I want to O/C my i5 3570k, help please

I looked at the sticky guides and have began to test some O/C scenarios using the quick setting option for 4.0 and 4.2 GHz. This changes the multiplier and BCLK remains at 100. I set CPU to 1.1v and it runs stable. In one of the guides it talks about changing the BLCK. In the BIOS it says it can be set up to 150. However when I change it to 150 and lower the multiplier to 22 so it remains at the stock 3.4GHz or slightly lower, when windows has loaded up and I check with CPU-z the multiplier is at 22 but the BCLK is unchanged at 100, effectively under-clocked to 2.2Ghz. I can't seem to find any info on what this is happening. Also in the one guide it mentions IOH voltage but I don't see IOH voltage. Aside from that I haven't gotten any farther with my experimentation since these two things have me unable to proceed until I know what is going on with them. Basically I'm looking to squeeze a little more out of the CPU for gaming if possible. I haven't messed around with O/C in awhile now and have been itching to play around again. So any advice or guides or what not ya'll have for me would be great in addition two these two specific things in question in this post. Thanks.

Have you tried checking your speeds with a second program like hwinfo to verify that cpuz is correct.

Have you read this guide? It doesn't get much easier then this. What are you cooling the processor with?

I have checked with HWmonitor and asrock's extreme tuning utility, both report the lower GHz of the 22 x 100 plus the asrock utility reports the BLCK as 100. When I go back into the BIOS the settings are correctly set at 22 and 150. So I have no idea what is happening. As for the liked guide that was the first one I read. It refers to terms from some other motherboard or something but I was able to decipher what voltage to change and that unless I misunderstood it change only the multiplier to increase the clock. As far as cooling it is heatsink and fan but I don't recall more detail about it. It is able to adequately cool the i5 up to 1.25v if I recall. I'm not trying to push it to the very limit but if I decide to go extreme then I'll upgrade the cooling to something more fancy than what I got. I'm not even sure how much of a gain I'll get for gaming, but I know I'll have fun playing around to see whatever the results are.

Uh, that's not going to work I'm afraid.

Newer CPU Architectures', such as Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge (what you have there), Haswell, and Devil's Canyon (and so forth) are very limited in how much you can change the Base Clock (BCLCK). Most top out around 105-108MHz Base Clock, although; instability can start as low as 103-104MHz with some CPU's.

Your board and CPU are failing the overclock and just resetting the BCLCK to default (100MHz).

Why does the Z77 support BCLK to 150 if it can't even go above or barely above the default? That's like having a speedometer in a car that gauges up to 200 MPH but can't exceed 100 MPH. No wonder I'm confused.

StoneRyno said:

Why does the Z77 support BCLK to 150 if it can't even go above or barely above the default? That's like having a speedometer in a car that gauges up to 200 MPH but can't exceed 100 MPH. No wonder I'm confused.

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No idea, I've never understood that myself.

I have a Z77 board (Asus P8Z77-V Pro) that allows the user to set up to 300MHz for the bclck, even though no CPU I've ever owned has been stable to much more than 105-106MHz.

There are many different things that are tied to the bclck, and some of them easily get unstable if you go too high. CPU, RAM, iGPU, PCI Express lanes (which is usually what suffers instability first, as far as I know), are just a few I believe are interconnected with the bclck frequency.

You're pretty much limited to overclocking via increasing the CPU multiplier on the LGA1155/Z77 platform. The bclck allows for some fine tuning, but you can't get much of an overclock from that alone.

Interesting, that makes me wonder why they didn't include ratio settings for some of that other stuff so that the BCLK could be changed. the asrock Z77 extreme4 has a setting for iGPU and RAM but I don't think there is one for PCIe. There are voltages for those things too which would if any only help for a tiny deviation I would think. While I was waiting on replies to this thread I messed with my RAM a bit. I have G.SKILL TridentX Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 2400. I thought I would bump it up to 2600 as a test. But I get beep error codes for memory error in POST. The XMP profile for the 2400 is 1.65v. I only tried a small increase in volts. I'll have to see if there is a guide on here for RAM o/c. I was told back when I build this PC that this was good RAM was good for RAM o/c. Good news is at 40x100 (4Ghz) I gained about 20% more fps with the game I play the most that ran at 30fps on average. I have an older video card. I'm not certain the results when the upgrade comes. I bought a GTX970.

The BCLK on the 1155 socket chips will usually top out about +5, a really good setup may do more but unlikely. As far as the Ram goes, for gaming you're not going to see any noticeable difference running 2600 over 2400 Mhz.