New system need help (4790k)

So after a long time I upgraded, got myself a nice 4790K and a ASUS Z97-AR board. Problem is I can't for the life of me figure out how to overlock this thing... well manually that is. What is all this auto crap? how do I actually set the multiplier myself?

OK, There are a few ways of doing this. The easiest way I have found for stability is doing it in steps and it does take a little time. First off reset everything to factory defaults. In your extreme tweak tab, go to AI Overclock and select your XMP profile. Some even leave this on Auto when starting, I do not. Then go down to CPU Core Ratio and set it to sync all cores and manually set all cores to 46. Leave the Cache on auto, just set cores. Then scroll down to CPU Core Voltage, change to manual, and set your voltage for 1.250v. Everything else should be left alone. F10 save and exit and boot into windows. Run Realbench. If all is good, go ahead and go back to bios and set all cores to 47 and try and boot into windows and run Realbench. You will hit a point where you will BSOD which means you will need to add some voltage. I usually raise voltage by .010 at a time. So if your at 1.250 raise it to 1.260. We are just trying to get a somewhat stable overclock to start off. You will most likely hit a wall at 4.7-4.8GHz where after you will have to raise voltage quite a bit to get there. There are crazy overclockers here that don't mind juicing there chips above 1.4v and they have the cooling to handle it. I try in my overclocks to stay at maximum of 1.35v until I find the sweet spot in any cpu. After you you find a voltage start backing it off in .010 until you BSOD and then you know where your sweet spot is. Then you can move on to your cache speed and voltage. You want to get as close to a 1:1 ratio with core and cache speed but if you get it within 300MHz you are right where you want to be without losing anything with your CPU. Also your cache voltage should not exceed your core voltage. I like to keep it if I can arounf .050-.10 below core voltage. Try this to start out. Now of course running a stress test like aida64 or XTU for a few hours will give you a piece of mind afterwards. This is just somewhat of a quick way to see what you can push with your chip but you also have to watch your temps so that you are also comfortable with those.

Figured it out mostly, my chip seems to be quite decent.



Gonna leave it here for a bit and try to lower the voltage. What temps do I want to aim for under load, I know obviously the lower the better but whats is the max that I should avoid.

Ideally, you would like to stay around or under 70C for a 27/7 overclock but even around 80C or just under will be just fine on air cooling. The cpu will want to throttle down if you were to go much higher than that. In most cases 90-95C you will see some sort of throttling of the CPU.

Alright great, thanks. I am currently around 65C under load.

Yeah, keep it under 85C or so... its good to the point of throttling (100C) but you can tend to see stability issues, at least I have over 90C. Less than that is being over conservative IMO.