Overclocking My Pc To The Max

[Zikofski]

okay maybe someone can help me on here trying to overclock my new i7 4770k with a delidded IHS, at the moment i can get 4.6ghz but i want to try and push for 5ghz or as close to it as i can, is there anyone on here with experience in OC that could help me out?
 

 

[ech0o]

overkill? LOLOL

 

[dgwebster]

I ask this question first because it is an extremely important issue: how are you cooling?

 

[DrRob]

I'm with dgwebster, to overclock, you must first solve the problem with what you do with the heat that you will produce, which is what will fry your chips (quite literally).
 
Most importantly, what are you going to do about the less obvious heat bits, the northbridge, the ram and all the other little bits and pieces, that also start to reach critical points as the processor (which most people manage to cool relatively well) gets faster.

 

[dgwebster]

I knew a guy at uni who literally melted his state of the art Pentium II! At 5GHz though this is the highest end of commercially available pre-overclocked systems I have seen and they are usually packing twin watercooling systems: one exclusive to the cpu, the other to RAM, NB etc.

I have seen one on the interweb where the guy basically submerged the entire computer in cooking oil.

 

[Zikofski]

haha nice

okay i have my own custom Liquid cooling loop, again i have reached 4.9ghz at around 80c which is good, but its not stable, DrROb ram is not overclocked, from my understanding if you overclock the ram your cpu will suffer on performance and the Northbridge is built into the cpu using Intel Burn in test on 4.7 i get 80c on maximum with 1.473, now i can get to 1.5v im sure but is there any other settings that i can tweek to help stability oh and i have declocked my northbirdge which in turn adds stability to the cpu
 
 
Cooking oil is one way yes, but ive seen people get 8ghz from my cpu using Liquid Nitrogen , there cpu voltages are over 2v lol

 

[DrRob]

I knew a guy at uni who literally melted his state of the art Pentium II! At 5GHz though this is the highest end of commercially available pre-overclocked systems I have seen and they are usually packing twin watercooling systems: one exclusive to the cpu, the other to RAM, NB etc.

I have seen one on the interweb where the guy basically submerged the entire computer in cooking oil.

 
I've seen the images of those. Waste of a good aquarium surely.....
 
If I remember correctly though he immersed his kit in mineral oil and overclocked it quite heavily with no great temperature rise. I think he used the aquarium pumps to circulate the fluid as well.

 

[techen]

The lifespan of a processor is almost killed once you slip past 4GHz. You are just added unwanted heat and stress to the chip which just reduces its lifespan a lot.
 
There is honestly no reason to go past 4Ghz and if you do, It's time to look at duel processor motherboards instead.
 
Stay at 4Ghz, Be happy and if you get FPS issues, It's not the i7.

 

[fm1978]

The lifespan of a processor is almost killed once you slip past 4GHz. You are just added unwanted heat and stress to the chip which just reduces its lifespan a lot.
 
There is honestly no reason to go past 4Ghz and if you do, It's time to look at duel processor motherboards instead.
 
Stay at 4Ghz, Be happy and if you get FPS issues, It's not the i7.

 
I hate to disagree and I didn't really want to weigh in on this one, but, I can't help myself!
 
Techen, that may have been true of older chips re the exceeding of a particular frequency, however, knowing a little about how these chips are made, some of them can very easily have plenty of headroom for overclocking. In fact, some are under-clocked at the factory or even have cores disabled, which, if you're fortunate enough to get one, means you can turn the cores back on, or ramp the Ghz back up, and get extra power for the same money. After all, this fella's chip is designed to turbo at 3.9Ghz. An extra 0.1Ghz isn't too much to ask!
 
Anyway, you're i7 should, in theory, be capable of surpassing 4Ghz and you should be able to negate the extra heat production with your water cooling solution - if it's good enough. The bad news is that the Haswell chips are not brilliant at overclocking. That said, you might be one of the lucky ones to get between 25%-30% boost in speed. There are a few caveats mind - you'll need a really solid MB and RAM and to an extent (if you play with voltages) a good PSU. It would be useful to know what you have re these bits of kit!
 
If you're not all that versed in the black arts of OCing, I'd stick with a moderate overclock and make sure it's stable! If you're a games player, this is mega important as that can be one of the most processor intensive things you'll do and how rubbish would it be if your machine falls over mid frag?!?
 
Good luck with it!

 

[Zikofski]

and i disagree too, modern chips are designed to be overclocked, i have hit 4.7  Ghz stable now, the average and best overcock for my new haswell chip is around 4.6ghz thats about what everyone can get like 25% can get to 5ghz its all depends on your chip its not makeing a toy where they are all 100% identical it varies and it all changes strange but ye as long as i keep my tempretures in check i am fine, at the max temp you can get to on my chip is 90c so the fact i am reaching 82 at 4.7 is perfectly safe even with these hit conditions ambient temp is 30c in my room my water cooling temp is 33
 
reason i am overclocking is i do a lot of video converting and obviously that is as intense as a cpu can get IMO, i've noticed a huge change from 3.5 to 4.7 almost 20 to 30 mins knocked of the times i'm gonna have a play and a few more tweek's se if i can get it higher i'm sure i can
 
just to clear up i have an XFX 1000W full modular platinum rated PSU, an ASUS Z88 Deluxe board only thing possibly holding me back is my memory Gskill 2133 16gb memory
 
i am pushing for 5ghz if i cant get there no biggie as like you said as well only a fraction can get there, happy i can reach 4.7 at least but i am always learning and would love to know more about OCing

 

[techen]

I can tell you now, There's a limit to all proccessers, I tried to overclock my socket 1366 from 3.07ghz to 3.5ghz and I get blue screens. That's with a H60 Watercooling unit and a stable 50c under load.
 
Totally useless, I never OC proccessers anymore and have never needed to, Ever.

 

[Zikofski]

yes on stock Vcore there is a limit the higher the Frequency the more voltage is required for the Vcore and the amount of Heat produced is determined by the Vcore

max OC on my cpu with the stock Vcore is around 3.9 but as i can alter the Vcore i can get around 4.7 is my limit for my cpu

 

[dgwebster]

Iirc overclocking is most problematic at the bleed point, where the voltage & frequency of your data channel is bleeding into the other channels creating false bits/incorrect bits. [Edit: just to point out im talking about plural bus i/o channels here]

Over clocking is not so much what it used to be: making the chip do something it wasnt designed to, but instead breaking out features the makers want you to pay more money for. I went down the AMD route and managed to unlock an extra core and boost it to 4.2GHz safely whilst not breaking 50ºc. Reality is, its chute loads better than the 486 DX4 100MHz I had 20 years ago but that was top of the line back then. I simply remember, when burning a 50GB Blueray pops up saying 18 minutes remaining, just how long it would have taken to do this on 1.44MB floppy discs

 

[Zikofski]

oh yes i remember the good old days of floppy took so long haha, but so far i have a stable 4.6ghz now, but webster from what i know about modern day CPU's you can unlock any cores, you just make them run faster, altho i am using the flag ship  cpu from intel so it cant get any faster than this or get any more core's but for me 3.5 to 4.6ghz is good, fixed volatage at 1.322v i may in the future push my cpu a little better but i have been almost 2 weeks stable now at 4.6 works out to be a 24% increase in performance temps stay under 20 to 30 idle depending on ambient temp and max load is 80c under a full 100% stress test  my cpu can push all the way to 90c under load, but under load during game it barely goes above 50c so i am very impressed with intel's latest haswell chip along with my two 7970's in crossfire i can run Crysis 3 on full graphics smoothish

 

[snazy]

DrROb ram is not overclocked, from my understanding if you overclock the ram your cpu will suffer on performance
 

 
By overclocking the CPU you maybe indirectly overclocking the RAM and video and vice versa because they are working in synchronization. 
I am not sure how to explain in my view but basically there's an external speed(in your case 4.6Ghz) which represents how fast the CPU will do calculations once the data has reached it. But there's also internal speed, mostly represented by FSB, which determines how fast data goes in and out from the CPU to the RAM and Video via the northbridge. So you can overclock your CPU as much as you like but when it comes to it to speak to RAM and Video, it will just use a walking stick and crawl down to the speed of the FSB all these three components are designed to support along with the motherboard.
And also, because roughly said the external speed of the CPU is determined by internal speed multiplied by a multiplier of some sort, by boosting the CPU external speed(depending on how you do it) you maybe indirectly overclocking the internal, which affects RAM and video too, because you are making them work faster too.
 
For example my old computer had those specifications: Intel 4 CPU 3.00 Ghz, DDR RAM 3200(800Mhz) and motherboard FSB of 800Mhz. The real/basic internal speed in my case was 200Mhz. Because of the design of the memory, you've got to multiply that by 4 to get RAM speed of 800Mhz and multiply it by 15 to get the CPU speed of 3000(3Ghz)
So basically if I wanted to overclock it, the easiest way without affecting RAM and video was to play with the muliplier of the CPU and increase it for example to 16, to give me 3.2Ghz and so on.
On another hand, by overclocking the RAM you need to increase the internal speed(above case 200Mhz), so let's say you overclock it to 250Mhz, that will force the memory to work 4x250Mhz(1000Mhz) and the CPU speed will go to 15x250Mhz=3750Mhz(3.8Ghz). More likely the motherboard's FSB won't support it in the first place, but if it does, the memory won't support it but theoretically that's another way to increase the CPU's external speed and I suppose from experience most will say that's one of the most difficult ways as it's just not supported for the majority of produced components these days. If it does, all components will work harder and need better cooling.
 
My point in all this is that there's no point overclocking the CPU to such high speed because what you have is enough for calculations and it won't make your computer work faster because the speed of communication isn't improved, even if it is indirectly, the computer will most likely crash/bluescreen because the rest of the components can't support talking to the CPU at that speed.