hey there buddies we're gonna take this cheap CPU and overclock it 25 guy at
least that's how it used to be when I built my first gaming PC I didn't have a
lot of money but thanks to a vibrant overclocking Community it was possible
to save 50 or even a hundred dollars on
your CPU without feeling like you were totally missing out compared to your
wealthier friends that's what Intel took away from us when they restricted
overclocking to their more expensive k-series CPUs and their premium chips at
motherboards I mean it's not really tuning if they only allow it on the
factory tuned models is it but nothing's
more enticing to tuners than an artificial restriction and I have got
something pretty cool to show you this is a core i5 12 500 a 210 dollar chip
that we've got running at a whopping 25
faster Now Intel doesn't want you to have this but I do so let's take a
closer look at it shall we after we take a closer look at our sponsor sir signal
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the link in the video description if you want to play by their rules Intel
requires specific CPU and motherboard pairings to overclock your PC but
whatever you might think of MSI they've done us a huge solid going against
Intel's wishes and sending over their mag b660m more term Max motherboard it's
got all the usual goodies PCIe Gen 5 dualgen 4m.2 slots a beefy 60 amp vrm
and it's got one unusual goodie the star
of the show its very own external clock
generator the one the only Renaissance
rc26008 doesn't have a sexy name but
it's right here on the board and we're going to talk a little bit more about
how it works later for now though we overclock for today's experiment we went
with the core i5 12500 it's not necessarily the best bang for the buck
assuming that we're going to overclock the snot out of it that might be the 12
400 because they both have six cores and 12 threads but what's cool about this
one is that it's the lowest end Intel chip that I would consider to be feature
Complete because it supports ECC memory it's also available for about 210
dollars U.S and while I could pay 50
dollars more for the 12 600k which is
the entry level overclocking chip with this puppy
I don't need to to ensure that we're not going to run up against a thermal wall
we've gone straight to the top of the line for our cooling with an nhd15 from
Noctua that might seem like kind of a
wacky Choice when we're so focused on saving a buck but a cooler like this one
can actually be thought of as a long-term investment one that you can
carry forward to Future systems with only a cheap mounting adapter bracket
the frequency or clock speed of the various components of your system is CPU
the memory even the PCI Express slots is
derived from your system's b-clock or base clock times some multiplier so the
safer way to overclock your CPU without risking running anything else out of
spec is to Simply adjust the CPU multiplier and leave that base clock
alone unfortunately that's the method that's behind the Intel paywall and
there is nothing that we can do about it so we are going to use that special
clock generator chip to enable base clock overclocking and then we can can
tune it by adjusting our core ratios step one is to adjust our base clock
from 100 to 125.
ah yes this is fun to enable CPU overclocking MSI is actually using a
specific microcode an older version that
wasn't successfully locked down by Intel now we set our P core Ratio or our
multiplier to 40 that is a value that is enabled for this particular CPU it's
just not supposed to be times 125 putting us at 5 gigahertz and then to
make sure that our poor memory is not going completely out of whack here we
want to find the closest thing to 3200 and this is amazing it does all the math
for you look at that for that we might need a little bit more voltage and this
is a very very quick and dirty quick and dirty overclock
see what happens well that's disappointing it looks like it didn't
take we're only running at four gigahertz which if we do the math is our
multiplier of 40 times 100 base clock
not 125. unless task manager is not the best
system monitoring tool hey well wait look at this
doing it yeah this Chip's not supposed to draw over 120 watts is it
we're hitting 82 83 degrees on an NHD 15 with a six
core chip she's spicy anyway the point is we're running at five gigahertz look
at this that's freaking awesome I was so busy trying to get my Hardware info
Windows sorted out here that I didn't even think about that this is not
crashing
by flipping gigahertz and look at these scores we're getting like 15
000 nearly 16 000 points in cinebench
that's not that far off a flipping like 16 core first gen threadripper with six
cars I freaking love this overclocking
on Intel hasn't been this much fun in over a decade AMD meanwhile has been
much more permissive a little bit more on that later on both sides
realistically we have had a similar issue where most of their products are
running so close to the red line out of the box that even if you can keep them
cool there just isn't a ton of Headroom and it's these budget chips where you
really feel like you're getting a lot more bang for your buck and there's no
doubt that this thing bangs off camera we pushed it even further to a stable
overclock of 5.25 gigahertz on all cores
with 1.2 volts of juice and we saw our performance improved by Leaps and Bounds
cinebench is up 25 compared to stock
speed and and still under 85 Degrees like what you heard me that score is
almost as good as a core I9 from just
last generation out of the box giving
you enough money left over to pick up both new colors of our waffle long
sleeve shirts lttstore.com and we found
the same thing across the rest of our productivity Benchmark Suite over a
minute saved in blender major improvements in 7-Zip and an extra 4 000
points in CPU pass Mark I mean it is
entirely possible that we won the Silicon Lottery here and that your 12
500 wouldn't go this far without instability but that's also half the fun
of it isn't it which makes me kind of Wonder then our AMD's days of being the
budget-friendly King coming to an end if we can squeeze this much performance out
of a 200 chip no for a number of reasons first up is
that unlike Intel AMD allows you to do basically whatever you want with your
CPU as long as your motherboard's power delivery can handle it and because they
remove arbitrary lockdowns except in certain cases 5800 X 3D their product
lineup is simpler as well you want Graphics grab a g-series chip want
anything else well pick the CPU that's right for you based on the core count
clock speed and cash if you want to overclock it just about any board
outside of their very budget a series boards is going to allow it just your
mileage may vary and unfortunately for the Intel fans out there
Intel fans you in the house
hey there you are unfortunately for you guys the same can't be said for y'all
even with this motherboard why well
because you can't get this motherboard I
mean it's on the MSI website and you can get the non-max version which does not
have the RC 26008 chip but for us to get
our hands on this thing we had to whip out our press credentials and get them
to send it to us and it's not that it's like too new or anything they showed
this thing off months ago and we actually did find a couple of AliExpress
listings for it but the problem is that they've got additional markups on them
to the point where they're 230 US Dollars it's not a great deal for a b660
board plus you're now adding 30 bucks for international shipping plus maybe
Customs or import fees when it shows up which means that it doesn't really make
a ton of sense for reference the non-max version of this board without the base
clock chip on we can't add that much is only 180 US dollars so if you're going
to be spending so much more well it gets
to the point where you might as well just look at a cheaper z690 board and
also since you're such a baller you can throw some money our way for a float
plan subscription where you can find all the latest extra content like an hour of
bonus footage from the recent build with my sister and there's another problem
with all of this I alluded to it before but it needs to be really highlighted
here that base clock overclocking can be a much worse kind of unstable than CPU
multiplier overclocking when you're adjusting your CPU multi the odds of
anything worse than a blue screen are pretty low so you go back into your BIOS
set it a little bit lower and boom you're back in your game in a couple of
minutes but with base clock over clocking when they say bass they mean it
CPU memory PCI Express Lane storage even
peripherals can be affected when you're adjusting this value and those are
components that are not designed to run outside of spec so you're going to want
to run a battery of stability tests disc
tests you get your fur Mark your mem test and you got to check and make sure
that everything is stable or you could run into crashes or Worse even things
like data corruption during real world use and it gets even worse while our
gaming performance did improve in CPU bound games like CS go where we gained
50 frames per second we were already getting 460 frames per second so unless
you're a pro player no offense you're probably not you're not going to benefit
from that difference then we transitioned over to Modern AAA games
where we really could use another 50 FPS and well the sad story there is that the
12 500 is already fast enough that your modern GPU is probably going to be the
bottleneck anyway so at best we got a
couple more FPS maybe overclocking is still dead then I've already talked a
lot about how even top tier coolers like the nhd15 can hardly tame a boosting 12
900k so good luck overclocking it unless
you have custom Loop liquid cooling or something much more exotic and then even
over on the AMD side as permissive as they are if you enable PBO on your 5950x
it's going to get pretty darn close to its final form without requiring any
additional fiddling in the BIOS something we explored recently with Pro
overclocker splav is the advantages of undervolting these higher end chips so
that they can boost in a stable manner but without cooking themselves but then
the performance gains from undervolting they're pretty pedestrian compared to
what we showed you guys today which makes overclocking top tier chips boring
kind of pointless and expensive so the
most frustrating thing about this MSI board cool product to be clear really
like it is that it puts us face to face with what we've lost these lower tier
CPUs man these things could totally rip
if you were just allowed to give them a little bit of extra juice at the expense
of nice to haves like low operating temperatures and a warranty Intel just
won't allow us to do it now MSI didn't
respond by the time that we filmed this when we asked why this thing isn't
broadly available
which really sucks just like this low
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enjoyed this video check out another of Intel's arbitrary lockdowns where we
looked at ECC memory support on Alder Lake 12th gen chips
it's also frustrating but worth a watch