Procedure for overclocking core i7 920 ?

GunRunner

GunRunner

GunRunner

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Joined
31 Jan 2007
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603
I am pretty well up to speed with over clocking intel socket 775 Cpu's see my signature, and have successfully overclocked 4 other systems very recently for my family.

But... I am having a problem with a newly built i7 set-up that is using the following:

Antec 900 case
i7 920 Cpu
Gigabyte EX58 -UD5 Motherboard
G Skill 6GB DDR3 PC3 -10666C9 (1333 mhz) Triple channel RAM (3 x 2GB)
BFG GTX 295 - 1792MB
Akasa AK-967 cooler now fitted on 4 March 09

Where ever I look on the web, there are very comprehensive write ups on how to over clock the i7 920 cpu, that are without a doubt written by well informed experienced experts. Some of these write ups are pages long, and because the person writing it, wants to convey the message fully and give a full account of why and how they did it, the very salient procedure and details are hidden inside the report and it is quite difficult to see the wood for the trees.

My question is: Does anyone already have procedure that is a condensed down version that is easy to follow and does not have all the padding? If they don't, has anyone considered doing this? I would even be happy to send the person doing it a beer or 4 or 5. Not joking!:D

I would hope the procedure would take the form of...

In the bios.....to clock to 3.0 Ghz do the following:

a.
b.
c.
d
e.
f.
etc.

Test for stability at this setting for a determined time.

Rinse and repeat for 3.2 Ghz.

Test for stability

Rinse and repeat for 3.4 Ghz etc.

Now before you say google it, I have and that is why I am getting bogged down with too much detail. Also I am now getting too long in the tooth and the older you get the harder it is to retain the information. The truth be known I am an OAP. There I have said it!

Can anyone help please?

Kind regards
 
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How high are you hoping to get? You will easily get 3.2 on stock voltages.

I'm at work at the moment, if I have time later I can post my bios settings for 4Ghz, although the list will be big and you might not want to go this high.

I would manually set the vcore to 1.2v and increase the BCLK frequency 10Mhz at a time and test for stability each time in Prime95 keeping an eye on temps in Coretemp then increase vcore a few notches when you get blue screen or errors. I found I could get 3.5Ghz on stock 1.2v.
 
mr_x_plosion said:
How high are you hoping to get? You will easily get 3.2 on stock voltages.

I'm at work at the moment, if I have time later I can post my bios settings for 4Ghz, although the list will be big and you might not want to go this high.

I would manually set the vcore to 1.2v and increase the BCLK frequency 10Mhz at a time and test for stability each time in Prime95 keeping an eye on temps in Coretemp then increase vcore a few notches when you get blue screen or errors. I found I could get 3.5Ghz on stock 1.2v.
Click to expand...

Great! Thanks! Anything you post with regards to overclocking would be gratefully received and appreciated. I mean anything! I feel I must start off low down and test for COMPLETE stability, as I play IL2 Forgotten Battels 2 (open GL2) and I have to fend off the nvlddmkm error that occurs in Vista x64.
 
mr_x_plosion

Did you look at your BIOS settings last night?

Has anybody else any thoughts on a procedure?

Regards

Edited. Since posting this request, I have re read the following review of my motherboard:

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/gigabyte_EX58-UD5_review/

I found at the end of the review the following settings:

Overclocking

Overclocking on the GA-EX58-UD5 went very easily until I tried to exceed 21x183MHz - at which point it required more finesse.

I was even able to get to the Windows desktop at 4.2GHz - however I could not get it stable, as the Vcore required generated too much heat for the Noctua 12 to keep the processor below 100'C; however I am sure that 4.2GHz would be workable with a good water cooling kit.

In order to hit 4.03GHz I had to:

* Enable "Turbo Boost"
* disable C1E
* disable C3/C6/C7
* enable EIST
* enable Base Clock control
* set base clock to 192MHz
* set PCIe to 100MHz
* set memory multiplier to 6x at 1152-7-7-7-20-1T or 8x at 1536-9-8-8-24-1T
* Vcore at 1.475V
* Load Line Calibration enabled

Frankly, I would not run the system with these settings long term; I'd back down to BCLK of 183MHz as that ran with a 1.4V Vcore.

end of quote from the review.

Any comments? I would NOT enable Turbo boost!
 
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When I started overclocking my i7 920, I kind of expected 4.0 ghz and pretty much dived in at the deep end after reading up on the settings other people were using. As it turned out it took me a long time to get it stable, I will try to remember how I got to my current overclock. The motherboard and memory I have is different to your system GunRunner so I am not sure how helpful it would be for me to just write my current settings.

first thing I did was to increase the cpu core voltage in the bios to 1.35 which seemed to be what people consider a safe voltage for high overclocks on the core I7 provided the temps are ok, (around 80c or below) I tried 20 x 200 for starters, this allowed me to boot into windows at 4.0 ghz ok but prime 95 would fail. I tried more voltage for the cpu 1.36 in the bios and this gave me a voltage reading of 1.368 in cpuz with load line calibration enabled. prime95 was stable at 4.0ghz but I rather wanted to have the voltage at 1.35v in the bios or below.

I read that using a high multiplier and turbo mode with the i7 might actually restrict overclocking so I changed from a miltiplier of 20 to 19 and increased the bclk from 200 to 210 which gave around 4.0ghz again. I was surprised to find that with this change I was able to run 1.32v in the bios for the cpu instead of 1.36 and prime was stable and the tempratures dropped around 5c.

I decided to try for 4.1 ghz so I increased cpu voltage back to 1.35 which gave me 1.36 in cpuz then I just increased the bclk from 210 to 216 slowly by two mhz at a time, testing prime 95 for stability and then rebooting and then increasing again.
I am at 4.1ghz now with prime 95 stable for an hour. I have not tested it longer then that because It stresses the cpu more then games by far, i have had no lockups or reboots so I am satisfied that its stable enough. If not I can always go back to 4 ghz. My system has been at this speed for about a week.

Thats how I got to my currant oc, all other voltages are default except for the memory which is at 1.66v.

I hope this helps :)
 
Based on advice advice on this forum, I'm currently at 3.3 and slowly moving up, but in no rush!

Because I've left Turbo on, this gives me about 3.4 - 3.5GHz during tests (occt, superpi etc). All I have done is change blck to 165 and cpu voltage to 1.3 and so far so good.

I'm a bit like in the sense that I initially tried the 'get to 4Ghz guide' written by Gigabyte but it wasn't as simple as that and was far from stable so I started from scratch and taking it one step at a time. I reckon this way I will learn a lot more and more easily be able to fault find should the need arise.

I'm using a Gigabyte UD4P so a similar board to you so would be interested in seeing how you get on. Good luck! ;)
 
OK new fan fitted! Temperatures now are now 10 degrees C lower at idle.

I had been overclocking to 3.26 Ghz with the standard fan, so now I aim to move onwards. I will not enable turbo, because I found I got the dreaded nVidia driver error using that function. I just ran the 3dm06 and found with this mild overclock that I am 600 points better than the one in my signature and the main improvement is in the CPU score.
 
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I overclocked my i7 920 upto 3.8ghz, getting to 3.2ghz was easy and didn't need much in the way of changing settings, I just set the BCLK and started with a low CPU multiplier, I then stepped it up until I got to what I would consider maximum temperatures.

My BCLK is currently set to 200, my CPU multiplier is 19, and I manually set the RAM speed to 1600mhz (this is also determined from the base clock, another reason I used the multiplier to step the CPU speed up in 200mhz chunks).

I then raised the CPU core voltage up until it was stable, I found that my system would boot, but as soon as I put load on it with prime95 it would blue screen, at which point I slightly upped the Core V, however I didn't want to touch 1.4v on the core, and now it sits at around 1.25v @ 3.8ghz and seems stable under load.

Temperatures are around 38degrees idle, and 65 under prime95 load, that's with air cooling and a crappy case.
 
bagwaa said:
I overclocked my i7 920 upto 3.8ghz, getting to 3.2ghz was easy and didn't need much in the way of changing settings, I just set the BCLK and started with a low CPU multiplier, I then stepped it up until I got to what I would consider maximum temperatures.

My BCLK is currently set to 200, my CPU multiplier is 19, and I manually set the RAM speed to 1600mhz (this is also determined from the base clock, another reason I used the multiplier to step the CPU speed up in 200mhz chunks).

I then raised the CPU core voltage up until it was stable, I found that my system would boot, but as soon as I put load on it with prime95 it would blue screen, at which point I slightly upped the Core V, however I didn't want to touch 1.4v on the core, and now it sits at around 1.25v @ 3.8ghz and seems stable under load.

Temperatures are around 38degrees idle, and 65 under prime95 load, that's with air cooling and a crappy case.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this information. I am just twiddling around at the moment with no overall plan and it is stable at 3.6ghz. It is running a bit warmer than yours, so perhaps I need to drop the voltage.
 
After reading myself to death on loads of threads and overclocking reviews, it appears that many people turn off the hyperthreading when overclocking. So that is what I have done. I am still "fumbling" around and have now got it stable at 3.8ghz. I ran prime95 for a couple of hours. The maximum temperature on any core was 62 degrees C. After that I ran 3dmark06 and this is the result.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=10221477

As you can see it is far better than my setup below..from June of 2008. That machine does not exist anymore in that form because I had cold boot problems inside the guarantee period and replaced the board. This is 5 boards of 680i and 780i (2 were EVGA) in 2 years that have failed. Never again will I go the nVidia chipset route.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=6980656

Anyway, I digress, I tried to run this new i7 system (see opening thread for details) at 4.0ghz but it blue screened on me. My guess is that it will do it easily, it is just that I am unsure what I need to tweak to get it stable.
 
62c is pretty good for 3.8, hyperthreading does increase temperatures quite a bit. I have it enabled though because I don't want to lose any i7 features. how much voltage did you use when you tried 4.0ghz? anything above 3.8 and voltage increases are necessary, temperatures rise a lot. 4.0ghz on i7 is definitely not easy.

I cant see your scores on the futuremark links maybe i need to register and log in ?
 
bagwaa said:
I overclocked my i7 920 upto 3.8ghz, getting to 3.2ghz was easy and didn't need much in the way of changing settings, I just set the BCLK and started with a low CPU multiplier, I then stepped it up until I got to what I would consider maximum temperatures.

My BCLK is currently set to 200, my CPU multiplier is 19, and I manually set the RAM speed to 1600mhz (this is also determined from the base clock, another reason I used the multiplier to step the CPU speed up in 200mhz chunks).

I then raised the CPU core voltage up until it was stable, I found that my system would boot, but as soon as I put load on it with prime95 it would blue screen, at which point I slightly upped the Core V, however I didn't want to touch 1.4v on the core, and now it sits at around 1.25v @ 3.8ghz and seems stable under load.

Temperatures are around 38degrees idle, and 65 under prime95 load, that's with air cooling and a crappy case.
Click to expand...

Would you be able to give me a complete Dufus Guide of getting it to 3.2 and 3.8?

I am using the P6T Deluxe Mobo.

I had a quick look but was unsure what to change to be honest. I started changing some options in the BIOS and was not really sure what I was doing.
 
ShaggyRS6 said:
Would you be able to give me a complete Dufus Guide of getting it to 3.2 and 3.8?

I had a quick look but was unsure what to change to be honest. I started changing some options in the BIOS and was not really sure what I was doing.
Click to expand...

Can you not do a bit of research and read some overlcocking guides? No-one should have to spend their precious time writing out a complete guide for you when there are PLENTY of them on various forums. And i7 is pretty similar to Core2 closking only with some minor differences, the core principles are the same.:)

Is it really so hard to put to put "i7 verclocking guide" into Google? http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=i7+overclocking+guide

First link is a good hit, as are numerous others.

EDIT - Don't take it personally, i'm just too jaded. :p
 
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Richdog said:
No-one should have to spend their precious time writing out a complete guide for you when there are PLENTY of them on various forums.

EDIT - Don't take it personally, i'm just too jaded. :p
Click to expand...


I ask only one question! Why write a statement like that if you did not mean it personally and you were just jaded? My opening thread was just the same question asking for help. That is why this forum and many other forums like it exist. By using google the person finds the questions such as mine and then finds the "helpful" people who will assist where they can.

Note. I am now over clocking mine (only to 3.9ghz) and still keeping the core temps to 65 degrees C and less. When I have asked a few more questions to other readers, I will be writing a procedure. It might not be the "dogs" but it will be a starting point for others.
 
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