Overclocking 4670k on Asus Z97-A

It never worked well on my saberkitty R1 or R2.0 or my ch5-f or the ch5-f-z

doveman said:

To be precise, it's just the DIP5 component of AI Suite that won't install but that's the part that handles the overclocking.

OK, I'll do it via the BIOS. I did read that guide thanks, it was very helpful being new to Intel as I am.

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Did you install the Intel ME 'driver'? I believe in order to use that software you need to have the ME driver from intel installed...

caddi daddi said:

It never worked well on my saberkitty R1 or R2.0 or my ch5-f or the ch5-f-z

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AMD...

yea on amd boards, it might work on intel, I was really aiming to manny, he has one of my old boards.

I know... just saying essentially what he said (may work generally well on Intel, not on AMD).

EarthDog said:

Did you install the Intel ME 'driver'? I believe in order to use that software you need to have the ME driver from intel installed...

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Not unless it is included in the Intel chipset drivers from the ASUS website I didn't but ASUS don't seem to say I need to go and download this and install it to get the DIP5 component of AI Suite to work and even if it was needed, it should still stay installed and not just disappear, with the installer changing it's status from Installed to None after rebooting when prompted.

Anyway no big deal, I'll just use the BIOS rather than waste my time trying to sort out ASUS' software. One question, does anyone know how to disable AI Suite and EZUpdate from loading at boot? I don't particularly want to uninstall them (although maybe EZUpdate isn't needed at all) but Starter doesn't show any entries for them that I could disable (I checked the usual places in the registry manually as well) and there's these services:

ASUS COM
ASUS HM COM
ASUS System Control
ASUS Webstorage
ASUS Fancontrol

but I tried stopping and restarting all of them one by one and none caused any programs to launch.

I've also got really bad latency, around 5000us, for some reason. I tried killing everything that isn't essential but that didn't help, so it must be one of the drivers causing it.

Anyway, getting back to overclocking, I reset the Cache Multi and voltage to Auto and tried the CPU Multi at 46 with 1.25v but that made strange things happen in Windows, so I'll probably just stick with 44 at 1.225v to keep temps reasonable, especially as I'm aiming to run the fans fairly quietly. I've got a 140mm Yate Loon on the front, a 120mm Scythe PWM on the CPU and the stock Coolermaster 120mm on the Exhaust but I might replace the last as it's probably the least quiet, although it might not be audible over the PSU fan anyway, so I'll have to test that. I might stick the fan that came with the Hyper 212 EVO on the rear of the heatsink to create a two fan push-pull configuration to see if that makes much difference, as the HSF comes with a spare set of clips to allow this.

I checked the XMP profile and the reason why I didn't use that is because it's not an option for me. On the EZ screen, the XMP dropdown just shows disabled and on the Advanced screen, under AI Overclock Tuner where XMP should be an option as shown here http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/asus_z97_a_and_z97_deluxe_motherboard_review,8.html it just offers Auto or Manual. As I said before, setting the RAM manually to [email protected] just made the machine completely unbootable, so has anyone got any other ideas?

I also noticed whilst idle that two of my cores are spiking to 1700Mhz, whilst the other two stay at 800Mhz, as shown here

Sometimes they spike to 1200Mhz instead and sometimes it's just one of them but there doesn't seem to be enough activity to justify them stepping up and I'm sure my AMD system stays at idle clocks in similar circumstances. I am using PhenomMSRTweaker with that, which lets me specify a load before it steps up but I left those settings at default.

I've swapped the RAM out for 2*4GB Crucial Ballistix sticks and now the XMP Profile #1 is selectable, so I'm using that. I still can't figure out how to get the Vcore and VID to auto-adjust when overclocking though. The cores still step up far too aggressively for my liking as well.

When I manually set the Cache Multi to 34 (stock) and leave the Vcore on Auto (1.06v at 3.4Ghz) then they do auto-adjust, although I had some problems in Windows with those settings, so I'm not sure the voltage was sufficient. If I then change the Vcore to 1.225v, the auto-adjust stops working but I obviously can't leave it on Auto and overclock the Multi to 44, at least I don't think I can and the fact I had problems at 34 on Auto only reinforces my belief that it would be a bad idea.

I think I've manage to get the latency under control at least, by uninstalling TurboLAN, disabling AI Suite.exe from loading and disabling all those ASUS services (COM and HM COM seemed to be the worst suspects).

Turns out that DPC latency is still a big problem and is triggered by data passing over the NIC. The only fix I've found is to keep it in High Performance, so I'm stuck with it running at [email protected] permanently, which totally sucks

Why would that suck?

Because I want to keep energy use and heat down so that I can run my fans quietly and avoid wasting money or causing unnecessary wear.

The difference is literally pennies a month friend and the heat you won't notice.

So why do CPUs even bother with having different states or Windows even have different Power profiles, if it makes no difference to just run at max Mhz and voltage?

To save those pennies a day.

I mean do the math... check your wattage with it idle and o/c versus idle. Take that value, how much you pay for electricity /hour (im 10 cents per KW). and for how long you leave your PC on. You will likely find the amount to be shockingly less than you though I would imagine. Just sitting here at idle I am using 90W on a 4.4Ghz 4770K with a 290. I bet with power savings that may drop to around 60/70.

Now, if you are sleeping/hibernating the PC, that is a different story.

Hmm maybe but what about the PLANET!!! Billions of people all wasting 30W adds up to a lot of W. You should know better with a name like EarthDog

I guess I should check what I'm pulling here at idle vs OC, like you say, as financially it might not be worth worrying about but I still don't like wasting power unnecessarily.

I just shut mine off. With an SSD, I am literally less than 20s to a fully functional computer so I don't bother. Shutting it off is my part in 'saving the earth'.

EarthDog said:

I just shut mine off. With an SSD, I am literally less than 20s to a fully functional computer so I don't bother. Shutting it off is my part in 'saving the earth'.

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Yeah, that's better than leaving it idling, even at [email protected]. OK, you can keep your name

According to an article I read recently, there's only about 1W difference between standby and shutdown though and I find it a lot more convenient to be able to wake it and carry on from where you left it, rather than have to restart from cold and relaunch apps, etc, so I'll keep using standby.

A lot of green talk for a forum dedicated to overclocking.

trents said:

A lot of green talk for a forum dedicated to overclocking.

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That's all the more reason to minimise power usage when possible, to offset all the extra power we use when loaded

The other issue with trying to save $2 per year with power savings enabled (what it works out to with my use) is depending on how your bios and windows power profile settings handles C states, power savings can defeat the purpose of overclocking via the increased latency hindering SSD performance in the most important areas of random small read/writes. Below is worse case where 25% decrease in 4k random read speed and the 63% decrease in 4k random write speed with all C states enabled versus not on mine, and windows on default balanced power profile. Though can reduce or negate this effect by choosing high performance and/or turning off some power savings features. some bioses/mobos only see 10-15% performance hit in small 4k, but still isnt what you want. If you use high performance, where things ramp up much faster, you typically get less hit sometimes none on some mobos, but again lose some of power savings while using computer. Or just turn off all power savings and not worry about SSD performance loss. But if using them, I would definitely test, since different mobo/bioses/windows settings will handle very differently. On GB later bioses, this hit was closer to 20% on both 4k read/write.

all power savings off, 4.7ghz, Sandisk extreme pro SSD, GB z97mobo



same overclock with all power savings on, note the latency/access times, and the repeatable effect on most important small 4k read/write.



The above is with my current setup, but same effect seen ?1-2 years ago, whenever 3770k first came out with its corresponding GB mobo, and had intel 520 SSD then
4.7ghz, manual vcore, Cstates/eist disabled


4.7ghz, all power savings enabled and eist, dynamic OC.

That is interesting, thanks for bringing it to my attention. I guess there's no point having EIST and C-States enabled if I'm using High Performance anyway is there, or will disabling them prevent it going to a low power state when sleeping?

I wonder if the BIOS setting 'Dynamic Storage Accelerator - Enable this item to accelerate the performance of SSDs by dynamically adjusting system power management during heavy multitasking' is meant to help with this.

Anyway, I tested at various settings but it doesn't seem to make any significant difference on my system.

Stock 3.8Ghz High Performance


4.4Ghz Balanced


4.4Ghz High Performance


4.4Ghz High Performance, Dynamic Storage Accelerator enabled


4.4Ghz High Performance, EIST and C-States disabled

Actually your 4.4ghz balanced with c states enabled took a 30% hit in 4K read speed with 20.45 along with corresponding .169 access time versus all the other runs were 28-30 with access times .113 to .119. Random 4k write was only about 10%. if you run them several times, you will see 4K read and write decreases are repeatable.

High performance mode sets the cpu min power to 100%, that is why your ssd speed is not being hindered with Cstates, though you are losing some of power savings.

Balanced performance sets cpu min power to 5% and you can see 30% decrease in 4k random read, and 10% decrease in 4K random write from increased latency with increase access time. The overall SSD perf numbers can vary, it is the 4K speeds and access times that matter and are pretty consistent run to run.

And thanks for running on your system, interesting to see how each mobo/bios/ssd combination handles things differently.