Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H and I5 4690k help

Like the title says, I have a new Gigabyte Z97x-UD5H motherboard and a Haswell refresh 4690K. I have started to try and overclock it a bit and am completely stumped by the results. It can do 4.4 on auto settings. It maxes out with a CPU voltage of 1.164 according to hardware monitor, passes at least thirty minutes of AIDA64 but crashed after about an hour of playing BF4, played for several hours at 4.3. I tried setting the Vcore to 1.2 manually nut it wouldn't even start AIDA64 with that setting at 4.4? Weird but it did better with auto settings except for the multiplier.

OK, so I go into the bios and it has so many settings that I don't know which voltage to raise if I just want to raise the vcore offset. The new bios has two options and I chose the classic because the other one was, well just strange and was pretty much just slide bars for everything which to me made no sense at all. I have enabled C1E and EIST because I found them on a search and it said the allowed it to idle at lower MHZ and voltage. I am hoping that someone here has a Gigabyte mobo and can tell me which voltage offset I need to change to allow more voltage when it ramps up the MHZ. I will post a screen shot if the size is small enough for here at 4.4.

Looking at this review for your board, I would go to Advanced CPU Core settings and under CPU PLL see what settings you have there. Maybe enabling the lowest settings there will stabilize vcore under load/gaming so you'll get a steady flow of said voltage to cpu. Hope this helps.

Mind you I'm as blind as you in this realm. I'm awaiting a 4790K and an ASRock Z97 Extreme 6. At least there's a thread started on my combo so I'm ahead of the game as far as info goes.

Good luck

Nebulous said:

Looking at this review for your board, I would go to Advanced CPU Core settings and under CPU PLL see what settings you have there. Maybe enabling the lowest settings there will stabilize vcore under load/gaming so you'll get a steady flow of said voltage to cpu. Hope this helps.

Mind you I'm as blind as you in this realm. I'm awaiting a 4790K and an ASRock Z97 Extreme 6. At least there's a thread started on my combo so I'm ahead of the game as far as info goes.

Good luck

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All the reviews that I see use the new bios images instead of the Classic one, I like the classic and did find that I had to change the vcore setting to normal, to enable the offset voltage. It doesn't even show that in options, you have to type it in. strangely enough it only uses 1.164 at 4.3 perfectly stable but uses 1.25 just to do 4.5 AIDA stable but not for sure BF4 stable. I may just go back to 4.3 and all auto options as I don't think it should need .1 more volts to do 200 MHZ. I will probably have to wait until more folks get a Z97 Giga board so I can find out more options. I wish I had just paid the taxes at newegg and got the Extreme 6 like you did. I am finding that this board has more then a few limitations that the Extreme 6 does not. The only thing that looks good are the temps.

Dam a shame. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful as this is actually my first time with a Z97

Funny how things are as I had that UD5H board in my cart, but since I really didn't find alot of info on it, decided to ditch it and go with the extreme 6 instead.

I didn't get the combo at the egg. Friend of mine in Mass. went to MC and picked up the combo for me $60 cheaper than the egg

Hope someone with similar board to yours can help you out further

while I understand you like the classic version better iirc on my z87 ud5h the classic does not have all the little tweaks for overclocking that the advanced does. My suggestion is to take some time and get familiar with the advanced and you'll find what ya need. And BTW first rule of overclocking is to turn off c states and eist. You dont want it controlling your overclock by allowing it to throttle the cpu. I run my 4770K at 4.5 full time and its been ultra stable. I've done this by turning off c states and eist and manually entering my settings. There should be no reason outside a bad chip (I mean not great clocker) that you cant run 4.4 at say 1.25 vcore + or- .05

S_I_N said:

while I understand you like the classic version better iirc on my z87 ud5h the classic does not have all the little tweaks for overclocking that the advanced does. My suggestion is to take some time and get familiar with the advanced and you'll find what ya need. And BTW first rule of overclocking is to turn off c states and eist. You dont want it controlling your overclock by allowing it to throttle the cpu. I run my 4770K at 4.5 full time and its been ultra stable. I've done this by turning off c states and eist and manually entering my settings. There should be no reason outside a bad chip (I mean not great clocker) that you cant run 4.4 at say 1.25 vcore + or- .05

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It is a help that someone has a UD5H and can share some of the tweaks with me, thanks.
This bios and mobo are strange, even though I went back and changed the CPU voltage to auto and it greyed out the voltage offset, for some strange reason it still uses the voltage offset that I put in. So I am running Prime right now at 4.4 and all is well so far. Are there any other settings that you had to change when you over clocked yours?

After an hour at 4.4 I went ahead and entered 4.5 and am priming now. It would not run this before with the voltage at manual for more then a few minutes, now it seems stable with temps in the mid to upper 60's. It even added an offset to llc ring offset that wasn't there before.

On this platform there are no special tweaks till you jump on LN2. Simply raise vcore and CPU ratio and keep everything else on auto till ~4.7GHz. Above that can change some other voltages. Most boards are slightly raising all other voltages at higher clocks when auto option is enabled so in most cases it will work also at higher clocks.

EIST and C1 can be enabled if it's passing stability tests and is not crashing in other programs. I would still disable C3/C6 as it's sometimes causing some other issues.

Overclocking on Gigabyte is exactly the same as on all other boards, just some options are called slightly different. If you have any questions then best is to take a look at any good haswell overclocking guide ( doesn't matter if it's Z87 or Z97 ).
Here is one made on Z87X-OC but all options are exacly the same in Z97X-SOC and I bet that many are called exactly the same in UD5H - http://www.overclock.net/t/1401976/the-gigabyte-z87-haswell-overclocking-oc-guide

For tests get Prime95 28.5 as it's working best with haswells.

Woomack said:

On this platform there are no special tweaks till you jump on LN2. Simply raise vcore and CPU ratio and keep everything else on auto till ~4.7GHz. Above that can change some other voltages. Most boards are slightly raising all other voltages at higher clocks when auto option is enabled so in most cases it will work also at higher clocks.

EIST and C1 can be enabled if it's passing stability tests and is not crashing in other programs. I would still disable C3/C6 as it's sometimes causing some other issues.

Overclocking on Gigabyte is exactly the same as on all other boards, just some options are called slightly different. If you have any questions then best is to take a look at any good haswell overclocking guide ( doesn't matter if it's Z87 or Z97 ).
Here is one made on Z87X-OC but all options are exacly the same in Z97X-SOC and I bet that many are called exactly the same in UD5H - http://www.overclock.net/t/1401976/the-gigabyte-z87-haswell-overclocking-oc-guide

For tests get Prime95 28.5 as it's working best with haswells.

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Great link for a Giga board, thanks. Also kudos for the c3/c6, I am hoping that that might clear up slide show errors while benchmarking. After changing only a few values it is easily doing 4.5 stable in BF4 and barely hits 70c during Prime. It will probably do 4.7 with just a little bump but that is going to take some time for testing.

I'm using Z97X-SOC Force which is about the same as Z87X-OC. Both have the same BIOS with even the same memory profiles. I see no special differences between these boards and ASRock or ASUS. Just some options are called in a different way or special options are available only on some top series what shouldn't change much while OC on air/water.

EIST and C1 together give voltage and CPU ratio drop while in idle. If you don't want to see clock dropping then there is one other way. Set maximum performance in system power profiles. Simple way to keep it at high clock only for benching etc and use power saving features while daily work/gaming.
Also best is to use high LLC but not extreme because it's bumping vcore above what you set in BIOS and will probably cause higher temps without special stability improvement.

Woomack said:

I'm using Z97X-SOC Force which is about the same as Z87X-OC. Both have the same BIOS with even the same memory profiles. I see no special differences between these boards and ASRock or ASUS. Just some options are called in a different way or special options are available only on some top series what shouldn't change much while OC on air/water.

EIST and C1 together give voltage and CPU ratio drop while in idle. If you don't want to see clock dropping then there is one other way. Set maximum performance in system power profiles. Simple way to keep it at high clock only for benching etc and use power saving features while daily work/gaming.
Also best is to use high LLC but not extreme because it's bumping vcore above what you set in BIOS and will probably cause higher temps without special stability improvement.

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I may have spoken to soon as it BSOD'ed twice last night in BF4, lost two really good k/d ratios, but it could have been the updates on BF4. Thanks for the tip on the LLC, and yes I do want it to throttle down when it is idle, so I kept just the EIST and C1. At 4500 it uses 1.22 volts and hits 70c with a few cores so I am not sure yet that I want to add more voltage yet until the TIM cures. It is noticeably faster then my old 975BE at most things even BF4 seems more clear and smooth but the memory is at least twice as fast at slower timings. It will not read the XMP on my ram but I can't really adjust them much as I don't have a working CD player to run Memtest. They sure don't put enough sata ports on these boards considering that they no longer have an IDE connector.

shadowdr said:

It will not read the XMP on my ram but I can't really adjust them much as I don't have a working CD player to run Memtest.

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Have you ever used HCI MemTest in Windows? I also find HyperPi 0.99b to be good for dialing in memory stability. So with your 4690K 4 threads/cores 32M successfully completed with out errors.

HCI MemTest:
http://hcidesign.com/memtest/

My old X58/Bloomfield setup running Memtest:
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7718906&postcount=81

TweakTown... Gigabyte links:
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/28441-gigabyte-latest-beta-bios.html

http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyt...system-info-benchmarking-stability-tools.html

PolRoger said:

Have you ever used HCI MemTest in Windows? I also find HyperPi 0.99b to be good for dialing in memory stability. So with your 4690K 4 threads/cores 32M successfully completed with out errors.

HCI MemTest:
http://hcidesign.com/memtest/

My old X58/Bloomfield setup running Memtest:
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7718906&postcount=81

TweakTown... Gigabyte links:
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/28441-gigabyte-latest-beta-bios.html

http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyt...system-info-benchmarking-stability-tools.html

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Thanks for the links, some good stuff there. I did run the hyperpi and it would seem that timings or even the speed make almost no difference. There are only a few seconds difference between 533 MHZ and 800, tighter timings make even less difference. Looks like I will probably just leave the ram at it's rated speed and concentrate at getting higher CPU clocks after I do a lot more reading on it.