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ever since our core i9 review we've been planning to do an x299 overclocking

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guide but at that time the whole lineup hadn't even been launched yet so

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fast forward to today we finally got our

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18 core chips and get this

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Intel wanted to sponsor an overclocking guide so we were like

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heck yeah let's do it

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okay so if you're in a hurry to squeeze a little more performance out of your

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system you could just run ASUS's easy

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tuning wizard or the equivalent from your motherboard manufacturer

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but you're here watching so my guess is you

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want more so then first order of business is

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component selection you're going to want to choose a motherboard that can handle

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the juice that your high core count CPU

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will need pick one with two eps 12 volt

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connectors to spread the current out over more wires like the ASUS prime x299

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deluxe or even a rampage series board

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and a high quality power delivery system

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with good cooling without robust vrms and adequate

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ventilation you should not attempt x299

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overclocking and this is especially true for the power hungry extreme edition

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which brings us to the next item on our shopping list the power supply you won't

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need to harness the power of the atom

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but core i9 htc chips alone can pull as much

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power as an entire mainstream gaming

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system when overclocked up to 500 watts

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off the 12 volt rail so most 850 watt 80

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plus gold and higher units will do you nicely but

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double check with a power supply calculator for your setup and the

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continuous load table before you buy i

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would actually even start at a thousand rather than 850 watts for a 14 core or

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higher next up then is cooling you'll want a

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lot of it from our review the core i9 series gets

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pretty toasty under load even at stock speed so whether you choose to get

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adventurous and replace the thermal compound under the heat spreader via the

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method that we showed off here or decide to keep your warranty more

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intact we recommend at least a 280

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millimeter aio like the Corsair h115i or

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a large air cooler like Noctua's nhd15

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and for the first time in years actually a

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custom water cooling loop is actually highly recommended for the best results

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as for the rest of the components higher spec RAM wouldn't be a terrible idea but

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it should be noted that in most cases it doesn't affect performance too much

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beyond 3000 megahertz and the rest pretty much comes down to personal taste

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and the goal of your build your SSD or your graphics card won't

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affect your ability to overclock

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unless they get lodged in your cooling fan

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okay then so you've got your build put together and a fresh install of the os

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of your choice time to get down to business

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we still prefer using the BIOS over tools

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like Intel's surprisingly versatile extreme tuning utility in Windows

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because we're old school like that so first off xmp

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if you spent a few bucks on fancy RAM you'll probably want this on but if you

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run into stability issues turn it off then let us know in the

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comments if you'd like a separate video down the line discussing tuning RAM

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frequency and timings manually next whether xmp is off or on you'll

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need to disable CPU s-vid support and

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speed step which prevents the CPU from communicating with the external voltage

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regulator and from down clocking to save power while idle

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once you've finished with that find where your UEFI BIOS keeps its power

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control options listed on our ASUS board as external

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digiplus power control we are interested in a few items in here for load line

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calibration start out with a lower value like two or three this provides extra

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voltage so that as the CPU goes from zero to 100 when you fire up a demanding

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load it doesn't wind up starved for power momentarily causing an error

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it should be noted though that this setting can exacerbate the thermal issue

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there is a reason why it's off by default

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CPU current capability should then be set to 140 percent which will allow more

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power to be supplied to the CPU this prevents a difficult to diagnose

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condition known as vrm throttling then

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spread spectrum should be disabled for stability and CPU power phase control

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should be set first to extreme and then

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dial back if possible once you've found a stable clock speed that you like

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your final stop sort of overclocking can be a bit of a

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rabbit hole is CPU core ratio

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which we recommend changing to buy specific core which allows you to

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specify ratios and voltages for each

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individual core along with an asterisk

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here that denotes the higher tolerance turbo boost max cores

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so 4.2 gigahertz is the non-max single

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core turbo speed for the 7900x so we'll

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use this as a starting point tweak the multiplier higher rebooting in

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between each step until you reach an unstable level where the system won't

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boot then you've got a couple of choices you

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can either bump the voltage up and see if you get stability we chatted with our

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friends over at gamer's nexus they figure about 1.25 volts on decent water

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cooling is about as high as you want to go or

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you can drop back to the last stable setting or to be safe one increment

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lower and try it again now those asterisk cores those can clock

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higher with lower voltage so be sure to take this into consideration while

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you're tuning the more you can control the heat output of your chip the better

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your results and the lower the voltage the less heat

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speaking of you may actually not need or want to add much voltage if

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you can help it unless you've got a custom loop in some cases like our ASUS

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board using offsets will actually offset

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from the auto voltage meaning that you might even want to push them negative

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depending on the readings that you get remember guys even small incremental

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bumps and voltage count for a lot when we're talking about up to 18 cores

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though this can be alleviated somewhat by using

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what's called an avx offset which down clocks the CPU by a set amount when

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running complex avx enabled workloads so

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ASUS BIOS shows the avx frequencies separately so you can actually see the

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offset's results alright then

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so if all goes well you've got some settings dialed in that will work for

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your CPU here's what we're using

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if not clear the cmos and try again until you

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do now it's time for burn-in testing now

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the traditional wisdom says to run a full system load like prime95 for 24

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hours to validate your overclock make sure your CPU is not going to spit out

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any calculations that aren't correct but while that's a good idea and we would

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still recommend it we've seen a lot of situations where even a 24-hour pass

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doesn't mean it's fully stable the real test for us lately has been in

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heavy start stop loads we've actually caught more stability failures using the

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3d modeling software blender which hits the CPU hard across all cores

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so there are free scenes that can be used to benchmark and passing longer

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ones like the classroom barcelona pavilion or the gooseberry production

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benchmark tends to be the final pass for us

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now if you're working on this and you feel like you're close but you're not

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quite stable you can maybe try increasing your CPU input voltage

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starting at about 450 millivolts above your core voltages

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it can help you can also try boosting the system agent voltage and bringing

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vccio up to within 50 millivolts of it to account for variants in CPU memory

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controllers especially if you're using xmp or overclocking your RAM

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once everything's stable and you're comfortable with your thermals which you can monitor using a free tool like

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hardware info 64 you've got a few options

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you can increase the clocks and rinse and repeat go through this whole process

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again you can just stick with what you have or

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for the adventurous you can actually start trying to reduce CPU core voltages

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re-enable power saving features and reduce voltages for the encore pll and

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vccio to help tame the heat output

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then validate it all over again it is a long process if you really want

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to get it dialed in perfectly but once you've done so you'll be left with

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a nice performance bump over the stock configuration

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in our case we managed some good gains in clock hungry gaming and our already

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good productivity performances unsurprisingly even better which means

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you can get your work done faster and get back to pwning noobs

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all without ever leaving the comfort of the glow of your battle station

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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get

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subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at

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the link in the video description also down there we've got cool shirts like

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this one as well as our community forum which you should totally join