War: Three Kingdoms, anything under a straight quad core had a major impact on performance, but then more than 4/8 didn't really provide much of a benefit at 1080p.
Total War: Three Kingdoms PC Performance Review - OC3D
Introduction This is going to be an ambitious performance analysis. The Total War series is one that demands more than a few hours of playtime and ships as a two-in-one gaming experience, providing players with turn-based campaigns and real-time battles. That means that there is a lot of...
Not saying that single threaded isn't required, it is defintely important, and I can see why the 9900k would be your desired CPU, makes sense.
There's a really impressive breakdown here:
CA COMMUNITY
forums.totalwar.com
Anyway, I'm coming very late to this discussion and am not best informed, I'd be better letting you guys carry on the discussion.
I was more replying to @debiruman665 comment about the Octane.
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A common misconception with single threaded performance is that it all comes down to the frequency, but that literally has nothing to do with it unless you’re comparing to same gen processors.
A 4th gen i7 with a frequency of 3GHz will not perform anywhere near as well as a 9th gen with 3GHz
It totally disregards the IPC of the CPU which is the “instructions per clock”.
There’s a good synopsis of this here:
cpugrade.com
A 4th gen i7 with a frequency of 3GHz will not perform anywhere near as well as a 9th gen with 3GHz
It totally disregards the IPC of the CPU which is the “instructions per clock”.
There’s a good synopsis of this here:
Cinebench R15 IPC Comparison Graphs — Articles — CPU Grade
Let's explore just how far we've come in the instructions-per-clock battle, since 2011!
debiruman665
Enthusiast
This whole single core thing is a bit misleading.
The entire game doesn't run on one thread continuously. Windows running doing nothing will take up to 6 threads at once. Then adding a browser and watching YouTube and suddenly your up to 8 threads. AFAK the process schedule spreads the jobs around each core to the one being the least used. A game might consist of many many threads doing different things and they don't all execute on the same core sequentially. Moving the workload around will help spread the heat around too since each core heats up independently.
the whole thing about there being 1 core clocked at 5GHZ is also misleading because in the real world it NEVER happens.. ever.
The entire game doesn't run on one thread continuously. Windows running doing nothing will take up to 6 threads at once. Then adding a browser and watching YouTube and suddenly your up to 8 threads. AFAK the process schedule spreads the jobs around each core to the one being the least used. A game might consist of many many threads doing different things and they don't all execute on the same core sequentially. Moving the workload around will help spread the heat around too since each core heats up independently.
the whole thing about there being 1 core clocked at 5GHZ is also misleading because in the real world it NEVER happens.. ever.
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Thank you for your explanations, they are very useful and now I know that a 9th generation CPU performs better than 4th generation CPU with the same frequency. I ask you patience because I do not have a computing background, just a chemical engineer who likes gaming sometimes. I am also worried about thermal throttling. I have read some people saying that i9 CPUs are facing thermal throttling in laptops (i9-8950HK, i9-9900K) and I wanted to know how true is that based on your opinion and also if i7-8700K or i7-9700K may help to relief thermal throttling considering clevo chasis (octane VI) and its cooling associated.
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Basically, any desktop chip in any laptop WILL thermal throttle unless an undervolt is applied, and even then it will power throttle. They will never reach full performance as if they were in a desktop.
@debiruman665 has done some really interesting analysis on his 9900k Octane which is well worth a read.
debiruman665
Enthusiast
When an i9 faces thermal throttling that means it turns from a 5GHz into a 4.2-4.7Ghz, its not as though it becomes a worse processor it just stops being a ultra giga processor for periods of time.
debiruman665
Enthusiast
Yeah 9900k on a full 16 thread workload will throttle down to 4.2Ghz If its maintained for a long period of time with the GPU at full heat at the same time sharing the load on the heatsink.
I'd like to know the full throttled 9700k when running 8 threads in a similar circumstance. We'll need to keep an eye out for the next time someone gets one in order to do a proper comparison.
debiruman665
Enthusiast
lets put it this way, the abilities of the CPU when it's CPU + Gaming is always going to be higher than what can actually be achieved by the heat.
The processer will keep boosting until it hits the wall of 100C whenever you play new games on ultra settings with a high graphics demand.
The benefit of a K processor is you get to decide how fast you want the processor to run,
Whenever I'm gaming I rarely have the clock higher than 4.2Ghz and that keeps me in the 80C region. I have a cooling pad but it only seems to benefit the laptop more when idle rather than when gaming. The cooling pad allows me to use it in the office without the whiny fans ever whirring up and annoying my co-workers.
the RTX 2080 will never break 80C and will never throttle, the i9 on the other hand is a greedy bugger and is like a dog that sprints everywhere it goes and doesn't know how to pace itself.
Its the same with other workloads, If you run cinebench the processor will blaze through it but it will do so all the way up to 100C.
i9 in a laptop is more suitable for sprinting at 5Ghz in short bursts. For sequential turns etc like the overworld map section of total war it will breeze through them, but in a sustained workload you're better just turning the clock down. There is a big difference of about 20C when you idle at 5Ghz compared to idling at 4Ghz.
The sweet spot to aim for is to never throttle and you'll get the best performance. Having it sporadically hit 5Ghz then go down to 4.2 and back up again will perform worse in game than having it stay at a solid 4.2Ghz
screenshot is me doing office work type stuff with the processor downclocked to 4Ghz. [image removed I realised I had some extra settings to downclock and wasnt a good representation, i'll add another when I get a moment]
my power settings are a little different from the defaults, but i sorta got it in the ballpark for you to see
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Thank you Debiruman for your informative reply. Still I have a question whether i7-9700K is good enough avoiding huge thermal throttling or what would be the real benefit to have the i9-9900K instead. But I am more interested to know how do you control the processor to run at the speed you want. Is there any software available for Octane VI laptops? Do you make this with a third-party software?
I'm also curious about Jorge's first throttling question. Of all the laptop configurations I've browsed through on other sites, only the Octane VI here on PCS seems to be the cheapest way to fulfil my requirements of 17 inch, g-sync and extreme high performance.
At the same time I'm fairly certain that the 9900k is overkill for me, so I'd be very interested to learn to what extent the i7-8700k might mitigate the thermal issues in comparison.
At the same time I'm fairly certain that the 9900k is overkill for me, so I'd be very interested to learn to what extent the i7-8700k might mitigate the thermal issues in comparison.