Overclocking a 4790k on an ASRock Z97 Extreme 6.

[Nebulous]

Very nicely done! I might try lowering my vcore and see where it'll fail at.

*Edit*

Lowest I can go stable is 1.28v. Any lower and it becomes unstable.

 

[dicko555]

What overclock are you at with 1.28 Neb. 4.7 or 4.8GHz
Seems you have done a little better than you first thought.
I am a happy chappy, I have done better than expected.

 

[Nebulous]

Running 4.7Ghz currently. Lowest stable vcore is 1.28v versus the 1.3v I was using at the time.

Boots up fine with 1.25v, but soon's I run Aida I get a restart with the whea uncorrectable error. Started stepping up a notch at a time til I got it to pass @ 1.28v without a restart

 

[dicko555]

Well done Neb, thats better than you thought you were going to achieve.
4.7 at 1.28 is pretty good. Are you going to go for 4.8? You may get there at under 1.325/1.35 and that OK.

 

[Nebulous]

I stand corrected. I needed 1.285v to be game stable. Haven't tried the 4.8Ghz as I'm sure my chip is quite stubborn and will most likely need 1.325/1.35v to get there

Was trying my very best to not use over 1.3v as that was the limit I set for myself voltage wise.

You, on the other hand, have a very sweet chip!

 

[dicko555]

I think you are correct and doing the right thing staying under 1.3v.
I have heard that 1.3 is the safe limit, the chip can take more and would probably be OK. But better to be safe than sorry.
I am a believer that Electrical degradation is the faster way to kill a good CPU over higher temps. So I am happy being at 1.25v or thereabouts.
I was going to push mine and see if I could get 5GHz at about 1.35v but have decided that 4.8 is bloody good and am happy there.

 

[roundhands]

Good to see you have achieved so highly, I am currently running the same I7 4790k and Asrock z97 extreme 6 motherboard, im a bit lost with the whole over clocking...does anyone know of a walkthrough for this motherboard? Im getting pretty high temps on small fft ( between 86-94) and thats 4.4 at 1.200v. The main things that im lost on are the other voltage settings in the bios.....im really not sure what i should set them to.

 

[Woomack]

For air/water cooling you don't have to change anything except CPU and memory voltages. Your motherboard will adjust some additional voltages when necessary. At clocks above 4.7GHz you may need to play some with additional settings but I see no point to run at so high clock 24/7.
Your temps in Prime95 28.5+ are about the same as most other users who are using more standard coolers. It seem high but the only way to improve temps is changing cooling to a better one. In normal work your CPU should work at about 60-70*C max.

 

[roundhands]

yeah im running air cooling and H100i cpu cooler. Just trying to work out if ive installed my thermal paste correctly, or if im running correctly. large fft is 79-85*c tops and blend is 74-80*c. I also get around 60*c to 70*c when running occt tests.

 

[dicko555]

Those temps sound about right for that cooler.
I changed out the fans on my H110 and saw a drop in temps going for fans with another 50 odd CFM each.

I am a little less temp wise but have a slightly better and bigger cooler but have slightly higher vcore and my overclock is 4.8GHz.
As for what to adjust I adjusted this up until about 4.6GHz and then a few other things when going higher.

DRAM at 1600 NOT auto or the actual speed.
XMP to Auto for now.
CPU VCORE Voltage mode to Override.
VCORE Override Voltage to 1.200 or whats needed for your chip at desired ....GHz.
CPU Ratio. All Core at 4?. What ever you are going for.
CPU Cache Ratio at 40. For now.
Some of these things can be changed later when you know how your chip behaves.
You may need to tweak some other settings when going over 4.6/7GHz.

Good luck.

 

[EarthDog]

VID = stock voltage, not your actual voltage (vcore).

 

[Brando]

speaking of cpu degradation i finally experienced it recently. i've had my 3570k for 2 years and 2 months. it's been at 4400mhz and 1.28v (i think) ever since with load temps at about 80c. finally after all this time i started getting some stability issues and had to bump it up one notch in the bios. i think it was a + .025v increment, the smallest amount allowable in settings which puts it at 1.288v load. if i had to put it up one or 2 more times in the next couple years i'll still be within reasonable temps on air. not too shabby. i can deal with it.

 

[roundhands]

Cheers for that dicko555 , I feel like my temps are still too high so I may try swapping out the fans on my h100i and see if I can push a little bit more. Oh and do you switch over to adaptive when you have finished the testing of your overclock?

 

[dicko555]

I leave Adaptive off all the time.

 

[tomobson]

I've been having some trouble with an oc on this board. Do you guys up the vcache voltage at all? I can run forever on aida64 but p95 fails me in minutes usually with rounding errors. I have an i5 4670k attempting a 4.5ghz at 1.28 vcore. My vcache volts is at 1.250. Should I bring up my vcache as I bring up my vcore?

 

[Woomack]

You don't have to touch cache voltage unless you are setting higher cache clock. Up to ~4.8GHz only that should matter is CPU voltage so maybe your CPU needs 1.3V or something near when at 1.28V is still generating errors.

 

[caddi daddi]

don't bother messing with cache, it gains you nothing, but setting it wrong can make you unstable, just set it 4.4 with the 1.25, let it be and get the cores and threads stable.

 

[tomobson]

Tried to up the vcore to 1.3 and 1.31. My cache clock is set to 35 and vcache at 1.250. Prime gave my cores rounding errors in a couple of minutes still.

Trying 1.32 right now with aida as I leave for work.

Also my prime sends my cpu temps to the 90s which starts throttling my cpu. Could that be the cause of these rounding errors? Aida only gets it to an avg of the low 60s with occasional spikes to 75-79. Are those temps fine at around these voltages? I have a coolermaster 212 evo.

Update: An hour in on the small fft test at 1.32vcore and it's still running with no errors, but I did try the blend test before and that failed in a couple of minutes with rounding errors. Gonna let it run for another hour or two. If it's still working I guess I can fiddle around with the ram currently running in xmp profle at it's rated 1.65v. Oh, and aida64 ran for 6hrs no problems, but my oc has been supposedly stable since I first tried using aida at 1.65vcore for 24hrs...I ran into a couple of bsods gaming which is why I'm working with p95 right now.

Update2: Right before the 3 hour mark worker#1 and worker#4 got the rounding error on the small fft test. Bumping up the vcore to 1.33. Haven't touched the ram settings yet but can anyone tell me if I should change these settings: BCLK Frequency, BCLK/PCIE Ratio, Filter PLL Frequency, Internal PLL Overvoltage, PCIE PLL Selection??? These are all set to default which is Auto.

 

[tomobson]

1.33vcore was working worse than 1.32. Small fft test restarted my computer with no bsod in about 5 mins. Blend tests were giving me clock_watchdog_timeout bsods at xmp profile #1 and other speeds I tried to fool around with. Running HCI memtest right now although I have run memtest86 for 9 passes with no errors before. I'm back at 1.32vcore now.

 

[alsmith]

My thanks go to everyone who has contributed to this thread- it's really helpful! I've o'ced in the past starting back in the day (Pentium 486's, 386SX, *very* early Celerons (that was *real* fun), with my first processor back when PC's were really office machines and even building one was a lot of money being an 8088 @ 4.77MHz (yep, I'm that old! Intel 8086-Date released 1979; Clock frequency 4.77 MHz; Fabrication process- 3,000 nm; Number of transistors- 29,000; Connector 40-pin) eventually followed by an 80826.
My first computer (not a PC) was 8 bit memory and was a kit where even the motherboard was self build with over 1,000 solder joints to make!

Anyhow it's time to upgrade again, this time from a nicely overclockable Core 2 Q6600 and I've got an Asrock Extreme4 motherboard, 750W Corsair CX750M Hybrid Modular psu, GeForce® GTX 750 Ti StormX OC (2048MB GDDR5), 8Gb 1866MHz DDR3 CL10 DIMM HyperX Fury memory (maybe I'll go to 16Gb later), Cooler Master Seidon 120V - Liquid cooling system -and now only need the processor where I've decided to go for the i5 4690K because the extra threads of the i7 won't be of any real advantage for my use.

Again, many thanks!