Help me get the best out of an i7 860

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

Soldato
Joined
12 May 2011
Posts
6,275
Location
Southampton
I have an i7 860 which I am trying to overclock it for a project. I can get it to 3.9GHz and I thought it was stable but BFV gave it a BSOD. I was aiming for a magic 4GHz but I'm not sure that is possible unless anyone can remember what overclocking they did 10 (!) years ago on these chips. There are a few other voltages and settings I can tweak around.

What I've done:

Disable all power saving (I remember doing this back then).
Raised multi to 21 (non turbo is 16, max turbo is 22)
Raised BLK to 181#
Vcore is 1.376 ish (This fluctuates up when less cores in use and down when more cores are in use!? Turbo is off).
QDI/VTT is + 0.100
CPU PLL is + 0.100
DRAM is dropped down to less than rated speed to adjust for BLK

Temps top out at 70c in game. I've got a Silverstone AR01 which reviewed as a very good £30 cooler. I've added an extra 120mm fan to it too. I'm confident CPU temps aren't an issue.

It's a Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 motherboard.
 
I have settings written down going back as early as Athlon 64 on socket 754 as well as benchmark results. :D

This may or may not help you but here are my settings for when I had a i5 760 in a Asus P7P55D-E Pro:-

Settings for 4Ghz

Vcore 1.2875v
CPU PLL 1.8625v
BLK 200
Multiplier 20x
IMC 1.16250v
PCH 1.0875v

Settings for 4.2Ghz

Vcore 1.375v
CPU PLL 1.900v
BLK 200
Multiplier 21x
IMC 1.13125v
PCH 1.15v

Anything not written down was left on auto. These settings were rock solid for me and 4.2Ghz was my day to day overclock. I have always turned power saving back on after finding my max stable overclock. I see no point in having the cpu running at full speed with max volts when I am browsing the net or it's at idle.

I have found a couple of videos for you that have peoples settings for a i7 860 at 4Ghz here and here and also a guys online diary about his journey of overclocking his i7 860 here. His voltages get reall silly by the end but he was doing everything he could to hit 4.5Ghz by this point. Everything is ok up to 4Ghz and 4.2Ghz though.
 
Last edited:
Bumping my old thread...

I read that these chips have the pci-e controller built in and it was the first generation of this.

I'm struggling to match my old overclocks and the only change to the system is putting a PCI-E wireless card in instead of a USB WiFi adapter.

Can having a PCI-E x1 (in addition to a x16 GPU) make overclocks less stable (in general or specifically on an i7 860) now that the PCI-E controller is on the CPU?

I've manually set the PCI-E "bus" to 100 rather than just auto.
 
Do you have option for QPI Speed/Ratio? If so possibly dropping that and upping BLK to 200 is where you need to be
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom