Overclocking Advise

[ek5932]

Hello All,

This weekend I impulse bought a new 9900k and Aurous master, cooled by a Corsair H100i. I'm pretty new to overclocking but I have everything up and running - clocked the CPU to 5GHZ (4.7 uncore) @ 1.3 vcore. I'm happy with everything but wanted some advise on a few of things:

I think my overclock is pretty decent; ~mid 30's (C) idle temps and generally under 60 when running Prime95 blend. Do you think it's safe to it a bit push harder? The OC guide I followed stated I shouldn't go over 1.35 vcore; am I safe to get the fastest clock speed at that, as long as I'm getting decent temps?

Secondly, when running blend [in prime] and gaming my CPU temps are OK but the Small FTTs test kills my PC instantly. Is this because it runs AVX commands? There's an offset in my Bios, should I configure that to keep the test stable?

Lastly, in my bios settings for XMP I only have a single profile option which I selected, with the correct speed for my memory (3200) and everything else is set to auto. Is this enough? I have read something about tight/loose timings which is more important then speed. Is this something I need to worry about? It's a gskill 16gb kit.

Thanks in advance! It's fun to start pushing my system.

 

[ek5932]

Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply.

I've tried getting Small FTTs stable but my PC still crashes pretty much instantly - even with my vCore set to 1.4. If a set a large AVX offset of 10 then it appears OK but looking in CPUz I get odd fluctuations down to 4ghz (from 5) even when I'm not performing AVX load. I'd rather not have these fluctuation - do I really need the test to pass? When I run blend for 20 minutes my temps are at ~85 with no crashes so the build seems stable enough. And if Prime isn't a true representation of a proper use case and my PC isn't freezing under normal load does it really matter?

Also, sounds like I have some research to do for my memory clocking. One thing I'm glad you mentioned is the Bios settings reverting settings after a number of fails. I thought this was some weird behaviour with my motherboard but now this makes sense.
The whole process sounds a bit scarier than I thought it would be, but I'll read up and see how I go!

 

[ek5932]

RealBench yields better results than Prime. My temps go upto 100 though, but the system doesn't crash which is a good thing ^^

Granted my system may not be 100% stable but I think I'm content with its current state. Sure, some synthetic test doesn't pass but as long as the system is stable in real world scenarios I'm happy. I think I'd rather have the 5hz for what I do use, then to lose a few hz to be 100% stable.

I also understand that I shouldn't go around saying my system is stable now as well

Thanks for taking the time to help - I really appreciate it.