there no place there no moment
welcome to my Devil's Canyon and Pentium anniversary edition overclocking guide
now the drawbacks of overclocking your CPU are many overclockable Hardware is
more expensive if it's done incorrectly it can cause your computer to blue screen or otherwise be unstable it makes
your PC consume more power and output more heat it can make your processor not
last as long it avoids the warranty on many components and finally doing it
right can be down right time consuming so why do we do it because we want to go
fast
H now before we get into this guide when it comes to running things beyond their
specifications I don't think I have to spell out that nothing is guaranteed so
with that out of the way let's get into the parts we're using for our guide
today for the CPU we actually have two
different choices the first is a 4790k
which is a quad core with hyperthread and clock do a little faster than the
older 4770k from our last overclocking guide at 4 GHz base and up to 4.4 4 GHz
boost it features an upgraded thermal solution for cooler temperatures versus
its older brother and due to refinements in Intel's chip selection process
promises more consistent overclocking results a fine Choice oh and like its
predecessor it's a ker skew which means it's unlocked and overclocking ready
which leads us into our second CPU the Pentium
g3258 anniversary edition this chip is
truly remarkable it's not the fanciest thing in the world with no
hyperthreading only two processing cores and a mere 3.2 GHz stock clock speed but
it's unlocked which means maybe a
massive overclocking potential for cooling we're using a Corsair h100
liquid cooler I recommend a good Tower air cooler or a dual fan all-in-one
liquid cooler for the best overclocking results for our power supply we've gone
with the Corsair ax850 we could have gone Overkill with the latest ax1 1500i
but getting a gr overclock is not about having a high wattage power supply as
much as it's about having a good quality one with stable rails and very little
Ripple so this one will be okay the ax500 I would have been better but this
one will be fine speaking of Overkill we've gone slightly overkill on the
motherboard with a z97 WS from ASUS both Luke and I are very fond of WS series
boards they're just so dependable and easy to work with they offer great
compatibility with other components amazing build quality and while they lack some of the fancy extras that Ro or
tough series boards might have they've got it where it counts and they'll
overclock with the best of them these days the motherboard actually doesn't
affect overclocking results much unless you're pushing things to the limits with
exotic cooling anyway so as long as you pick an Aus motherboard you should be
able to follow along with our guide exactly with other brand motherboards
having similar options with just a little bit more digging required on your
part to match up the stuff we're changing to how what it looks like on the other board finally for memory we're
using an 8 gig kit of 2400 MHz gskill memory high-speed memory isn't a huge
deal these days but with how much less expensive it's gotten lately compared to
standard 1600 MHz stuff and how easy it
is to dial in at high frequencies with XMP profiles we figured what the hate
it's optional but we'll show it to you anyway okay lonus enough Preamble how do
I overclock step one don't overclock start
by updating your BIOS and drivers running a stress test for an hour or two
doing at least a couple passes of mest 86 and playing games for a couple of
hours to ensure that things are functioning correctly out of the box
after all you wouldn't take a new car to the track and Tred to go 200 km an hour
in it until you made sure it can stay in a straight line going 60 clicks right
step two gather your software toolkit while I mentioned mest 86 already you're
going to want a couple of other things in your bag of tricks for stress testing
CPUs Z lets you see how your processor is running so you can verify your
settings and Cort temp lets you monitor your CPU's temperatures in real time to
see if they're getting out of hand if you want an all-in-one utility and a
nice userfriendly package I to 6 4 gets a solid recommendation from us it's what
we use and it includes monitoring stress testing and diagnostic stuff but it does
cost money everything else I mentioned is free step three set aside the time to
do it properly be prepared to have your system not be usable for a day or two if
you want to correctly dial in an overclock I'm not saying it will take
that long I'm just saying it can take that long especially if you're a real
stickler about validation I've seen stress testing programs fail after even
a full day of Burnin and my personal standard is that if it's not 100% stable
I'd rather turn it down a little rather than risk losing valuable work and data
so I typically validate for 24 hours or more step four the tour of the UEFI BIOS
on most motherboards pressing delete will land you in the ufi BIOS if you're
not sure about your motherboard consult the menual a Seuss drops you into a
simplified ufi by default that gives you all the basic info you need like
temperatures and lets you adjust your fan speeds change boot order and enable
your memories XMP profiles but doesn't really allow for any serious tuning
press F7 to get to advanced mode most
modern motherboard bioses have a ton of features that we didn't have in the old
days you can navigate through the menus manually or you can create your own
favorites menu with the settings that you use most frequently you can make
quick notes as you progress through your overclock and review them later you can
save profiles for known good settings so it's easy to revert to something that
works when you're done experimenting and you can even have the motherboard take
care of overclocking for you on its own we're going to experiment with that
feature later on to see how close it can get to the performance of our manual
overclock now if you want a bit of a deeper rundown of every setting things
actually haven't changed a lot since our last Haswell overclocking guide in this
guide we're going to leave most of the dials on auto and explain only the ones
that we're changing as we go let's jump into the AI tweaker heading where most
of this stuff is found now most Enthusiast grade memory these days has
an XMP profile and if you set this setting to XMP it will dial in into its
optimal settings you can push memory past its rated speeds but because of how
difficult memory instability is to diagnose I really don't recommend doing
it unless you have a lot of patience moving on down the CPU core ratio is
where most of the magic happens this ratio times the base clock locked at 100
MHz for all intents and purposes is how the processor's final frequency is
derived as for the settings here sync all cores
is faster and easier to dial in because it runs every core at the same speed
which is easy to stress test but setting up different maximum turbos depending on
how many cores are active could yield slightly better results in dual or
single threaded applications we're going to stick with sync all cores next up is
the CPU core voltage increasing core voltage improve CPU stability at higher
clock speeds but higher voltages are also the main reason that overclocking
causes higher temperatures and a shorter lifespan for your processor now there
are actually several ways to set CPU voltage we're going to use manual
voltage the generally regarded as pretty safe voltage being 1.3 Volts for Haswell
based CPUs to find our Max over clock then to save power we're going to switch
to Adaptive later on adaptive gives us
better power consumption characteristics when the computer is not working hard
and ramps up whenever the CPU needs more juice but it's not good for stress test
when you're actually validating the overclock because certain stability
testing applications can cause voltage spikes that can hurt your CPU in
adaptive mode so now that we're familiar with the settings that we'll be running
it's time to overclock we're going to start by leaving our CPU at stock
voltage so 1.25 volts this is different from Auto which will actually scale
voltage as you increase your frequencies thanks to the same BIOS Wizardry that
will automatically be handling all the other settings in here that we didn't cover then we're going to turn all of
our cores multiplier up a little bit let's say to 44 which would give us a
speed of 4.4 GHz actually equal to what turbo boost will do on its own but let's
just see if it can do it all the time so now we press F10 to save our settings
boot into Windows and do some stability testing if the CPU passes a short let's
say 5 to 10 minute stress test and temperatures are within your comfort
zone remember higher tempts equals shorter CPU lifespan then we boot back
into the BIOS and push it some more if it fails then we add a bit more voltage
and see if that makes it stable it's important to go through this process to
find out where you're needing to crank up the voltage a lot for a very small
CPU frequency return that's the way to find the balance between the longevity
of your chip and the extra performance that you crave another thing to consider
is the conditions in which you're overclocking is it optimal is it the
worst case scenario an overclock that you set up in the winter might not work
correctly in the summer so leave yourself some buffer room or save a
couple of other profiles that work in case you need to grab one of them when
the weather heats up another thing to consider if you're working on other more
advanced settings within the BIOS let's say you want to do some tuning to the
RAM timings is to throw another step into the routine not everything you
tweak will have a positive result so run a short Benchmark rather than just a
stability test to see if what you're doing is actually helping or hindering
performance once you've dialed in your overclock using manual voltage switch
over to Adaptive then use a real world stress test like cinebench to validate
your load voltage I found that just doing the math and keying in the same
number actually didn't work so I used AI Suite to make sure the voltages were
right and even though the software voltage readouts are typically not very
accurate the system was stable and my load temps were similar once I turned
things up a little bit more so it seemed to work a digital multimeter would
actually be preferable if your board has voltage checkpoints though that's a
great feature for overclockers unfortunately not found on WS
boards so following this methodology we
we achieved a 4.8 GHz on our 4790k at 1.3 Vols with a load CPU temperature of
around 65° and Rock Solid stability and
4.7 GHz on our g3258 at 1365 volts with
a load CPU temperature of 49 Dees I gave
the Pentium about 065 volts more than
the typical best practice setting for Haswell for a couple of reasons number
one is that temperatures were still great since it's a dual core and doesn't
output much and number two is that as a $75 chip I'm a little bit more willing
to live on the wild side with it both of these results are going to turn into
some significant real world performance improvements but by now you might be
sitting there kind of going well lonus this is all fine and good but ain't
nobody got time for that is there another way well actually there are two
other ways that I alluded to before to overclock on an isus motherboard number
one is to Simply navigate to the easy tuning wizard in the BIOS answer a short
questions about your setup then let the board apply one of the pre-done profiles
that asusa Engineers have cooked up this resulted in lower more conservative
overclocks at higher temperatures for both of our chips temps were still
reasonable at only a couple of more degrees on both CPUs but it's just plain
not as good as a manual overclock the second alternative way is to use ausus
AI Suite softwares five-way optimization
feature to have the board overclock itself it actually goes through much the
same increase speed until unstable then increase voltage until stable rinse and
repeat process that we did except it does it completely on its own and it
actually works reasonably well the automated system ended up 100 MHz slower
on my 4790k and 100 MHz faster on my
g3258 with the only issue being that in both cases it was applying More Voltage
than I was really comfortable with and since I'd already tested the system and
found it to be stable with less voltage it seems like as was overdoing it a bit
in both cases not a huge deal if you
just want a quick and dirty overclock since it can dial it in in about 10
minutes and you don't even need to touch it and they were both stable it's just
not the proper way to do things either
and that pretty much wraps it up thanks for checking out this overclocking guide
if this answered your questions then Happy overclocking if it didn't and you
still want some one-on-one help try the CPU section of the Linus Tech tips Forum
our community is full of helpful individuals and I'm sure one of our knowledgeable members would be happy to
help you and I think that's pretty much it thanks to Intel for sponsoring this
overclocking guide thanks to you for watching like the video if you liked it
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