ever since our core i9 review we've been planning to do an x299 overclocking
guide but at that time the whole lineup hadn't even been launched yet so
fast forward to today we finally got our
18 core chips and get this
Intel wanted to sponsor an overclocking guide so we were like
heck yeah let's do it
okay so if you're in a hurry to squeeze a little more performance out of your
system you could just run ASUS's easy
tuning wizard or the equivalent from your motherboard manufacturer
but you're here watching so my guess is you
want more so then first order of business is
component selection you're going to want to choose a motherboard that can handle
the juice that your high core count CPU
will need pick one with two eps 12 volt
connectors to spread the current out over more wires like the ASUS prime x299
deluxe or even a rampage series board
and a high quality power delivery system
with good cooling without robust vrms and adequate
ventilation you should not attempt x299
overclocking and this is especially true for the power hungry extreme edition
which brings us to the next item on our shopping list the power supply you won't
need to harness the power of the atom
but core i9 htc chips alone can pull as much
power as an entire mainstream gaming
system when overclocked up to 500 watts
off the 12 volt rail so most 850 watt 80
plus gold and higher units will do you nicely but
double check with a power supply calculator for your setup and the
continuous load table before you buy i
would actually even start at a thousand rather than 850 watts for a 14 core or
higher next up then is cooling you'll want a
lot of it from our review the core i9 series gets
pretty toasty under load even at stock speed so whether you choose to get
adventurous and replace the thermal compound under the heat spreader via the
method that we showed off here or decide to keep your warranty more
intact we recommend at least a 280
millimeter aio like the Corsair h115i or
a large air cooler like Noctua's nhd15
and for the first time in years actually a
custom water cooling loop is actually highly recommended for the best results
as for the rest of the components higher spec RAM wouldn't be a terrible idea but
it should be noted that in most cases it doesn't affect performance too much
beyond 3000 megahertz and the rest pretty much comes down to personal taste
and the goal of your build your SSD or your graphics card won't
affect your ability to overclock
unless they get lodged in your cooling fan
okay then so you've got your build put together and a fresh install of the os
of your choice time to get down to business
we still prefer using the BIOS over tools
like Intel's surprisingly versatile extreme tuning utility in Windows
because we're old school like that so first off xmp
if you spent a few bucks on fancy RAM you'll probably want this on but if you
run into stability issues turn it off then let us know in the
comments if you'd like a separate video down the line discussing tuning RAM
frequency and timings manually next whether xmp is off or on you'll
need to disable CPU s-vid support and
speed step which prevents the CPU from communicating with the external voltage
regulator and from down clocking to save power while idle
once you've finished with that find where your UEFI BIOS keeps its power
control options listed on our ASUS board as external
digiplus power control we are interested in a few items in here for load line
calibration start out with a lower value like two or three this provides extra
voltage so that as the CPU goes from zero to 100 when you fire up a demanding
load it doesn't wind up starved for power momentarily causing an error
it should be noted though that this setting can exacerbate the thermal issue
there is a reason why it's off by default
CPU current capability should then be set to 140 percent which will allow more
power to be supplied to the CPU this prevents a difficult to diagnose
condition known as vrm throttling then
spread spectrum should be disabled for stability and CPU power phase control
should be set first to extreme and then
dial back if possible once you've found a stable clock speed that you like
your final stop sort of overclocking can be a bit of a
rabbit hole is CPU core ratio
which we recommend changing to buy specific core which allows you to
specify ratios and voltages for each
individual core along with an asterisk
here that denotes the higher tolerance turbo boost max cores
so 4.2 gigahertz is the non-max single
core turbo speed for the 7900x so we'll
use this as a starting point tweak the multiplier higher rebooting in
between each step until you reach an unstable level where the system won't
boot then you've got a couple of choices you
can either bump the voltage up and see if you get stability we chatted with our
friends over at gamer's nexus they figure about 1.25 volts on decent water
cooling is about as high as you want to go or
you can drop back to the last stable setting or to be safe one increment
lower and try it again now those asterisk cores those can clock
higher with lower voltage so be sure to take this into consideration while
you're tuning the more you can control the heat output of your chip the better
your results and the lower the voltage the less heat
speaking of you may actually not need or want to add much voltage if
you can help it unless you've got a custom loop in some cases like our ASUS
board using offsets will actually offset
from the auto voltage meaning that you might even want to push them negative
depending on the readings that you get remember guys even small incremental
bumps and voltage count for a lot when we're talking about up to 18 cores
though this can be alleviated somewhat by using
what's called an avx offset which down clocks the CPU by a set amount when
running complex avx enabled workloads so
ASUS BIOS shows the avx frequencies separately so you can actually see the
offset's results alright then
so if all goes well you've got some settings dialed in that will work for
your CPU here's what we're using
if not clear the cmos and try again until you
do now it's time for burn-in testing now
the traditional wisdom says to run a full system load like prime95 for 24
hours to validate your overclock make sure your CPU is not going to spit out
any calculations that aren't correct but while that's a good idea and we would
still recommend it we've seen a lot of situations where even a 24-hour pass
doesn't mean it's fully stable the real test for us lately has been in
heavy start stop loads we've actually caught more stability failures using the
3d modeling software blender which hits the CPU hard across all cores
so there are free scenes that can be used to benchmark and passing longer
ones like the classroom barcelona pavilion or the gooseberry production
benchmark tends to be the final pass for us
now if you're working on this and you feel like you're close but you're not
quite stable you can maybe try increasing your CPU input voltage
starting at about 450 millivolts above your core voltages
it can help you can also try boosting the system agent voltage and bringing
vccio up to within 50 millivolts of it to account for variants in CPU memory
controllers especially if you're using xmp or overclocking your RAM
once everything's stable and you're comfortable with your thermals which you can monitor using a free tool like
hardware info 64 you've got a few options
you can increase the clocks and rinse and repeat go through this whole process
again you can just stick with what you have or
for the adventurous you can actually start trying to reduce CPU core voltages
re-enable power saving features and reduce voltages for the encore pll and
vccio to help tame the heat output
then validate it all over again it is a long process if you really want
to get it dialed in perfectly but once you've done so you'll be left with
a nice performance bump over the stock configuration
in our case we managed some good gains in clock hungry gaming and our already
good productivity performances unsurprisingly even better which means
you can get your work done faster and get back to pwning noobs
all without ever leaving the comfort of the glow of your battle station
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