i5 4670k overclock questions

Afran

Afran

Afran

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6 Oct 2008
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Hey guys, so I found this guide linked in another thread made by a member here which had this as a template for;

"Easy 4.4 / 4.6 GHz
CPU VRIN Override LLC: Set to Extreme (this is to make sure VIN doesn’t droop)
CPU VRIN Override Voltage: 1.7-2.0v (reduce if temperatures too high is causing instability, increase if temperatures are fine and you are unstable)
VCore: 1.24-1.34v
Ring Voltage: 1.15 or 1.2v
CPU Multiplier: 44x-46x
BCLK: Auto
Turbo: Auto
C1E, C3, C6/C7, and EIST: All Disabled"

So I looked at doing this in the bios and could use some help in finding/clarifying some stuffs.

The motherboard I have is Gigabyte Z87-HD3 Intel Z87 (Socket 1150)

Does CPU VRIN Override LLC = CPU Vrin Loadline Calibration? If so, Turbo = Extreme?
Does CPU VRIN External Override = CPU VRIN Override Voltage ?

Those 2 I wasn't sure about, I also couldn't find:

"BCLK"
"Turbo" (Unless that's the Intel turbo thing which is already on Auto by default)

Just want to make sure I do it all right before I give it a go, and I'm unsure of those 4 things.

Lastly I suppose oc'ing this cpu to around 4.3 ghz would be a fairly significant increase to gaming/recording performance given I'm currently running @ stock 3.4ghz with my gpu being a 1080 gtx playing at 1440p?

Thanks
 
Afran,

I used a Gigabyte Z87 board to overclock the same I5-4670K and I only had to adjust vCore and the CPU Multiplier to get a nice stable overclock going . . . everything else was on full auto, full power savings etc.
 
Interesting, I did try 1.24 vCore & 44x CPU Multiplier as per the guide plus C1E/C3/C6/C7/EIST disabled & that BSOD as soon as Windows started to load;

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 2057

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 124
BCP1: 0000000000000000
BCP2: FFFFFA80077ED8F8
BCP3: 0000000000000000
BCP4: 0000000000000000
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 256_1

Did you do something different? I'm a total noob to overclocking hence following that guide/template, figured it just didn't work as missing the steps I'm unsure about in OP.
 
I think if you're a beginner it's probably best to start out simple with most of the board on [auto]. Most of those settings from the cookie cutter guide/template are quite advanced and certainly not necessary to get a reasonable overclock going. vCore and CPU Multiplier alone should get you most of the way there . . . then if you still want to push further you can start adjusting additional settings. If your CPU is a dog it won't overclock much past 4.2GHz without a large jump in vCore. The i5-4670K I had was a turd and needed 1.23vCore @ 4.2GHz, 1.3vCore for 4.3GHz and 1.452vCore for 4.5GHz but eventually I settled on 4.3GHz.

You will also need a decent 3rd party HSF to keep the temperatures under control as the silicon does not respond well to heat. What cooler do you have and what idle/loads temps are you seeing?

In your boots I would reset the BIOS so everything is on full auto, run some benchmarks to get a baseline on performance and monitor both the vCore and temps to get a feel for the CPU. Then I would manually set the vCore to 1.2v and the CPU Multiplier to 40x and test for stability. If stable I would bump up the CPU Multiplier to 41x and test again. Once you hit a wall where the PC crashes or won't boot then turn up the vCore 0.025v and test again. Keep doing this while all the time monitoring vCore and temps in Windows until you either find yourself hitting 1.4vCore or over 80°C load stress temps. If you do this process carefully and keep taking notes you will build up a good idea how your CPU scales and you should see the point where you get a good amount of extra MHz for not a stupid amount of vCore and temps, also known as the "sweet spot". Once you push past the sweet spot it's all about diminishing returns and you feel like you are flogging a horse to get extra speed.

If your chip BSODs @ 4.4GHz 1.24vCore then boost the vCore and try again *or* reduce the CPU Multiplier and try again. For test purposes I've had that chip up to 1.452vCore but most folks seem to end up somewhere between 1.25v-1.35vCore for day to day usage.

The meat and potatoes of overclocking your chip is quite easy but does need a little patience. Once you eventually hit a brick wall then it may be the case you need to tinker with additional BIOS settings but that is definitely more advanced and should not be rushed into by a beginner.

Hope this helps! :)
 
Big.Wayne said:
I think if you're a beginner it's probably best to start out simple with most of the board on [auto]. Most of those settings from the cookie cutter guide/template are quite advanced and certainly not necessary to get a reasonable overclock going. vCore and CPU Multiplier alone should get you most of the way there . . . then if you still want to push further you can start adjusting additional settings. If your CPU is a dog it won't overclock much past 4.2GHz without a large jump in vCore. The i5-4670K I had was a turd and needed 1.23vCore @ 4.2GHz, 1.3vCore for 4.3GHz and 1.452vCore for 4.5GHz but eventually I settled on 4.3GHz.

You will also need a decent 3rd party HSF to keep the temperatures under control as the silicon does not respond well to heat. What cooler do you have and what idle/loads temps are you seeing?

In your boots I would reset the BIOS so everything is on full auto, run some benchmarks to get a baseline on performance and monitor both the vCore and temps to get a feel for the CPU. Then I would manually set the vCore to 1.2v and the CPU Multiplier to 40x and test for stability. If stable I would bump up the CPU Multiplier to 41x and test again. Once you hit a wall where the PC crashes or won't boot then turn up the vCore 0.025v and test again. Keep doing this while all the time monitoring vCore and temps in Windows until you either find yourself hitting 1.4vCore or over 80°C load stress temps. If you do this process carefully and keep taking notes you will build up a good idea how your CPU scales and you should see the point where you get a good amount of extra MHz for not a stupid amount of vCore and temps, also known as the "sweet spot". Once you push past the sweet spot it's all about diminishing returns and you feel like you are flogging a horse to get extra speed.

If your chip BSODs @ 4.4GHz 1.24vCore then boost the vCore and try again *or* reduce the CPU Multiplier and try again. For test purposes I've had that chip up to 1.452vCore but most folks seem to end up somewhere between 1.25v-1.35vCore for day to day usage.

The meat and potatoes of overclocking your chip is quite easy but does need a little patience. Once you eventually hit a brick wall then it may be the case you need to tinker with additional BIOS settings but that is definitely more advanced and should not be rushed into by a beginner.

Hope this helps! :)
Click to expand...

Good to know that - wonder if the bsod at 44x on 1.24vCore was due to the other settings I'd changed (the auto stuff and ring voltage), though the numbers you've provided give me a good place to start.

My cooler is the hyper 212 evo, currently (running at stock still) I get 25-35c idle and 65-70c load depending on ambient temperature, I think that's a decent starting point? But yeah, I'm not wanting to push it to anything crazy - I'd be happy with a 4.2 overclock, hell even 4.0 for now.

I take it as long as I stay within that 40-46 multiplier and 1.24 - 1.452 (ideally up to 1.35v it sounds like?) vCore these tests are "safe" providing I'm monitoring temps etc?

Thanks, certainly does help
 
65°C-70°C load on a stock i5-4670k is quite high? that sounds more like the retail CPU cooler. As you increase the vCore and increase the CPU frequency those load temps will rise quite steeply, particularly if we're talking Prime95. Is your system a new build or is it an older rig with maybe a ton of crud in the HSF? For testing purposes I would do what you need to do to bring those temps down, take off the case side panel etc, open a window and sit there shivering while you marvel at your new low temps!. As you mentioned 4GHz that could be a good place to start. With the BIOS reset and on full [Auto] change the CPU multiplier to 40x and the vCore to 1.1v and do some testing. If that voltage isn't stable add another 0.025vCore and test again. If 1.1v is stable at 4GHz try dropping the vCore more until you lose stability. All of this will give you a solid baseline and you will know what your chip needs to run 4GHz, then you begin the process of upping the CPU Multi and upping the vCore as you go. At some point it will be obvious your at the top end of your clock as either the vCore will be somewhere around 1.4v-1.5v or the CPU temps will be flying past 90°C! :D
 
Big.Wayne said:
65°C-70°C load on a stock i5-4670k is quite high? that sounds more like the retail CPU cooler. As you increase the vCore and increase the CPU frequency those load temps will rise quite steeply, particularly if we're talking Prime95. Is your system a new build or is it an older rig with maybe a ton of crud in the HSF? For testing purposes I would do what you need to do to bring those temps down, take off the case side panel etc, open a window and sit there shivering while you marvel at your new low temps!. As you mentioned 4GHz that could be a good place to start. With the BIOS reset and on full [Auto] change the CPU multiplier to 40x and the vCore to 1.1v and do some testing. If that voltage isn't stable add another 0.025vCore and test again. If 1.1v is stable at 4GHz try dropping the vCore more until you lose stability. All of this will give you a solid baseline and you will know what your chip needs to run 4GHz, then you begin the process of upping the CPU Multi and upping the vCore as you go. At some point it will be obvious your at the top end of your clock as either the vCore will be somewhere around 1.4v-1.5v or the CPU temps will be flying past 90°C! :D
Click to expand...

The 70c only really when pushing it through testing going off memory, I might be wrong - my 1080 GTX barely hits the 70c mark. As we speak I'm playing Grim Dawn which is largely cpu bound and it's running at 48-56c. Will start as you suggest as for the HSF is a little dust which I'll clean out but as I already cleaned it recently really isn't much :p
 
Big.Wayne said:
The i5-4670K I had was a turd and needed 1.23vCore @ 4.2GHz, 1.3vCore for 4.3GHz and 1.452vCore for 4.5GHz but eventually I settled on 4.3GHz.
Click to expand...

Sounds like our chips are twins, only a 4770K in my case. Settled on 4.3 with 1.296v. With a H100i that's pretty much the acceptable 24/7 limit temp-wise, at least on warm days. 65-75C gaming/Cinebench/Realbench temps. 75-90C Intel burn test/Prime/others. The 4670K's don't run quite as hot but with a Hyper Evo cooler it's unlikely you can push much over 1.3v 24/7 with Haswell.
 
Alright here goes - I've set it to default settings and the multiplier to 40x with vCore 1.1v as you suggested Wayne, I'll see how this goes before I tweak more, it booted at least :p

Edit: Bsod after about an hour of testing, keeping multiplier on 40x testing with 1.125v now
 
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Tip: use Cinebench for preliminary testing. It runs in a minute or two, and if you BSOD, then either add voltage or step back frequency, depending on your chosen method. Once you've found what's Cinebench stable, then you can do different and longer tests.
 
The i5-4670K I had wouldn't boot/load windows at 4GHz 1.1vCore. Eventually had to nudge the vCore up to 1.175v for the system to be completely stable @ 4GHz.
 
Well, so far so good @ 4ghz with 1.125v. System been stable for a good 10 or so hours, during that various games played, Cinebench ran fine (thanks for that tip), prime95 smallfft for an hour or so no issues (I know longer is ideal ;p) and tested recording gameplay no issues so far and certainly notice the increase in performance going to 4.0 from 3.4ghz

Edit:

Temperature wise, max during the prime95 test was 81/87/86/76c cores (87c package) and my highest "real world scenario" temp so far is 59c
 
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That looks good. So you have the choice to dwell at 4.0GHz for a day or two and make sure it's completely 100% stable before pushing on or you can jump straight to 42x CPU Multiplier and do some more stability testing. Real world load temps of 59°C @ 4GHz is good but those Prime95 peak temps are damn hot . . . Prime95 does push the temps more than any real world scenario I've encountered so as I'm only on air cooling I switched stability testing to a program called aida64 which does fully stress the computer but doesn't heat up the chip much beyond what real world scenarios would create. The only snag with aida64 is that it isn't free. Let us know how you get on and happy clocking! :)
 
Big.Wayne said:
That looks good. So you have the choice to dwell at 4.0GHz for a day or two and make sure it's completely 100% stable before pushing on or you can jump straight to 42x CPU Multiplier and do some more stability testing. Real world load temps of 59°C @ 4GHz is good but those Prime95 peak temps are damn hot . . . Prime95 does push the temps more than any real world scenario I've encountered so as I'm only on air cooling I switched stability testing to a program called aida64 which does fully stress the computer but doesn't heat up the chip much beyond what real world scenarios would create. The only snag with aida64 is that it isn't free. Let us know how you get on and happy clocking! :)
Click to expand...

Aye, I intend to stay on 4.0GHz for now. So as the Prime95 temps were high, I decided to do the "blend" test instead - this resulted in temperatures of no higher than 65c after about 10 minutes, but then it BSOD.

Shouldn't I have gotten a BSOD during the smallfft test since that tests the cpu more? Anyhow, I then rebooted and upped the voltage to 1.50v, ran the blend test and BSOD again within just a few minutes. Do I keep upping the voltage as a result of this despite it being stable outside of the blend test so far at 1.125v ?

I'm currently running on 1.75v but I'll not run the blend test 'til I see what you advise :)
 
Danny75 said:
Which voltages? Good idea to specify.
Click to expand...
Sorry? The vCore if that's what you mean? Only one I've messed with as suggested above.

To re-iterate; had 1.125v vCore for approx. 14 hours without issues (then bsod p95 blend test) so upped vCore to 1.150 (bsod during p95 blend test again) now vCore is set to 1.175v and I've not yet ran p95 as awaiting confirmation on what to do next really
 
Ah, you missed out a 1 on both those voltage numbers I quoted. It made them sound like RAM and VCCIN voltages instead of Vcore. Thanks for explaining.
 
Afran,

Bump the vCore to 1.175v and try both prime SmallFFTs and the Blend test, the SmallFFTs should pass but with high temps and hopefully the blend test may pass also, if not bump the vCore again to 1.200v. I'm not exactly sure why a CPU only overclock would pass Prime95 SmallFFTs but fail Blend but I believe the SmallFFTs test keeps most of the workload on chip whereas the blend test passes more data backwards and forwards to the ram. What RAM do you currently have and what speed is it running? If you open CPU-z and click on the [Memory] tab what does it read under DRAM frequency and NB Frequency? . . . . also in CPU-z if you click the [Bench] tab, then click the Stress CPU button and then click the [CPU] tab and right click over the Core Speed field do you see all the cores running @ 4GHz or are there some different speeds?
 
Hi Wayne,

My RAM is "Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3" CPU-z shows the memory as being 799.9 MHz DRAM Frequency and 3999.1 MHz NB Frequency

Checking the core speed fields all the cores are running at 4GHz
 
Afran,

I think I can see what is going on but for the moment continue your testing as I'm waiting to see what happens at 1.175v and 1.200v vCore with the CPU multi at 40x . . . I suspect it will still BSOD on Prime95 Blend. The thing that has happened which I didn't expect is that when you changed the CPU multiplier to 40x the board has also set the CPU-NB frequency to 40x resulting in 3999.1MHz. Normally the CPU-NB multi stays on its stock multiplier but yours has been bumped and maybe your board isn't smart enough to increase the specific CPU-NB voltage so it's running over clocked and under volted. a lot of data from the CPU passes through the CPU-NB so if it's not stable then it's going to spaz out when the processor tries to pass data to the memory and back ergo the Prime95 Blend test failing. It's always best to keep things simple so over clocking the CPU and the CPU-NB at the same time is not ideal so if the added vCore (1.175v/1.200v) doesn't solve the Prime Blend BSOD @4GHz then I would suggest finding the control for CPU-NB in the BIOS and set its multi manually . . . say x38 . . . this would cut the CPU-NB some slack and it may not spaz out. Once you finally work out what your CPU can do in terms of processing MHz you will be able to come back and then work on the CPU-NB clock . . . most likely the CPU-NB will need a boost in voltage to run @ 4GHz. Lastly what we should have done before we started was to run all your benchmarks and stability tests on a fully stock system just to see if the basic platform passes all tests before we started to overclock . . . It may be there is a problem with your stock memory config so prime would fall over anyway even on a stock system. So there is a couple of hours worth of testing there, get the vCore tested to see if that helps, if it doesn't drop the multi on the CPU-NB and if dropping the CPU-NB frequency does make prime blend stable then also reduce the vCore back down to 1.125v and test again. Any questions just ask! :)
 
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