Bought a 10900k OCUK bundle @ 5.0GHz with an ITX motherboard. From OCUK the CPU was poorly binned 63SP and had way too much voltage vcore and LLC in the motherboard settings. Remember this is an ITX motherboard with poor VRMS, you want a good sample with low vcore and power draw limited to 280 watts which these CPUs can do if you bin right. LLC7 (top LLC which degrades) and 1.385 volts vcore is excessive. This lead to 110c vrm temps, 300+ watts power draw and very hot air going out via the water cooling rad in prime 95. OCUK tech support could see nothing wrong with 110c vrm temps, afterall it was not throttling according to them. This was down to the poor choice of cpu. A cpu 80SP with lower vcore voltage would have been 280 watts and the VRMs could handle that. This was a 5.0GHz SSE/4.9GHz avx overclock. Even so you could limit power draw for a 10900k in BIOS to 280 watts and fix this issue for all loads. Remember an overclock needs to be safe under every load, small cases doesn't need a 110c source of heat. Was told 6-8 weeks for them to look at it, as everyone was on holiday. So had to fixed it myself. This type of outcome I find normal for most online stores or shops selling PC components.
So to fix this I had to limit the power draw in BIOS so the CPU down clocks in video coding and prime95 loads. Was able to get power draw down to 280 watts, by setting the long duration power draw.
As I took over the overclocking of the cpu. I knew that this sample would need a better motherboard to run at the stock overclock of 5GHz and not have to limit power draw or lower LLC and VCore. This would keep the VRMs to 60c and the air cool in my case. I really only overclock on good motherboards.
So I got a new motherboard and found that at stock the motherboard got the OCUK overclock with default settings in BIOS and no VRM problems. This motherboard was a Asus ROG Maximus XIII Hero. I had to do nothing but set XMP and was done. Couldn't get the sample to overclock higher. This is a hard sample to keep cool.
So say you really know how to overclock and want the most out of a poor sample?
Found that the motherboard likes to put high amount of vccio and vccsa into the CPU. This is an issue because this causes the IO to become unstable. This prevents higher overclocks becoming unstable in Prime 95 small ffts.
Also found out that limiting the power draw of the CPU to 4095 short and 300 long allowed for a much higher overclock. Basically you can get really high overclocks this way. Like 5.2GHz AVX and SSE. Just keep an eye on the vcore voltage and that its not too high,
Also the ocuk settings of vccio/vccsa of 1.15 appeared wrong and vccsa needs to be 50mV more than vccio. This can lead to odd booting issues. VCCIO/VCCSA too high or not correct in some way.
With this CPU sample I found that not using manual voltage was best for reducing LLC. Using offset for example and V/F curve. I set the ratio too 52 and offset to 1. Vcore to offset, voltage auto and reduce vcore to auto. We are going to set the voltage via V/F curve.
I was able to get the LLC down to 5 and the vcore to around 1.375 volts for 5.1GHz AVX/5.2GHz SSE. VCCIO needed 1.15 volts. Important is that too low or a little too high equalled errors in small ffts. Too high would lead to freezes after a period of time. Its important not to set this to say 1.35volts vccio and 1.4 volts vccsa. Motherboards will auto to this and its end of days for the higher overclocks. The difference now is that I can get a 5.2GHz SSE/5.1GHz AVX overclock. I dont hit 100c on the CPU in Prime 95 small ffts and VRM remain 50c or there abouts. This means that these CPU's have to be carefully overclocked after 5.0GHz. Getting higher becomes about the right settings for next to everything. The better the sample the easier the overclock.
What I learned about the 10900k. You can get whatever overclock you like by keeping the vccio as low as needed and limiting long duration power draw. Setting the short duration too 4095 and time to 1 second worked best for stablity. Getting the right settings for everything. I had to manually set most of tweakers tweakers paradise to defaults. Limit some stock bios voltages for RAM I thounght was too high. Mostly the main issue was BIOS adding too much voltage. The AI overclocking for the motherboard binned the CPU as a maximum of 5.0GHz SSE/AVX all cores.
The motherboard also didn't support 4xDIMMs above DDR4-3600. I was able to get DDR4-4000 CL15 with stock voltage for the RAM. This was by turning everything and keeping voltages as low as possible.
What is best? Using v/f curve overclock allows a lower LLC. Take control of all the voltages going into the CPU and keep them stock. VCCIO needs to be 100% correct or you will get issues. Too high and the overclock will be randomly unstable. VCCSA needs to be higher than VCCIO. Avoid the high LLC options and higher values of vcore together. This leads to the massive power draws for no reason. @ 5.1GHz AVX a 10900k is pulling 360 watts. 5.0GHz 330 watts. At 4.9 GHz 280 watts. You have to tune this or you will get a higher power draw and thus temperatures become the limit. You don't want 100c temps on the CPU ever. Higher the temps the more vcore needed to stay stable. Under normal gaming you want to be under 70c (world of warcraft I am 25c-35c) and under 80c in general (cinebench can reach 280 watts with some overclocks).
Keeping the cache low helps to reduce power draw. Cache does increase performance in games by reducing RAM latency. The higher the overclock the more important that you reduce power draw. So it could be that a lower clock frequency and a higher cache is better for games. This lowers power draw by reducing frequency but still gives great performance.
So you find the maximum all core frequency. You can then set the the per core frequency. This is were having the right VCCIO is important. I found that too high a VCCIO would make the cpu unstable as it clocked up and down for single/multi thread loads. At some point you will get freezes or randomly unstable. Hopefully my story will help others get the most out of their 10900k.
www.3dmark.com
valid.x86.fr
Cinebench r23 17k+
So to fix this I had to limit the power draw in BIOS so the CPU down clocks in video coding and prime95 loads. Was able to get power draw down to 280 watts, by setting the long duration power draw.
As I took over the overclocking of the cpu. I knew that this sample would need a better motherboard to run at the stock overclock of 5GHz and not have to limit power draw or lower LLC and VCore. This would keep the VRMs to 60c and the air cool in my case. I really only overclock on good motherboards.
So I got a new motherboard and found that at stock the motherboard got the OCUK overclock with default settings in BIOS and no VRM problems. This motherboard was a Asus ROG Maximus XIII Hero. I had to do nothing but set XMP and was done. Couldn't get the sample to overclock higher. This is a hard sample to keep cool.
So say you really know how to overclock and want the most out of a poor sample?
Found that the motherboard likes to put high amount of vccio and vccsa into the CPU. This is an issue because this causes the IO to become unstable. This prevents higher overclocks becoming unstable in Prime 95 small ffts.
Also found out that limiting the power draw of the CPU to 4095 short and 300 long allowed for a much higher overclock. Basically you can get really high overclocks this way. Like 5.2GHz AVX and SSE. Just keep an eye on the vcore voltage and that its not too high,
Also the ocuk settings of vccio/vccsa of 1.15 appeared wrong and vccsa needs to be 50mV more than vccio. This can lead to odd booting issues. VCCIO/VCCSA too high or not correct in some way.
With this CPU sample I found that not using manual voltage was best for reducing LLC. Using offset for example and V/F curve. I set the ratio too 52 and offset to 1. Vcore to offset, voltage auto and reduce vcore to auto. We are going to set the voltage via V/F curve.
I was able to get the LLC down to 5 and the vcore to around 1.375 volts for 5.1GHz AVX/5.2GHz SSE. VCCIO needed 1.15 volts. Important is that too low or a little too high equalled errors in small ffts. Too high would lead to freezes after a period of time. Its important not to set this to say 1.35volts vccio and 1.4 volts vccsa. Motherboards will auto to this and its end of days for the higher overclocks. The difference now is that I can get a 5.2GHz SSE/5.1GHz AVX overclock. I dont hit 100c on the CPU in Prime 95 small ffts and VRM remain 50c or there abouts. This means that these CPU's have to be carefully overclocked after 5.0GHz. Getting higher becomes about the right settings for next to everything. The better the sample the easier the overclock.
What I learned about the 10900k. You can get whatever overclock you like by keeping the vccio as low as needed and limiting long duration power draw. Setting the short duration too 4095 and time to 1 second worked best for stablity. Getting the right settings for everything. I had to manually set most of tweakers tweakers paradise to defaults. Limit some stock bios voltages for RAM I thounght was too high. Mostly the main issue was BIOS adding too much voltage. The AI overclocking for the motherboard binned the CPU as a maximum of 5.0GHz SSE/AVX all cores.
The motherboard also didn't support 4xDIMMs above DDR4-3600. I was able to get DDR4-4000 CL15 with stock voltage for the RAM. This was by turning everything and keeping voltages as low as possible.
What is best? Using v/f curve overclock allows a lower LLC. Take control of all the voltages going into the CPU and keep them stock. VCCIO needs to be 100% correct or you will get issues. Too high and the overclock will be randomly unstable. VCCSA needs to be higher than VCCIO. Avoid the high LLC options and higher values of vcore together. This leads to the massive power draws for no reason. @ 5.1GHz AVX a 10900k is pulling 360 watts. 5.0GHz 330 watts. At 4.9 GHz 280 watts. You have to tune this or you will get a higher power draw and thus temperatures become the limit. You don't want 100c temps on the CPU ever. Higher the temps the more vcore needed to stay stable. Under normal gaming you want to be under 70c (world of warcraft I am 25c-35c) and under 80c in general (cinebench can reach 280 watts with some overclocks).
Keeping the cache low helps to reduce power draw. Cache does increase performance in games by reducing RAM latency. The higher the overclock the more important that you reduce power draw. So it could be that a lower clock frequency and a higher cache is better for games. This lowers power draw by reducing frequency but still gives great performance.
So you find the maximum all core frequency. You can then set the the per core frequency. This is were having the right VCCIO is important. I found that too high a VCCIO would make the cpu unstable as it clocked up and down for single/multi thread loads. At some point you will get freezes or randomly unstable. Hopefully my story will help others get the most out of their 10900k.
I scored 19 762 in Time Spy
Intel Core i9-10900K Processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti x 1, 32768 MB, 64-bit Windows 11}
www.3dmark.com
Intel Core i9 10900K @ 5200 MHz - CPU-Z VALIDATOR
[30ceqt] Validated Dump by SILVERYMOON (2023-01-15 20:00:17) - MB: Asus ROG MAXIMUS XIII HERO - RAM: 32768 MB
valid.x86.fr
Cinebench r23 17k+
