so there's been plenty of Buzz about Intel's new Skylake processors and now
they're finally here which means it's time for an overclocking guide so today
we'll not only be running through the benefits and risks of overclocking as
usual we'll also be showing you some new features of the Skylake platform that
could make fine-tuning your shiny new rig a little bit easier than ever before
so first off we need to answer that question that new pc Builders and even
some experienced ones have been asking themselves since time in Memorial what
the heck is overclocking and why do we want to do it well the idea behind
overclocking is pretty simple it's just the process of tuning your Hardware to
make it run faster than its original specification many parts of a system can
be overclocked including the CPU video card RAM and even your monitor but the
most common Target for people who want to Tinker is the CPU and that's we'll be
focusing on today but keep in mind guys that overclocking isn't just a matter of
cranking up a virtual dial and expecting everything to automatically run smoothly
there are some possible drawbacks more power consumption and heat output system
instability a shortening of the lifespan of your processor even but while there
are't every any guarantees with overclocking the benefits are that it
can substantially improve your computer's performance particularly in
CPU bound programs which can include everything from image and video editing
software to demanding video games some of what are actually relatively CPU
bound and can see real performance gains from a faster CPU with all that said
then let's get down to it today we're going to be looking at Intel's allnew
core i7 6700k Skylake processor running at a 4
GHz stock speed with a turbo boost clock of up to 4.2 GHz and like other LGA 1150
whatever core i7s the 6700k has four
physical cores and eight threads with hyperthreading you also get standard
complement of PCI Express Lane so you got 16 either 16 individually or 8X 8X
for your graphics cards and then four more that go through the new version of
Intel's Direct Media interface DMI 3.0
that links the CPU to the chipset at around 4 GB per second twice the speed
of the last few chipset Generations but there are a few really special things
about Skylake that should be very enticing to both novice and advanced
overclockers first of all early tests suggest that Skylink provides a much
more consistent overclocking experience than Haswell which had a reputation for
varying greatly from Chip to chip so while obviously not every Skylake chip
will be exactly the same it looks like you may not need to worry as much about
losing the Silicon Lottery as you did in
the past second skyli offers much more
flexibility with a key setting that can let you hit very specific frequencies
I'm talking of of course about the processor base clock in the past the
base clock affected the speed not only of the CPU but of other system buses
like SATA and PCI Express which could lead to data loss from your storage
devices when overclocked by more than even a couple of megahertz not a
worthwhile trade-off for a slightly faster super P time well not so with
Skylake if you're feeling particularly daring you'll have much more flexibility
to play around with the base clock to squeeze every last drop of performance
out of your system more on that later third power efficiency has been much
improved to the point that higher overclocks should now be possible
without investing in a super expensive motherboard in the past enthusiasts
would you know lust after boards with 8
12 or even 16 power phases but due to
Sky Lake's low power consumption a good motherboard with as few as four phases
can give you a great overclock meaning that you won't have to Shell out tons of
money for the beefiest motherboard you can buy instead focusing on buying one
that has the right features for you things like onboard Wi-Fi for example so
with that out of the way let's jump into it and have a look at the rest of our
test setup remember that skyl primarily supports ddr4 RAM so we're using 16 gigs
of AD dat xpg ddr4 memory running at 2400 MHz with a mere 1.2 volts our CPU
and RAM are sitting on the ASUS z170 Deluxe and although it might lack some
of the eye popping bells and whistles of the Rog series boards the deluxe packs
plenty of features some even designed specifically for overclocking like a
dedicated water pump header for total control over your CPU cooling and the
ability to completely customize the speeds of both your DC and pwm fans with
fan export in the BIOS including a new
setting that prevents rapid fan speed changes which can be
distracting and for those of you who like a little more flash you can also
use the adjustable r GB Lighting on the chipset cooler that can even change in
real time according to CPU temperatures or whatever music is playing in your PC
they've also got key Express which allows you to assign macro functionality
to normal keys on a standard keyboard which is kind of neat and yeah I don't
know I guess that's pretty much it solid board uh rounding out our test setup we
used a Cooler Master nepton 280l closed loop cooler with dual 140 mm fans to
keep our shiny new CPU from overheating when we're pumping the juice through it
and then finally a Cooler Master V 650 power supply rated at 80 plus gold
efficiency and featuring a semi modular power supply so let's get started power
on your rig and start spamming either delete or F2 to get into Theus ufi BIOS
the settings that you'll be working with are in advanced mode which you can get
to easily by hitting F7 immediately once you're there select AI tweaker at the
top of the screen to bring up a buttload of settings related to overclocking go
ahead and dial in XMP so that your RAM will run at its rated speed and voltage
then have a look at the CPU core ratio this setting controls the CPU multiplier
which is the most straightforward way to overclock although it only works on
unlocked that is K or extreme Edition processors on the Intel side and it's
usually the safest your CPU speed is actually the result of multiplying its
base clock which is typically 100 by default by a multiplier so for example
our CPU runs at 4 GHz at stock with a 100 MHz base clock and a default
multiplier of 40 for the Skylake i7 I
recommend starting at 4.5 GHz and working your way up so for now select
sync all cores to make sure that all of your processing cores are running at the
same speed you can also assign different numbers per core later but it's harder
to stress test um and only really improves performance in programs that
use one or two cores it's kind of like customized uh turbo boost all right so
once you've keyed in the multiplier that you want scroll down to CPU core voltage
and switch it over to manual mode for stress testing and overclock manual mode
allows your CPU to run at near constant voltage but once you've validated your
overclock a popular choice is to set it to Adaptive mode for everyday use so
that you're not running the full Voltage through the CPU when it's just idling
which can reduce its lifespan although most processors are capable of slight
overclocks on stock voltage any serious overclocking will require you to give
the CPU a little bit more juice or voltage R i7 shipped with a stock
voltage of around 1.2 volts but your mileage may vary on that one so have a
look at what it runs at stock but then regardless of that overclocking voltages
should be somewhere in the 1.2 to 1.4
range I would keep it below 1.4 for everyday use and certainly wouldn't go
much higher than about 1.42 volts so key in the voltage you
want to start with and press enter when you're all done save your settings and
boot into Windows from there you can bring up the stress testing applications
of your choice so here at the office we use ASUS's Rog reel bench and Ida 64 for
CPU validation Ida 64 also allows real-time monitoring of CPU voltages and
temperatures which is why you want to keep those voltages as low as you can
while retaining stability because the higher the voltage the higher the temperature and while realbench is free
Ida 64 is not after the trial so
programs like HW Monitor and CPU Z are good no cost alternatives to keep an eye
on numbers during your testing after you've got your software up and running
run a stress test for about 15 minutes and watch for any system instability
this will come in the form of blue screens of death random shutdowns
freezes or sometimes your testing program actually just telling you hey
your system's unstable and if none of those things happen congratulations go
back into the BIOS and try pushing the multiplier up a little bit further if
your system did crash though try giving your CPU A Little More Voltage being
sure not to push it outside of a safe range once you get the multiplier as
high as it can go while maintaining a reasonable core voltage of course go
ahead and run a longer stress test to ensure stability over the long term I
mean you don't want to decide everything is okay after a few minutes only to have
your PC crash during a crucial moment two weeks later it's also a good idea to
use more than one program for validation
we've had overclocks past stress tests in Ida 64 but then CR within a minute or
two in real bench which can be it can stress different parts of the CPU
differently a good approach is to stress test on real bench for at least four
hours then I'd say do at least a 24hour
validation on Ida 64 or another program
if you'd like so don't plan on using your PC for a while quick note though a
lot of people still use prime 95 for stress testing we don't recommend the
newer versions of it they're actually power viruses which are programs that
can push so hard that you can actually damage your Hardware so keep an eye on
that now other things to keep an eye on temperatures I have alluded to this but
I haven't really given a solid guideline for me personally the comfort zone is
anywhere from the 80 to 85 Degree Mark
once you start getting there the long-term lifespan of your chip can be
affected so that's why investing in a quality CPU heat sink is so important
for overclocking now although we're using a 280 mm radiator allinone you can
get just as good results a lot of the time with a large air cooler just make
sure that you're not using like the Box heat sink or something like that I mean
maybe that's why they stopped including them with kseries overclockable chips
outright so results time using this
procedure we were able to achieve a rock solid overclock of 4.7 GHz using 1325
volts under load our maximum temperature stayed around 75° C and our test system
drew around 3 30 Watts from the wall during real benches stress test but even
if you get good you know clock speed numbers like we did it's a good idea to
run some real world style benchmarks as well and not just stress test programs
like cinebench uh PC Mark or even your favorite games can be very useful for
determining a if the system really is stable like really really really and
also how much performance you even gained with your overclock if everything
looks good but you want to tweak your speeds a little bit more tuning your
base clock might be the way to go as I mentioned earlier with Skylake you now
have the freedom to tune your base clock to a much greater extent than you did
before so we were actually able to crank our base clock all the way up to 200 MHz
which with a CPU multiplier of 23 gave
us a very solid overclock of 4.6 GHz using the same voltage as we did when we
adjusted the multiplier only and with similar thermals and power draw do keep
in mind though that playing with the base clock is a little bit more
complicated because while PCIe has been detached from it it still does affect
your RAM speeds so if you're experiencing freezes and crashes after
overclocking your base clock go back into the BIOS and have a look at your
memory settings certain memory dividers are often inherently more stable than
others and it's also important to pay attention to ensure that your RAM isn't
running at a Speed Way Beyond its specifications after you adjusted the
base clock providing A Little More Voltage through advanced settings called
system agent and vcci might be helpful
in these cases and but for our test setup we found that keeping the RAM at
its rated speed of 2400 MHz gave us a stable overclock without having to
really change any voltages and I personally find memory overclocking to
be the most difficult to do stably
because RAM errors can take a really long time to manifest and show up at the
worst possible time so in general I recommend just leaving them alone all
right solinus you've thrown a ton of information here uh but what if I don't
have the time to Tinker with voltage and just invalidate for two days and all
that kind of stuff surely there has to be an easier way never fear most
motherboard manufacturers offer a more you know oneclick overclock option of
some sort and ASUS is no exception head into the BIOS and you'll find the easy
tuning wizard where all you have to do is indicate uh what you'll be using your
PC for and what kind of cooler you have and it will apply an overclocking
setting automatically the drawback is that you typically won't get the same
performance as you would with a manual overclock as the board will try to apply
safer settings than maybe necessary our motherboard gave us an overclock of just
above 4.6 GHz with 1.3 volts definitely
not too shabby but not quite as good as our manual process alternatively you can
use ASUS's AI Suite which is available on their website or on the disc that
came with your motherboard and selecting extreme tuning and turning off frequency
and voltage targets will cause the software to push the CPU as far as it
can go though when we tried this it tried to take our Skylake processor past
5 GHz and then completely refused to boot so we then set a target of 4.8
which seemed to work but the CPU actually ran below 4.7 g anyway the
point is we recommend the uh the uh the
manual the manual process and that gave us the best results which pretty much
wraps this up so if you followed along I hope you've gotten an overclock that
will be the Envy of all your friends or at least the ones who know what
overclocking is don't stop tinkering guys and thanks for checking out our
Skylake OC guide if you enjoyed the
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the top right corner of the video where on Channel Super Fun we did part two of
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