u/Difficult-Cup-4445

I've averaged down over 900 times on this bad boy. Thank you Papa Cohen for this dip we may receiveth to go with all the other dip buying opportunities you already gave us this year. You're literally spoiling us.

Go GameStop!

I've been stuck with a hot 4 core 4 thread (no HT!) 7600K on my favourite old PC for years and finally worked up the courage to - if not bring it up to date - then to get the most out of it.

I performed the CoffeeMate Mod with a USB programmer to unlock Coffee Lake 8000- series compatibility on my old ASUS RoG Strix Z270i ITX motherboard in a very cramped FTZ-01 Silverstone case.

Then I took a peek under the IHS of the 8700K and it was literally Tutankhamun's tomb under there, absolutely zero TIM left in place.

4.8 GHz on a tiny 0.005 +mV offset, 60 degrees in Space Marine 2 and very smooth 1% lows.

EVGA (RIP) RTX 2070 pairs nicely with it.

Anyway, don't give up on your old stuff - bring it back to life! It's fun!

Edit: It's called the "CoffeeTime Pin Mod" and this is the guide I followed.

I'm very fond and nostalgic for my old FTZ-01 SilverStone ITX case and the ASUS RoG STRIX Z270i board inside it, but being locked to 4c/4t on a i5-7600K from 2018 was taking its toll on me.

So what do I do? Pay a premium for the 7700K just for 4c/8t? Hell no, I take a graphite pencil to the pads of an 8700K, insulate the necessary pads with Kapton and send a prayer to the machine Gods.

Context aside; I have had SOME pretty severe issues that I'm hoping someone can help with.

Initially I was randomly freezing and crashing in games (heavy multicore load e.g Space Marine 2), I'm on CachyOS Linux so I managed to systematically check each individual core until I found the core that was spewing errors under load. I turned that core completely off, voila, stability returns.

But having to disable 1c out of a 6c CPU kind of sucks as it's already an old CPU, so I try to dig into what's causing the crashes.

After twiddling a lot of knobs in the BIOS, I figure out that Load Line Calibration (LLC) seems to be the lever that's having an effect here.

So I set LLC to 5 (out of 7, so relatively high) and a static manual voltage of 1.17, reenable the "defective" core and...

BOOM. I'm an hour in to an OCCT stress test with no errors, so the CPU is NOT defective.

Which brings me back to my broader CoffeeTime mod question:

Is this within the bounds of "normal" or "expected" behaviour / quirks for an 8700K operating on a Z270i motherboard?

Does it make sense that it might be more sensitive to V-droop that a 7000- series CPU from the prior gen?

It took a LOT of troubleshooting to iron this out and I'd love some feedback from anyone more knowledgeable before I get to delidding and adding Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal :) and yes I'm aware it's only running at 4200 MHz currently, the TIM is so destroyed inside the IHS that it's an absolute heat monster atm.

Thank you so much if you read to the end.

Probably not a huge deal for some but I'm not massively technical, so I managed to use a CH341A USB Programmer to pull the BIOS off my ancient Z270i STRIX ITX Kaby Lake motherboard (that Intel abandoned almost as soon as they launched it) via a SOP8 clip, modified it with the CoffeeTime Mod Tool to add compatibility microcode to the next gen of Intel CPUs and remove all the artificial restrictions they added, then flashed it back to the Winbond IC on the motherboard.

Can't imagine many people even do this mod nowadays; hardest part was probably attaching the Kapton tape to the pads that needed insulating on the 8700K - however tiny you think it is, I promise you it's even smaller than that - and getting a good connection between the pads that needed shorting using a 6B graphite pencil.

Enormous performance increase; the 7600K and the whole Z270 platform was DOA as Intel rugpulled consumers so hard. My other PCs were always AMD after that, but this PC (which I'm very nostalgic for) was always stranded in 4c/4t despite being actually a very solid platform with USB-C and plenty of modern features.

Finally plucked up the courage to upgrade this one and enjoy 12 GLORIOUS THREADS in 2026 on a board ASUS and Intel abandoned years ago :)

Hopefully I can squeeze a few more years out of it - it's nearly a decade old already and still kicking!

Cheers to PC lovers everywhere!

God tier couch co-op hack and slash fun. Such a rare hidden gem. Two instances of Xenia running, one hosts the match, one joins. Playing on CachyOS Linux, one controller wrapped to each window separately. Works like a dream, much better than the PC version which has a tonne of issues on Windows.

Just sharing this as I love buffing up 360 games with 2x resolution and going for a drive. Such a trip.

I was trying to do a long post about how I got System Link FUEL / Dirt 3 / Blur / Viva Pinata TIP working on CachyOS on a single machine but Reddit wouldn't let me post it so I guess these silly glitched out funny colours will have to do instead. Pretty!

Ok so this has been bugging me for months - basically the whole time I have owned my Gigabyte RX 9070, which is otherwise an extremely performant GPU.

I get regular, harsh, short-lived frametime spikes. I observed LACT and saw that when this happened, my GPU usage / frequencies were dropping briefly to virtually zero for a little under a second.

As you can imagine this is incredibly disruptive to gaming, and as someone that was TRYING to get the best possible frame rate... I was using Mangohud, like most probably do.

After ruling out everything else (hardware, framegen, FSR, optiscaler, power issues, CPU priority / scheduling issues) it didn't leave much else but Mangohud.

I removed Mangohud and used the Optiscaler overlay - which is excellent btw - to get my frame times and FPS.

Turns out I wasn't crazy - there's an open Mangohud issue for Hogwart's Legacy specifically and similar reports on other titles. The pattern matches what I saw i.e periodic frametime spikes and in LACT the GPU briefly flatlines because the render thread stalls - it looks like power gating but it isn't.

Essentially Mangohud polls AMD GPU stats from sysfs (gpu_stats, gpu_power, clocks, temps, etc) every frame. On some cards, reading certain nodes - especially power1_average - can block and stall the GPU. The maintainer's take is that the sysfs read shouldn't stall the GPU in the first place (kernel/amdgdpu issue) but Manohud is still what trigers it by polling in the present path. There's also a Proton NTSYNC + GPU stats combo that causes stutters even when individual sysfs reads look fine.

What made it SO HARD to diagnose was that the spikes are relatively predictable but the GPU metrics in LACT make it look like it's the GPU's fault i.e dropping to 0% usage and stalling out. It persists even when doing nothing in-game e.g staring at a wall, VRR off, FPS capped, LACT Manual Performance Mode - none of it helped while MangoHud was injected.

So you have to TURN OFF MANGOHUD in affected games. Optiscaler's HUD is excellent and you can press Page Down to cycle through to a proper frametime graph.

TL;DR

RX 9070 / CachyOS, KDE Wayland, Heroic/Proton. Months of chasing the wrong things and it turns out it's the very tool I'm using to measure frametimes that is causing frametime spikes (stutters).

MangoHud can cause real in-game stutters that look exactly like GPU power drops in LACT, but it's a present/sysfs polling stall, not the 9070 misbehaving.

Ok so this has been bugging me for months - basically the whole time I have owned my Gigabyte RX 9070, which is otherwise an extremely performant GPU.

I get regular, harsh, short-lived frametime spikes. I observed LACT and saw that when this happened, my GPU usage / frequencies were dropping briefly to virtually zero for a little under a second.

As you can imagine this is incredibly disruptive to gaming, and as someone that was TRYING to get the best possible frame rate... I was using Mangohud, like most probably do.

After ruling out everything else (hardware, framegen, FSR, optiscaler, power issues, CPU priority / scheduling issues) it didn't leave much else but Mangohud.

I removed Mangohud and used the Optiscaler overlay - which is excellent btw - to get my frame times and FPS.

Turns out I wasn't crazy - there's an open Mangohud issue for Hogwart's Legacy specifically and similar reports on other titles. The pattern matches what I saw i.e periodic frametime spikes and in LACT the GPU briefly flatlines because the render thread stalls - it looks like power gating but it isn't.

Essentially Mangohud polls AMD GPU stats from sysfs (gpu_stats, gpu_power, clocks, temps, etc) every frame. On some cards, reading certain nodes - especially power1_average - can block and stall the GPU. The maintainer's take is that the sysfs read shouldn't stall the GPU in the first place (kernel/amdgdpu issue) but Manohud is still what trigers it by polling in the present path. There's also a Proton NTSYNC + GPU stats combo that causes stutters even when individual sysfs reads look fine.

What made it SO HARD to diagnose was that the spikes are relatively predictable but the GPU metrics in LACT make it look like it's the GPU's fault i.e dropping to 0% usage and stalling out. It persists even when doing nothing in-game e.g staring at a wall, VRR off, FPS capped, LACT Manual Performance Mode - none of it helped while MangoHud was injected.

So you have to TURN OFF MANGOHUD in affected games. Optiscaler's HUD is excellent and you can press Page Down to cycle through to a proper frametime graph.

TL;DR

RX 9070 / CachyOS, KDE Wayland, Heroic/Proton. Months of chasing the wrong things and it turns out it's the very tool I'm using to measure frametimes that is causing frametime spikes (stutters).

MangoHud can cause real in-game stutters that look exactly like GPU power drops in LACT, but it's a present/sysfs polling stall, not the 9070 misbehaving.

This might be a bit obscure, but is anyone familiar with the issue of the onboard RGB-LED on the 9070 from Gigabyte being problematic to control? I remember reading a few posts about it but can't seem to find them any more.

Mine was cycling through the rainbow endlessly and i had to vibe code a patch to fix it.

Just wondered if this was an issue other people knew about