welcome to the Intel fourth generation core series processor AKA code name
Haswell overclocking guide we're going to show you how to get the most of of
your new CPU in only a few simple steps
let's start with the basic benefits of overclocking I actually had someone ask
me about this the other day uh you know what is computer overclocking and I was
trying to explain well you take the parts that you would normally buy and
then you turn them up in speed and you can increase the voltage to make sure
the stability stays right and basically you're getting more performance than
what you actually paid for and this individual said to me oh so it's kind of
like overclocking your phone and I said yes overclock clocking is overclocking
whether it's a PC or a phone the idea is you want more performance and you don't
necessarily want to pay anymore for the actual processor but of course I have to
tell you guys the dangers of overclocking overclocking can result or
will result in higher heat output more
power consumption it can result in instability or shorter lifetime for your
components and very very rarely it can result in outright death of components
but as long as as you're using high quality stuff and going about it in a
safe and responsible manner you likely won't run into this kind of trouble now
the good news is that for CPUs in particular Intel has an overclocking
extended warranty that you can actually buy for it and they'll replace it for you just like that even if you kill it
during overclocking now it would be irresponsible of me also to not give you
guys the luck of the draw disclaimer overclocking is running things outside
of their specifications they are not guaranteed to do these things so if you
happen to get a CPU that runs at exactly
stock speed and only stock speed that's
life you can't return it because it's a bad overclocker it doesn't work that way
it overclocks or it doesn't and that's great if it does so whatever we do today
you might get the same results as us better results than us or much worse
results than us and that'll be just kind of luck of the draw without further
ado let's get into it now planning out
an overclocking capable build does take a little bit more work than just your
average PC you can't Cobble together whatever you want and expect to get
great overclocking performance and it starts with the CPU you're going to
choose either an extreme edition if you're on the very high end or a K
series processor because those are the ones that have what are called unlocked
multipliers allowing you to turn the CPU frequency up and down at will and test
them and actually run them at those speeds now we're using a 4770k this is a
Haswell fourth generation CPU and you
can expect somewhere in the range of 4.4 to 4.5 GHz for most 4770 K and then if
you're lucky and you're in the top 30% you might get around 4.6 in the top 20%
you might get around 4.7 GHz and in the top 10% of CPUs you will be able to get
4.8 GHz or more if you also build a
system around it that is capable of taking advantage of that
now that bit I mentioned before about how it'll increase the thermal output
you need better cooling to get the most out of an overclock so in our case we're
going to be using an Corsair h100i this
is a dual 120 mm radiator liquid cooling
system however it should be noted that you can still get very good overclocking
out of something like a dual Tower heat sink such as this thermal right Silver
Arrow extreme or something like a no TOA NHD 14 for our motherboard we've gone
with the Maximus 6 Extreme from ASUS and as the name suggests this is a bit of an
extreme option and you don't really need that for a mainstream overclock pretty
much any ASUS Z87 board has the same
digital power delivery as well as ufi BIOS optimizations that up to
multipliers such as 48 or 4.8 GHz they
are pretty much all going to be able to achieve those results now the key
difference with high-end boards such as the deluxe WS series tough series or Rog
series is going to be in things like the overall build quality the extras that
are included things like the OC panel that I have in front of me as well as
their beefy vrm Solutions both in terms
of the design and the cooling that allow them to stay stable at even much higher
frequencies than your typical motherboard particularly with the Rog
series you also get a degree of tweaking and tinkering that is not available with
other motherboards for our memory we've gone with Corsair Dominator platinums
these are 2400 MHz modules they're 8 gig
dims meaning we've got 32 gigs of RAM in this system but this was mostly for
stress testing it should be noted that while most Haswell CPUs are capable of
running at 2.8 GHz to 3 GHz on the
memory remember the integrated memory controller affects
this it tends to be reduced a lot as you
increase the CPU speed so once you get up to around 4.6 GHz 1600 MHz is pretty
much a guarantee with anything above that being gravy and most of them can't
do more than around 2133 MHz on RAM once
you ramp up the CPU clock speed this becomes especially true with high
density kits and when you populate all the dims in your motherboard so we use
this kit mostly to push the platform to its absolute limit and because Dominator
platinums are so sexy a good quality
power supply such as the ax 1 1200i although calling it good quality is a
bit of an understatement allows the power that's delivered to your system to
be cleaner and more consistent meaning it will can be more stable in addition
to being able to power more components such if you wanted to add more graphics
cards or whatever else later this particular one is also extremely
efficient rated at 80 plus platinum and is validated for the lower sea states
that has well as capable of going into C
states allow you to save power but they require your power supply to be stable
not only at very high wattages but also incredibly low wattages so make sure
that your power supply whether you're overclocking or not for a Haswell system
is validated for C6 and C7 States now
the rest of these components don't really affect overclocking performance
directly but our Intel 335 series SSD enables us to boot up more quickly after
failed overclocking attempts our Noctua 120 MIM fans allow us to have the
radiator still perform very well but also not be loud and our GTX 780 is a
great match for a 4770k once it's overclocked allowing us to have beastly
system performance now it should also be noted that VGA Hotwire is a feature
supported by certain ASUS motherboards and graphics cards that allows you to
directly overvolt your graphics card using the motherboard so check that out
if you're looking for a great motherboard graphics card pairing as
well and here we go step one of overclocking is to not overclock I
recommend updating your mother board to the latest BIOS setting those settings
all to default make sure all your fans
are spinning make sure your CPU is stable run the Ida 64 built-in CPU
testing tool as well as a couple passes of mest 86 Plus at bone stock settings
because if you have problems before you even start overclocking you're going to
have a bad time as soon as you do start overclocking next up is your software
tool kit so you'll need some kind of application for monitoring the status of
your CPU such as CPU Z or in this case we're using the built-in one in ID to 64
you will need something for stress testing and normally we were using prime
95 in the past but what prime 95 does do
well is it tests maximum heat output of the CPU and there are similar tools such
as Linux or Intel burn test but what the Ida 64 system stability test does well
is it allows the CPU to not only run
really hot but it also tests other components such as the new instruction
sets that are built into Haswell giving us a more complete picture of the
overall system stability last but not least we're going to need some kind of
temperature monitoring program typically in the past I've used real temp GT but
what you might notice about Haswell is that the CPU temperatures under load are
going to be very bouncy they're going to move around a lot it's going to give you Peaks but not necessarily an average so
ASUS has actually built a thermal probe into their motherboards themselves now
that you can read using AI Suite or in our case we're using the OC panel right
here to read it that'll give you a more realistic view of how the CPU is running
under load I always recommend keeping
some other device next to you while you're overclocking such as a notebook
or a tablet so that you can look things up and reference them while you're
working not every board has downloadable profiles like the Rog series boards and
it can be a godsend if you can go on a forum such as Linus tips.com find other
people who have similar Hardware configurations who are able to help help
you and if you can do that at the same time as working on the machine then so
much the better the last thing you need before you get started is this set aside
some time for the overclock budget yourself some time where you assume that
your system is not going to be fully functional because a rushed sloppy
overclock is a bad overclock that can cause instability crashes or even
operating system corruption you don't want to rush it because at the end of
the day if your system crashes and takes with it a bunch of your work or whatever
else it could cost you more time and headache and frustration than if You'
just done it right in the first place
now I know this makes me a little old school because there are lots of software utilities that allow you to do
this kind of stuff within Windows and the extreme motherboard we have here has
the OC panel that allows you to change most of these parameters but not
everyone's going to be working with that so I'm mashing delete or F2 or some
motherboards have different buttons to get into the UEFI or bio that allows us
to change all the settings that we need to change the first setting we'll be
having a look at is the CPU core ratio also known as the CPU multiplier it's
called that because you've got your base clock which is 100 MHz by default and a
multiplier that gives you your final CPU clock speed so if you had a setting of
44 you'd be at 4,400 MHz or 4.4 GHz and
at a setting of 48 you'd be at 4800 MHz or 4.8 GHz now there's 's more to it
than just that and you've got a couple of different options so you press enter
to go into those options and you've got Auto which is your stock speed including
Intel's turbo boost technology which allows you to go to higher speeds when
fewer cores are under load your next setting is sync all cores this allows
you to change that multiplier and it'll change all the cores at the same time
and lock them there so they'll all move together regardless of what kind of load
is on the CPU finally you've got the per core option this allows you to BU build
kind of like your own turbo boost technology but an overclocked one so you
could set a multiplier of maybe 50x when
you're only using one core or 48 when you're using two cores or whatever the
case may be you can play around with it a fair bit the next setting we need is
one of the most important one so we're going to scroll down down down down down
in extreme tweaker here and we're going to get to CPU voltage now we can turn up
the frequency all you want but at the end of the day if you don't increase the
voltage you're not going to increase your stability and the amount of power
you can deliver to the CPU and you're not going to be stable it's not going to
work so CPU voltage allows us to compensate for the increases in
frequency and make the system stable the problem is that the More Voltage you add
to your CPU the more heat output will come out of your CPU so you need to add
more Cooling and it will also decrease
the overall lifespan of your CPU going past a certain point now there are
actually a number of different ways that you can change CP voltage on this
platform so you can see we're in full manual mode right now but I'm going to
change that so now I've got Auto which is self-explanatory manual mode which
allows me to key in a voltage and have it stay there the advantage of this is
that random applications like stress tests can ask for too much voltage and
overpower my cooling solution more on that a little bit later and the
disadvantage is that when the CPUs in a low power state idling at the desktop I
can't take advantage of any of the power savings that Haswell brings to me
next up we've got offset mode so this allows me to take my stock CPU voltage
remember that voltage bounces around a lot depending what's going on to give
you that balance between power and power savings offset voltage takes whatever
your stock ones are and bumps them up a noge so this gives you the power you
need when you're running at an overclocked setting but it doesn't scale
all the way back down when you're idling and not doing anything that's where
adaptive comes in so adaptive is the one I'd recommend using as your daily driver
setting when you're not actually tuning in an overclock because what adaptive
does is it gives you the power you need at full load and scales all the way back
down to stock default voltages when you're not really doing anything the
only drawback of adaptive is that certain stress tests such as Prime 95
can actually override your maximum adaptive voltage that you set and draw
too much power like if you set a voltage of 1.25 for your CPU that that
application could cause up to 1.37 volts to be drawn through your CPU causing
instability or overwhelming your cooling so guys manual mode for dialing in the
overclock then when you're completely done switch over to Adaptive to get that
power savings benefit now on some older platforms it was really recommended to
disable a lot of the power management features such as Intel's lower C States
as well as things like speed step that turns the frequency of the CPU down when
it's not really doing anything on Haswell that hasn't really been found to
affect overclocking in any way so it's great because you get to leave all that
stuff enabled while enjoying better performance under load our next setting
is Dam's frequency 1 two 3 four five six
seven eight yes in there now if we were
going to leave our CPU at default and just set our RAM to 2.4 GHz we could do
that but I recommend like I said before finding your CPU overclock before trying
to turn your RAM up so we're going to dial our RAM into 1600 mahz and leave it
there until we're done testing the CPU for our next trick RAM voltage now RAM
voltage is helpful when overclocking RAM in much the same way that you add more
CPU voltage to overclock your CPU most kits these days with the exception of
low power ones run at around 1.65 volts
but if you're ever not sure look at the side of your memory to find out and I
really don't recommend changing it much
beyond that stock voltage because honestly increasing RAM speeds doesn't
affect many applications that much things like games don't get much benefit
from additional RAM speed on the Haswell platform however there are exceptions to
these rules such as if you run a lot of virtual machines you'll get a big
benefit out of additional RAM speed and you might want to spend more time with
that RAM frequency and that RAM voltage setting pair speaking of virtual
machines there have been previous platforms where it was recommended to
turn off things like virtualization or execute disabl bit not so we go into CPU
configuration where you can see all these settings with Haswell because it
doesn't seem to be affecting overclocking at all which is great because it means you can have all these
features enabled and get more performance changing memory sub timings
can have an effect on overall system stability as well as helping attain
higher RAM overclocks but honestly that's a little bit outside the scope of
this guide one setting in here that you might find really useful though is this
fast boot setting right here disabling fast boot can improve memory
compatibility by giving the computer more time to detect and diagnose any
kinds of issues as it's booting up but it will slow down your boot time now
ASUS has this setting on some auto rules in fact a lot of this stuff is on auto
rules so you shouldn't need to touch most of it but the CPU cache ratio is
something that once you've dialed in an overclock and it's stable you might want
to try turning up because by default as you increase the CPU the CPU cachee
ratio might lag a little bit behind and for Optimal Performance you want them to
be one to one so you might actually go in and turn this up or turn it down to
get it as close to your CPU frequency as possible keeping it 200 to 300 MHz below
your CPU frequency however can improve stability getting near the end here guys
now within the overclocking tuner manual
mode you can see we unlock a few extra settings here CPU strap allows you to
manually set the strap that the base clock runs at so changing this to for
example 125 would allow your CPU's base
clock to become 125 while leaving all the other devices that rely on the base
clock such as the PCI Express frequency to stay at their nominal values this
allows you to make changes to base clock which mostly you don't really need to do
the only time I'd really recommend changing base clock would be to leave
this guy at 100 and and then make slight
changes to the base clock frequency like maybe on the order of of. 3 or 0.5 when
you're at a setting where you kind of look at your overclock and you go oh I'm
almost stable here maybe I want to turn
it down a little bit under 100 so that I can get instead of 4.4 GHz or 4.5 GHz I
can run at 4.43 gahz to see if I can get that
little bit of extra frequency that's how I'd really recommend using these
settings because other than that you don't really need them the last things
I'm going to show you guys are the CPU analog and digital IO voltages so these
are these guys right here now these can improve stability but the challenge is
that they doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean you increase them to get more
stability it's a matter of fine-tuning so if you're looking for that extra
little bit you might try turning them a little bit up or a little bit down to
see if you can squeeze a few more megahertz out of your CPU now on to the
black magic of overclocking itself I always recommend a quick and dirty
overclock to give you some idea of what you're working with before you start to
dial things down so for Haswell I'd recommend a multiplier of 46 on all
cores so we're going to go ahead and change that value there press enter to
dial it in and I would recommend a CPU voltage of 1.2
volts press F10 to save the settings press enter and this will give you some
idea so if it boots up and runs all the benchmarks you need it to and all the
stability tests then you got a pretty good CPU congratulations if it boots up
and doesn't run the stability tests then you've probably got something in the
middle of the road and if it doesn't post at all doesn't get into the
operating system doesn't do anything then that's unfortunate you've probably
got a below average overclocker so this is great our CPU is
running our stability tests no problems at 4.6 that gives us two options now
number one is we can be happy with 4.6
GHz and we can try turning the voltage down to get better power consumption and
less heat output this will make the CPU last for longer even though we're
running a pretty significant overclock option number two is keep pushing so
increase the multiplier and see if she runs at 4.7 GHz with 1.2 volts although
that would mean we'd have a pretty awesome overclocking chip now don't
worry if your system isn't stable at these settings there are other things
you can try you can see we're well within our thermal threshold our Target
of about 85° that keeps us below where
the CPU will throttle but is you know
warm enough that you we're not super thrilled with it good thing we're only
going to be running synthetics for a little while remember real world applications won't have the same heat
effect on the CPU as these synthetic benchmarks do so if it doesn't run you
can try increasing your voltage in steps until it becomes stable check that out
we're stable at 4.7 GHz that means our
CPU is probably somewhere in the top 20% of Haswell 4770k and we're feeling
pretty good about ourselves now we can keep pushing but we know already having
tried this before we started filming that we're not going to get 4.8 GHz
without pushing the voltage up further and we're already sitting at about 80°
underload on the CPU so that's the comfort zone we set for ourselves if we
got more exotic cooling maybe we could go a little bit further but we're
probably gonna stay there what we can do is we can try to optimize our settings
at this particular speed or push for a little bit more but not quite 4.8 GHz
now there are a few more things to do now that you're pretty much finished
number one is turn up your RAM frequency to the rated speed of your memory or go
up in increments until you reach a point where it's not stable anymore we were
able to achieve 1866 even at 4.7 gahz
number two is turn up your cache ratio
so what ASUS will automatically do is turn it down a little bit as you reach
those higher overclocks try bringing it up to one to one you can eek out a
little bit more performance that way and last but not least now that you've got
everything dialed in you're going to want to change to that adaptive vcore
setting which is going to give you that best balance between performance and
power consumption so you're pretty happy with the overclock you've got there's
still a few more things you can do number one is try playing around with
per core overclocking so while with all four cores running at 4.7 GHz this is
the best we can do what if it'll do one core at 4.8 or 4.9 or even 5 GHz you can
try tuning some of those ones a little bit further to see how they go next you
can try increasing the frequency of your memory so go up to the rated speed of
your memory and or or maybe not the rated speed of your memory go up one at
a time until it gets unstable and then back it back off and that's pretty much
where you're good to go we got 1866 6 MHz on our platform even at 4.7 GHz next
you can try turning up your cache ratio to be equal to your CPU multiplier this
will achieve a little bit better performance but not that much the only
thing the only reason we're doing this is we're compensating for ASUS's
automatic rules that turn it down a little bit when you get to higher CPU
frequencies in order to improve stability it is optimal to have them
running one to one and the last thing you do once you have everything dialed
in and you've run your very last stability test is change that voltage
setting from manual to Adaptive mode
that way you get the benefit of the performance and the benefit we ran a few
different games and didn't see huge differences going from our stock
performance CPU to our overclocked CPU at 4.7 GHz however we saw massive
differences in our benchmarks that really made use of all of the cores of
our CPU so the examples were cinebench and szip where our overclocked CPU
performed up to 20 to 25% better than our stock CPU giving you
some idea of what kind of tangible gains can be had in the right applications
with overclocking now if all of that looked like way too much work ASUS has
easy profiles in the BIOS where you can just go CPU level up 4.2 4.4 or 4.6 GHz
and make it that simple on yourself and with within AI Suite there is an autot
tuner that will not just set a static profile but will actually run through
tests with your computer and determine good settings for your individual
components and that one takes anywhere from around half an hour to an hour to
run depending on how long it needs to
find that optimal spot so thank you so much for checking out our overclocking
guide on Intel's fourth generation core series Haswell CPUs on the Z87 platform
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