Successful i5 OC, couple of Q's

Measurements

Measurements

Measurements

Associate
Joined
28 Jan 2012
Posts
7
Hey all, my first foray into overclocking has seemingly gone well. I've managed to follow this video, super cool accent and all. Here are some numbers and questions:

My System:
Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail
Asus P8Z68-V GEN3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
XFX 850W XXX Edition Modular '80 Plus Silver' Power Supply
Kingston HyperX Genesis 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit
Akasa AK-CC4008HP01 Venom Voodoo CPU Cooler
Crucial RealSSD M4 256GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive
MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti OC Power Edition "448 Edition" OC Twin FrozR III 1280MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card

I ran the basic Prime95 test for an hour and hit 91 degrees briefly on temps. Is that bad or good, should I be concerned about the nature of the cooling? Most of the time they stayed in the 80-85 range but died immediately to 50 when I stopped the test after an hour.

Speed stepping is turned on but doesn't seem to kick in now. It used to idle down to 1600MHz, now it's seemingly set to 4700 for good, even when not needed. This increases the idle temps from 30 to 40-45 degrees which seems like a waste, more than anything else. Can I re-enable speed stepping with the range to hit 4700?

I think the core voltage got to about 1.336v. Good? Bad? I don't think I'll ever stress my system as much as that hour did, but I realise that's the point :)

Also, as in the video, I set my RAM timing to 'auto'. Where does it report the RAM speed in CPU-Z (in a number that relates to the 1600~ numbers you see on the product itself)? Should I be looking to set or fine tune that as well?

So many questions, appreciate any answers.
 
Last edited:
Temperature is way, way too high for that clock speed. Must have been close to shutting down :p

Core voltage is OK for the overclock level.

You should set your RAM timings to the ones in the XMP - choose it from the saved BIOS settings. RAM settings are shown in the Memory tab in CPUZ.

Questions to you:

1) Is your CPU cooler blowing air through the heatsink towards the exhaust fan at the back of your machine?
2) What case fans do you have and are they blowing air in?
3) What is your cable management like?
4) How did you apply the thermal paste?
 
Last edited:
Rusty0611 said:
You should set your RAM timings to the ones in the XMP - choose it from the saved BIOS settings. RAM settings are shown in the Memory tab in CPUZ.
Click to expand...

Just set the RAM to XMP profile but then set the DRAM voltage manually to ~1.55V.

The XMP profile will use 1.65V which is too high for Sandy Bridge.

CPU-Z should show 800MHz on the memory tab.

You then have to double this as it's Double Data Rate RAM so 1600MHz.
 
I think it would have shutdown at about nine degrees more (Temp to TJ Max?). Damn that's annoying to learn - I have a push/pull cooler there. In an antec 902. Blowing straight up. to the big fan at the top. With really really good cable management (it's like a cable tie advert).

Might as well add that I have three of the Noctua Silenty case fans. One at the front and one at the back are both running at 1200rpm and the other front one is running at 900 or 'medium'. Then there's the 200mm top fan, as mentioned.

Does this mean I should re-do my thermal paste? I used Arctic 5 Silver but sparingly, as instructed. I put a small bit in the middle and then trailed a bit around in a circle half way from that. Still got plenty left so perhaps I should just redo it?

Cheers again for any thoughts.
 
Last edited:
If your cooler is blowing air to the top of the case then it's sucking in hot air directly from the back of the GTX 560Ti.

That's not going to help.

Re-fit the cooler so that the fans blow from front to back instead of bottom to top.

While you're at it make sure you only use a small amount of thermal paste and spread it evenly over the processor.

The cooler has exposed heatpipes so if you just apply a blob, or don't spread it around much, it'll just disappear into the grooves on the base of the heatsink.

Arctic Silver 5 also takes around 200 hours of operating time, with several cool down/warm up cycles, before it's working at its best.

Edit:

You can have a look here for some tips on applying thermal paste to coolers with exposed heat pipes.
 
Last edited:
The video settings are pretty spot on, the only thing I would say is you probably don't need to have LLC on extreme, and cpu capability at around 110-120%.

Temps might not be too far away from what they should be, the voodoo fits in as an upper mid range cooler and its probably hitting its safe limit at around 4.6-4.8ghz.
 
Alright I'll redo the thermal paste next weekend and see how it goes. Cheers for the link, It's clear from that info that I have to redo the paste. Unfortunately there isn't an option with the size of the cooler to reorient it around and blow directly out the back of the case. It will bump into the ram!

I will try changing the LLC and cpu capability as recommended. Unfortunately I got a bluescreen playing Dawn of War 2 today. Something about CPU missing an interval or... well it's bad times for that setup. I might rollback to what I had before (no overclock) and go again from the top. Baffled that a stress test of greater duration didn't pick up on something that a computer game did.
 
Last edited:
What were your temps like at stock as that could highlight a problem before trying to go towards the toasty end?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom