Advice on i5-4690k OC

[teetar]

Hello, I've recently gotten my Corsair H110 water cooler for my PC, and so I was excited to try out overclocking for the first time. I'm a little confused however. I set my Vcore to 1.25 and tried a 48 core ratio across all cores. This crashed my PC, as did 47, but 46 worked, giving me an OC of 4.6GHz. I want to say that this is pretty good, since it's 1.1GHz over the stock for my CPU, but I'm a little confused. I stress tested my CPU for an hour (didn't want to leave it overnight for fear of something going wrong) and it did pretty well. My CPU temp averaged out to be around 53 degrees Celsius, but I heard that during stress testing it should get up to around 90 degrees Celsius. So, given the temps I was getting, should I OC further? As a new enthusiast, I'd love to push my CPU to it's limits, but if it's already reached the limits and just has really good temperatures, I guess there's nothing else I can do. I'll add a picture below of the stress test and ASUS Suite that I used to measure the temps, voltage, and speed during this short test.

Thanks for any tips/advice, since I don't know what I'm doing!


Edit: Also, I've noticed that my DRAM keeps coming up as 1333MHz, would it negatively affect anything if I changed the frequency to 2400MHz (its actual speed) in the BIOS? Would I have to change anything else as well?

Not sure if it's important but I guess I should add my motherboard, if not most other specs for my PC.
MOBO: ASUS Z97-A

 

[GearingMass]

Hey there!

First i'll start by saying that most of the more experienced people on here will tell you not to overclock with any program like the ASUS one you have here. It's a little more work, but the best and most sure-fire way to overclock is straight out of the bios. That might be a contributing factor here.

Ok so quick and dirty guide here - the higher the voltage, the higher temperatures you're going to have. Exponentially.

I believe the stock voltage for the 4690k is around 1.2v, so you're not very far from that. As long as you keep it at or below 1.30-1.35v, you're not going to see any appreciable loss in CPU life.
If you're crashing at higher clocks, that means you're probably not feeding it enough voltage. And since you're currently sitting at about 53c temps, you've got plenty of room to increase voltage (and thus temps). Try slowly upping the voltage past 1.25 in the bios and see if you can't hit a stable 4.7 Ghz.

Also, what are you using to stress test your CPU? You might also have really low stress temps because you're simply using a stress test that isn't very stressful. Prime95, AIDA64, CCBT(?) and Intel Burn Test are the most widely used stress tests (use one of those).

Also concerning the RAM. With these Haswell chips, overclocking is more of a tradeoff between the cpu and ram than it was in the older days. That being said, I'd definitely want my ram running at a minimum of 1600 or 1866MHz, especially if it's rated at 2400. Whether or not it'll run stable at it's full 2400MHz while pushing the cpu as far as it can go...is for someone more experienced on this forum to answer. It might just be that pushing the cpu as far as it can go makes it hard to overclock the ram (past 2400 in your case), but anything up to it's rated speed still isn't a problem - I simply don't know enough to answer that.

Hope that helps!

 

[EarthDog]

I believe the stock voltage for the 4690k is around 1.2v, so you're not very far from that

Stock voltage is typically around 1.1v or so. We say to keep it under 1.4v or so for 24/7 operation so long as temps are in order.

Prime95, AIDA64, CCBT(?) and Intel Burn Test are the most widely used stress tests (use one of those).

OCCT I believe is what you meant here...

Overclocking ram is not really a tradeoff on Haswell. I can run 2800Mhz+ with my CPU near 5Ghz on ambient cooling. And 6Ghz+ on LN2 with ram that high. If the OP wants to run 2400Mhz, then set the XMP profile and make it so. Why buy 2400Mhz ram just to downclock it??

As far as your temps OP, you have to run a stress test. Just keep it at 90C or less and you will be fine with everything else!

 

[GearingMass]

OCCT I believe is what you meant here...

Yes! Thanks, I couldn't remember for the life of me what it was called.

Overclocking ram is not really a tradeoff on Haswell. I can run 2800Mhz+ with my CPU near 5Ghz on ambient cooling. And 6Ghz+ on LN2 with ram that high. If the OP wants to run 2400Mhz, then set the XMP profile and make it so. Why buy 2400Mhz ram just to downclock it??

I was trying to remember where I read that - just remembered: http://www.overclockers.com/3step-guide-to-overclock-intel-haswell/

I suppose I should have taken it with a bigger grain of salt. But yes, haha, why let it sit at half it's rated speed if you don't have to?!

EDIT: I just realized that link is the same one you have in your sig.