Intel Haswell 4th Generation Core i5 & i7 Overclocking Guide
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
4,782 words · ~23 min read
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welcome to the Intel fourth generation core series processor AKA code name
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Haswell overclocking guide we're going to show you how to get the most of of
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your new CPU in only a few simple steps
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let's start with the basic benefits of overclocking I actually had someone ask
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me about this the other day uh you know what is computer overclocking and I was
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trying to explain well you take the parts that you would normally buy and
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then you turn them up in speed and you can increase the voltage to make sure
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the stability stays right and basically you're getting more performance than
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what you actually paid for and this individual said to me oh so it's kind of
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like overclocking your phone and I said yes overclock clocking is overclocking
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whether it's a PC or a phone the idea is you want more performance and you don't
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necessarily want to pay anymore for the actual processor but of course I have to
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tell you guys the dangers of overclocking overclocking can result or
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will result in higher heat output more
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power consumption it can result in instability or shorter lifetime for your
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components and very very rarely it can result in outright death of components
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but as long as as you're using high quality stuff and going about it in a
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safe and responsible manner you likely won't run into this kind of trouble now
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the good news is that for CPUs in particular Intel has an overclocking
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extended warranty that you can actually buy for it and they'll replace it for you just like that even if you kill it
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during overclocking now it would be irresponsible of me also to not give you
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guys the luck of the draw disclaimer overclocking is running things outside
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of their specifications they are not guaranteed to do these things so if you
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happen to get a CPU that runs at exactly
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stock speed and only stock speed that's
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life you can't return it because it's a bad overclocker it doesn't work that way
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it overclocks or it doesn't and that's great if it does so whatever we do today
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you might get the same results as us better results than us or much worse
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results than us and that'll be just kind of luck of the draw without further
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ado let's get into it now planning out
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an overclocking capable build does take a little bit more work than just your
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average PC you can't Cobble together whatever you want and expect to get
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great overclocking performance and it starts with the CPU you're going to
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choose either an extreme edition if you're on the very high end or a K
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series processor because those are the ones that have what are called unlocked
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multipliers allowing you to turn the CPU frequency up and down at will and test
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them and actually run them at those speeds now we're using a 4770k this is a
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Haswell fourth generation CPU and you
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can expect somewhere in the range of 4.4 to 4.5 GHz for most 4770 K and then if
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you're lucky and you're in the top 30% you might get around 4.6 in the top 20%
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you might get around 4.7 GHz and in the top 10% of CPUs you will be able to get
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4.8 GHz or more if you also build a
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system around it that is capable of taking advantage of that
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now that bit I mentioned before about how it'll increase the thermal output
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you need better cooling to get the most out of an overclock so in our case we're
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going to be using an Corsair h100i this
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is a dual 120 mm radiator liquid cooling
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system however it should be noted that you can still get very good overclocking
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out of something like a dual Tower heat sink such as this thermal right Silver
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Arrow extreme or something like a no TOA NHD 14 for our motherboard we've gone
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with the Maximus 6 Extreme from ASUS and as the name suggests this is a bit of an
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extreme option and you don't really need that for a mainstream overclock pretty
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much any ASUS Z87 board has the same
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digital power delivery as well as ufi BIOS optimizations that up to
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multipliers such as 48 or 4.8 GHz they
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are pretty much all going to be able to achieve those results now the key
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difference with high-end boards such as the deluxe WS series tough series or Rog
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series is going to be in things like the overall build quality the extras that
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are included things like the OC panel that I have in front of me as well as
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their beefy vrm Solutions both in terms
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of the design and the cooling that allow them to stay stable at even much higher
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frequencies than your typical motherboard particularly with the Rog
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series you also get a degree of tweaking and tinkering that is not available with
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other motherboards for our memory we've gone with Corsair Dominator platinums
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these are 2400 MHz modules they're 8 gig
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dims meaning we've got 32 gigs of RAM in this system but this was mostly for
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stress testing it should be noted that while most Haswell CPUs are capable of
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running at 2.8 GHz to 3 GHz on the
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memory remember the integrated memory controller affects
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this it tends to be reduced a lot as you
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increase the CPU speed so once you get up to around 4.6 GHz 1600 MHz is pretty
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much a guarantee with anything above that being gravy and most of them can't
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do more than around 2133 MHz on RAM once
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you ramp up the CPU clock speed this becomes especially true with high
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density kits and when you populate all the dims in your motherboard so we use
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this kit mostly to push the platform to its absolute limit and because Dominator
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platinums are so sexy a good quality
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power supply such as the ax 1 1200i although calling it good quality is a
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bit of an understatement allows the power that's delivered to your system to
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be cleaner and more consistent meaning it will can be more stable in addition
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to being able to power more components such if you wanted to add more graphics
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cards or whatever else later this particular one is also extremely
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efficient rated at 80 plus platinum and is validated for the lower sea states
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that has well as capable of going into C
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states allow you to save power but they require your power supply to be stable
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not only at very high wattages but also incredibly low wattages so make sure
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that your power supply whether you're overclocking or not for a Haswell system
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is validated for C6 and C7 States now
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the rest of these components don't really affect overclocking performance
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directly but our Intel 335 series SSD enables us to boot up more quickly after
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failed overclocking attempts our Noctua 120 MIM fans allow us to have the
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radiator still perform very well but also not be loud and our GTX 780 is a
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great match for a 4770k once it's overclocked allowing us to have beastly
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system performance now it should also be noted that VGA Hotwire is a feature
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supported by certain ASUS motherboards and graphics cards that allows you to
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directly overvolt your graphics card using the motherboard so check that out
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if you're looking for a great motherboard graphics card pairing as
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well and here we go step one of overclocking is to not overclock I
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recommend updating your mother board to the latest BIOS setting those settings
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all to default make sure all your fans
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are spinning make sure your CPU is stable run the Ida 64 built-in CPU
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testing tool as well as a couple passes of mest 86 Plus at bone stock settings
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because if you have problems before you even start overclocking you're going to
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have a bad time as soon as you do start overclocking next up is your software
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tool kit so you'll need some kind of application for monitoring the status of
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your CPU such as CPU Z or in this case we're using the built-in one in ID to 64
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you will need something for stress testing and normally we were using prime
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95 in the past but what prime 95 does do
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well is it tests maximum heat output of the CPU and there are similar tools such
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as Linux or Intel burn test but what the Ida 64 system stability test does well
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is it allows the CPU to not only run
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really hot but it also tests other components such as the new instruction
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sets that are built into Haswell giving us a more complete picture of the
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overall system stability last but not least we're going to need some kind of
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temperature monitoring program typically in the past I've used real temp GT but
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what you might notice about Haswell is that the CPU temperatures under load are
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going to be very bouncy they're going to move around a lot it's going to give you Peaks but not necessarily an average so
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ASUS has actually built a thermal probe into their motherboards themselves now
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that you can read using AI Suite or in our case we're using the OC panel right
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here to read it that'll give you a more realistic view of how the CPU is running
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under load I always recommend keeping
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some other device next to you while you're overclocking such as a notebook
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or a tablet so that you can look things up and reference them while you're
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working not every board has downloadable profiles like the Rog series boards and
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it can be a godsend if you can go on a forum such as Linus tips.com find other
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people who have similar Hardware configurations who are able to help help
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you and if you can do that at the same time as working on the machine then so
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much the better the last thing you need before you get started is this set aside
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some time for the overclock budget yourself some time where you assume that
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your system is not going to be fully functional because a rushed sloppy
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overclock is a bad overclock that can cause instability crashes or even
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operating system corruption you don't want to rush it because at the end of
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the day if your system crashes and takes with it a bunch of your work or whatever
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else it could cost you more time and headache and frustration than if You'
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just done it right in the first place
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now I know this makes me a little old school because there are lots of software utilities that allow you to do
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this kind of stuff within Windows and the extreme motherboard we have here has
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the OC panel that allows you to change most of these parameters but not
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everyone's going to be working with that so I'm mashing delete or F2 or some
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motherboards have different buttons to get into the UEFI or bio that allows us
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to change all the settings that we need to change the first setting we'll be
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having a look at is the CPU core ratio also known as the CPU multiplier it's
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called that because you've got your base clock which is 100 MHz by default and a
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multiplier that gives you your final CPU clock speed so if you had a setting of
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44 you'd be at 4,400 MHz or 4.4 GHz and
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at a setting of 48 you'd be at 4800 MHz or 4.8 GHz now there's 's more to it
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than just that and you've got a couple of different options so you press enter
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to go into those options and you've got Auto which is your stock speed including
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Intel's turbo boost technology which allows you to go to higher speeds when
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fewer cores are under load your next setting is sync all cores this allows
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you to change that multiplier and it'll change all the cores at the same time
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and lock them there so they'll all move together regardless of what kind of load
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is on the CPU finally you've got the per core option this allows you to BU build
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kind of like your own turbo boost technology but an overclocked one so you
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could set a multiplier of maybe 50x when
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you're only using one core or 48 when you're using two cores or whatever the
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case may be you can play around with it a fair bit the next setting we need is
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one of the most important one so we're going to scroll down down down down down
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in extreme tweaker here and we're going to get to CPU voltage now we can turn up
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the frequency all you want but at the end of the day if you don't increase the
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voltage you're not going to increase your stability and the amount of power
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you can deliver to the CPU and you're not going to be stable it's not going to
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work so CPU voltage allows us to compensate for the increases in
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frequency and make the system stable the problem is that the More Voltage you add
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to your CPU the more heat output will come out of your CPU so you need to add
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more Cooling and it will also decrease
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the overall lifespan of your CPU going past a certain point now there are
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actually a number of different ways that you can change CP voltage on this
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platform so you can see we're in full manual mode right now but I'm going to
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change that so now I've got Auto which is self-explanatory manual mode which
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allows me to key in a voltage and have it stay there the advantage of this is
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that random applications like stress tests can ask for too much voltage and
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overpower my cooling solution more on that a little bit later and the
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disadvantage is that when the CPUs in a low power state idling at the desktop I
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can't take advantage of any of the power savings that Haswell brings to me
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next up we've got offset mode so this allows me to take my stock CPU voltage
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remember that voltage bounces around a lot depending what's going on to give
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you that balance between power and power savings offset voltage takes whatever
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your stock ones are and bumps them up a noge so this gives you the power you
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need when you're running at an overclocked setting but it doesn't scale
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all the way back down when you're idling and not doing anything that's where
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adaptive comes in so adaptive is the one I'd recommend using as your daily driver
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setting when you're not actually tuning in an overclock because what adaptive
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does is it gives you the power you need at full load and scales all the way back
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down to stock default voltages when you're not really doing anything the
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only drawback of adaptive is that certain stress tests such as Prime 95
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can actually override your maximum adaptive voltage that you set and draw
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too much power like if you set a voltage of 1.25 for your CPU that that
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application could cause up to 1.37 volts to be drawn through your CPU causing
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instability or overwhelming your cooling so guys manual mode for dialing in the
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overclock then when you're completely done switch over to Adaptive to get that
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power savings benefit now on some older platforms it was really recommended to
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disable a lot of the power management features such as Intel's lower C States
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as well as things like speed step that turns the frequency of the CPU down when
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it's not really doing anything on Haswell that hasn't really been found to
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affect overclocking in any way so it's great because you get to leave all that
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stuff enabled while enjoying better performance under load our next setting
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is Dam's frequency 1 two 3 four five six
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seven eight yes in there now if we were
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going to leave our CPU at default and just set our RAM to 2.4 GHz we could do
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that but I recommend like I said before finding your CPU overclock before trying
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to turn your RAM up so we're going to dial our RAM into 1600 mahz and leave it
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there until we're done testing the CPU for our next trick RAM voltage now RAM
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voltage is helpful when overclocking RAM in much the same way that you add more
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CPU voltage to overclock your CPU most kits these days with the exception of
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low power ones run at around 1.65 volts
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but if you're ever not sure look at the side of your memory to find out and I
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really don't recommend changing it much
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beyond that stock voltage because honestly increasing RAM speeds doesn't
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affect many applications that much things like games don't get much benefit
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from additional RAM speed on the Haswell platform however there are exceptions to
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these rules such as if you run a lot of virtual machines you'll get a big
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benefit out of additional RAM speed and you might want to spend more time with
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that RAM frequency and that RAM voltage setting pair speaking of virtual
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machines there have been previous platforms where it was recommended to
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turn off things like virtualization or execute disabl bit not so we go into CPU
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configuration where you can see all these settings with Haswell because it
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doesn't seem to be affecting overclocking at all which is great because it means you can have all these
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features enabled and get more performance changing memory sub timings
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can have an effect on overall system stability as well as helping attain
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higher RAM overclocks but honestly that's a little bit outside the scope of
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this guide one setting in here that you might find really useful though is this
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fast boot setting right here disabling fast boot can improve memory
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compatibility by giving the computer more time to detect and diagnose any
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kinds of issues as it's booting up but it will slow down your boot time now
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ASUS has this setting on some auto rules in fact a lot of this stuff is on auto
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rules so you shouldn't need to touch most of it but the CPU cache ratio is
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something that once you've dialed in an overclock and it's stable you might want
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to try turning up because by default as you increase the CPU the CPU cachee
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ratio might lag a little bit behind and for Optimal Performance you want them to
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be one to one so you might actually go in and turn this up or turn it down to
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get it as close to your CPU frequency as possible keeping it 200 to 300 MHz below
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your CPU frequency however can improve stability getting near the end here guys
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now within the overclocking tuner manual
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mode you can see we unlock a few extra settings here CPU strap allows you to
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manually set the strap that the base clock runs at so changing this to for
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example 125 would allow your CPU's base
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clock to become 125 while leaving all the other devices that rely on the base
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clock such as the PCI Express frequency to stay at their nominal values this
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allows you to make changes to base clock which mostly you don't really need to do
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the only time I'd really recommend changing base clock would be to leave
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this guy at 100 and and then make slight
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changes to the base clock frequency like maybe on the order of of. 3 or 0.5 when
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you're at a setting where you kind of look at your overclock and you go oh I'm
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almost stable here maybe I want to turn
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it down a little bit under 100 so that I can get instead of 4.4 GHz or 4.5 GHz I
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can run at 4.43 gahz to see if I can get that
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little bit of extra frequency that's how I'd really recommend using these
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settings because other than that you don't really need them the last things
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I'm going to show you guys are the CPU analog and digital IO voltages so these
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are these guys right here now these can improve stability but the challenge is
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that they doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean you increase them to get more
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stability it's a matter of fine-tuning so if you're looking for that extra
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little bit you might try turning them a little bit up or a little bit down to
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see if you can squeeze a few more megahertz out of your CPU now on to the
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black magic of overclocking itself I always recommend a quick and dirty
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overclock to give you some idea of what you're working with before you start to
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dial things down so for Haswell I'd recommend a multiplier of 46 on all
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cores so we're going to go ahead and change that value there press enter to
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dial it in and I would recommend a CPU voltage of 1.2
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volts press F10 to save the settings press enter and this will give you some
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idea so if it boots up and runs all the benchmarks you need it to and all the
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stability tests then you got a pretty good CPU congratulations if it boots up
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and doesn't run the stability tests then you've probably got something in the
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middle of the road and if it doesn't post at all doesn't get into the
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operating system doesn't do anything then that's unfortunate you've probably
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got a below average overclocker so this is great our CPU is
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running our stability tests no problems at 4.6 that gives us two options now
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number one is we can be happy with 4.6
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GHz and we can try turning the voltage down to get better power consumption and
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less heat output this will make the CPU last for longer even though we're
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running a pretty significant overclock option number two is keep pushing so
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increase the multiplier and see if she runs at 4.7 GHz with 1.2 volts although
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that would mean we'd have a pretty awesome overclocking chip now don't
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worry if your system isn't stable at these settings there are other things
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you can try you can see we're well within our thermal threshold our Target
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of about 85° that keeps us below where
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the CPU will throttle but is you know
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warm enough that you we're not super thrilled with it good thing we're only
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going to be running synthetics for a little while remember real world applications won't have the same heat
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effect on the CPU as these synthetic benchmarks do so if it doesn't run you
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can try increasing your voltage in steps until it becomes stable check that out
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we're stable at 4.7 GHz that means our
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CPU is probably somewhere in the top 20% of Haswell 4770k and we're feeling
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pretty good about ourselves now we can keep pushing but we know already having
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tried this before we started filming that we're not going to get 4.8 GHz
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without pushing the voltage up further and we're already sitting at about 80°
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underload on the CPU so that's the comfort zone we set for ourselves if we
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got more exotic cooling maybe we could go a little bit further but we're
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probably gonna stay there what we can do is we can try to optimize our settings
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at this particular speed or push for a little bit more but not quite 4.8 GHz
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now there are a few more things to do now that you're pretty much finished
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number one is turn up your RAM frequency to the rated speed of your memory or go
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up in increments until you reach a point where it's not stable anymore we were
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able to achieve 1866 even at 4.7 gahz
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number two is turn up your cache ratio
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so what ASUS will automatically do is turn it down a little bit as you reach
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those higher overclocks try bringing it up to one to one you can eek out a
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little bit more performance that way and last but not least now that you've got
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everything dialed in you're going to want to change to that adaptive vcore
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setting which is going to give you that best balance between performance and
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power consumption so you're pretty happy with the overclock you've got there's
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still a few more things you can do number one is try playing around with
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per core overclocking so while with all four cores running at 4.7 GHz this is
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the best we can do what if it'll do one core at 4.8 or 4.9 or even 5 GHz you can
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try tuning some of those ones a little bit further to see how they go next you
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can try increasing the frequency of your memory so go up to the rated speed of
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your memory and or or maybe not the rated speed of your memory go up one at
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a time until it gets unstable and then back it back off and that's pretty much
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where you're good to go we got 1866 6 MHz on our platform even at 4.7 GHz next
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you can try turning up your cache ratio to be equal to your CPU multiplier this
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will achieve a little bit better performance but not that much the only
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thing the only reason we're doing this is we're compensating for ASUS's
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automatic rules that turn it down a little bit when you get to higher CPU
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frequencies in order to improve stability it is optimal to have them
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running one to one and the last thing you do once you have everything dialed
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in and you've run your very last stability test is change that voltage
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setting from manual to Adaptive mode
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that way you get the benefit of the performance and the benefit we ran a few
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different games and didn't see huge differences going from our stock
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performance CPU to our overclocked CPU at 4.7 GHz however we saw massive
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differences in our benchmarks that really made use of all of the cores of
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our CPU so the examples were cinebench and szip where our overclocked CPU
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performed up to 20 to 25% better than our stock CPU giving you
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some idea of what kind of tangible gains can be had in the right applications
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with overclocking now if all of that looked like way too much work ASUS has
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easy profiles in the BIOS where you can just go CPU level up 4.2 4.4 or 4.6 GHz
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and make it that simple on yourself and with within AI Suite there is an autot
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tuner that will not just set a static profile but will actually run through
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tests with your computer and determine good settings for your individual
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components and that one takes anywhere from around half an hour to an hour to
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run depending on how long it needs to
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find that optimal spot so thank you so much for checking out our overclocking
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guide on Intel's fourth generation core series Haswell CPUs on the Z87 platform
24:56
don't forget to subscribe subcribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews
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