[hokiealumnus]

There's an update to this coming soon. Should be out next week. We'll let you know. Great improvements to an already quality guide.

[Gillbot]

Nice, I can't wait to toy with my i3 530.

[OC nub]

Thanks, Very nice guide, , I spent the afternoon playing around with this. It works very well on the P55 board. Max bclk on my P55A UD6 without going crazy on the VTT was 220. I did short LinX runs to test for stability, 10 passes to save time.
http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/6...bclk138vtt.png
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/4...bclk136vtt.png

[kkpudge7]

Awesome guide mia...

I was able to get 4Ghz (8hrs stable) without ht, and only 3.8ghz with ht only somewhat stable prior to this. Using this guide as a reference I'm now working towards 4.3Ghz HT stable. Breaking it up into sections like that is the key, you cant change a ton of settings at once because then you dont know why its failing.

Breaking it into sections allows for much easier trouble shooting. Keep up the good work man

[hokiealumnus]

Bumpety Bump.

Update has been published folks...catch it here!

[DreadCthulhu]

First of all I'd like to thank Miahallen for putting together this extensive guide, I think it's a step in the right direction for a lot of people like me who have absolutely 0 experience with overclocking.

One piece of feedback that I wanted to leave is that as an owner of an i5-750 running on a GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2 I found some of the variables mentioned in the guide to be missing or new ones to be present. If you're completely green like I am, it's be very helpful to know how those additional (or missing) variables relate to what's in the guide. Here's a couple of points that were unclear to me:

- The "Bclock voltages" section talk about an IOH voltage. On my p55 gigabyte there's no such thing, instead I have a CPU Vcore, a Dynamic VCore (DVID) and a QPI/VTT Voltage. The Vcore is mentioned at the end of the guide in step 3. Given that IOH appears not to exist in P55, do I just ignore the suggestion to raise it to 1.3-1.35?

- In the same section, and in the rest of the guide, you measure tweaks to the VTT in terms of +0.xV (where x is a number). What does that actually mean? Are you saying we should take the default value of the BIOS and increase that by +0.xV? I guess the confusing part is that in my menu there's the DVID variable which actually does have + and - 0.xV settings, so to me it's not clear whether you're asking to keep the VTT default and tweak the DVID, or if I should ignore the DVID and only increase the VTT.

Thanks!

[MIAHALLEN]

Originally Posted by OC nub

Thanks, Very nice guide, , I spent the afternoon playing around with this. It works very well on the P55 board. Max bclk on my P55A UD6 without going crazy on the VTT was 220. I did short LinX runs to test for stability, 10 passes to save time.
http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/6...bclk138vtt.png
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/4...bclk136vtt.png

Thanks for the feedback...glad it helped!

Originally Posted by kkpudge7

Awesome guide mia...

I was able to get 4Ghz (8hrs stable) without ht, and only 3.8ghz with ht only somewhat stable prior to this. Using this guide as a reference I'm now working towards 4.3Ghz HT stable. Breaking it up into sections like that is the key, you cant change a ton of settings at once because then you dont know why its failing.

Breaking it into sections allows for much easier trouble shooting. Keep up the good work man

Thant was the idea Please post in the forums if you have questions that the guide does not address. We're here to help...great job so far, keep it up

Originally Posted by DreadCthulhu

First of all I'd like to thank Miahallen for putting together this extensive guide, I think it's a step in the right direction for a lot of people like me who have absolutely 0 experience with overclocking.

One piece of feedback that I wanted to leave is that as an owner of an i5-750 running on a GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2 I found some of the variables mentioned in the guide to be missing or new ones to be present. If you're completely green like I am, it's be very helpful to know how those additional (or missing) variables relate to what's in the guide. Here's a couple of points that were unclear to me:

- The "Bclock voltages" section talk about an IOH voltage. On my p55 gigabyte there's no such thing, instead I have a CPU Vcore, a Dynamic VCore (DVID) and a QPI/VTT Voltage. The Vcore is mentioned at the end of the guide in step 3. Given that IOH appears not to exist in P55, do I just ignore the suggestion to raise it to 1.3-1.35?

- In the same section, and in the rest of the guide, you measure tweaks to the VTT in terms of +0.xV (where x is a number). What does that actually mean? Are you saying we should take the default value of the BIOS and increase that by +0.xV? I guess the confusing part is that in my menu there's the DVID variable which actually does have + and - 0.xV settings, so to me it's not clear whether you're asking to keep the VTT default and tweak the DVID, or if I should ignore the DVID and only increase the VTT.

Thanks!

Great feedback! Thanks!

- IOH
This does not apply to all boards, as many lower end boards do not support extensive OCing features in the BIOS. Since you do not have the ability to tweak IOH, just pass that section. (the difference will be minor anyway, VTT voltage adjustments are the main factor in bclock OCing).

- VTT and DVID
VTT adjustments are made over the default value which is different for different platforms. That is why I refer to VTT in +0.xV adjustments. DVID is a very cool feature, but my guide is writen to no use it, please disable it! If you want to explore DVID possibilities, please start a thread to discuss it (if I don't chime in, PM me and give me a link to your thread so I can help out)

OCing can get very complex, so I thried to make this guide as green friendly as possible, while still empowerin users with the basic knowledge to understand what they are doing. It's a lot to swallow in one sitting, so take your time, and don't rush Best of luck, and don't hesitate to call on the users here for help

Originally Posted by hokiealumnus

Bumpety Bump.

Update has been published folks...catch it here!

Thanks for getting the update published while I've been out of town Hokie

A huge shout-out to Senior Member "Brolloks" for his invaluable input on this update....I couldn't have done it without you man!

[freeagent]

Thanks for the write up! This noob finally cracked 4.2 on my ancient C0 last nite, and it didnt bluescreen with large ffts like it always does! It has been my first intel chip where it actually challenged me to get a ghz over stock, usually you are pratically guarenteed it

[ewoogy]

Thanks, helped a lot! This is my first time to ever try to overclock anything and i got my i7 920 to 4.0ghz with no problems at all. Thanks for helping the new guys!!!

[Lvcoyote]

I'll concur with the weak IMC issue on these 32nm CPU's. I was going nuts trying to overclock this i5 661 past 4.0 GHz, until I dropped the ratio to 2:8, off and running now!!

[DHEnthusiast]

Love reading OC guides, nice one!

Learning all I can

[Brolloks]

Originally Posted by MIAHALLEN

A huge shout-out to Senior Member "Brolloks" for his invaluable input on this update....I couldn't have done it without you man!

You are most welcome my friend, glad I could add some value to your already excellent guide

[Aynjell]

Innacurate:

Quad core i5 CPUs (Lynnfield) are identical to the low end i7 CPUs, the only exception being the lack of Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology. All i5 CPUs work only in LGA1156 based motherboards.

I5 750 being the only quad core out right now, you can add to that blanket statement "and vt-d, which allows virtual machines direct access to the hardware."

See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#IOMMU

It's basically the stuff required for using real 3D hardware in VM's. I say give it 2 more years and somebody will come up with some type of shell operating system that lats us run Linux and Windows in parallel. A super lightweight and flexible hyper-visor...

[MIAHALLEN]

Originally Posted by Aynjell

Innacurate:

Quad core i5 CPUs (Lynnfield) are identical to the low end i7 CPUs, the only exception being the lack of Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology. All i5 CPUs work only in LGA1156 based motherboards.

I5 750 being the only quad core out right now, you can add to that blanket statement "and vt-d, which allows virtual machines direct access to the hardware."

See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#IOMMU

It's basically the stuff required for using real 3D hardware in VM's. I say give it 2 more years and somebody will come up with some type of shell operating system that lats us run Linux and Windows in parallel. A super lightweight and flexible hyper-visor...

Interesting, you are correct sir....thanks I missed that one

[hokiealumnus]

Now that you mention it, it's also missing "Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT)", for what that's worth (nothing for most).

[MIAHALLEN]

Hokie...would you mind making those corrections please?

[hokiealumnus]

Fixed:

Quad core i5 CPUs (Lynnfield) are identical to the low end i7 CPUs, the only exceptions being their lack of Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology, Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d) and Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT).

With appropriate linkage of course.

[Aynjell]

Originally Posted by hokiealumnus

Fixed:

With appropriate linkage of course.

TXT I'd argue is pointless. I've never had issues without. I know I wouldn't mind an i7 860 so I could get HT and the vt-d for future use. I'm praying for the day when we can run comsumer OS's on a hypervisor. I'd love to be able to utilize all my hardware natively and be able to swap between os's at will. A man can dream, right?

[Brolloks]

Originally Posted by Aynjell

I'd love to be able to utilize all my hardware natively and be able to swap between os's at will. A man can dream, right?

Now that would be great...then again that is what I do 99% of the time in any event...knock on wood I have only had a few bad OS adoptions, most of the time I have a seperate dedicated OS drive for my X58, P55, P45 and X38/X48 boards, it does minimize issues.

[DreadCthulhu]

The guide mentions that sometimes the machine might not post at all and then you'll pretty much have to reset the bios. A couple of related question:

- What is usually the cause for the inability of the computer to post? Low VCore or VTT? It'd be good to know in case you made a tweak and all of a sudden the box won't boot and you have no idea what can be improved about the previous set of settings.

- What do you do in case there's no CMOS reset button? Pull the battery out?

- Sometimes a certain set of settings works fine and resets fine, and is perfectly stable throughout tests, but then it might not post the next time you turn on the machine. Why?