Base Clock vs. Multiplier Overclocking
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,067 words · ~5 min read
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thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos wouldn't it
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be nice if overclocking your pc were a little more straightforward i mean sure
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there are those automatic one-click solutions that can give a quick and
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dirty boost to your CPU but if you want to do it yourself
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you end up looking at all these confusing options in your UEFI BIOS
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instead of just a dial that you can turn to make the pc go faster and one thing
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that's easy to get confused by is the base clock and something called the CPU
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multiplier which together determine your CPU speed but what the heck are these
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things and why is it that they are separated out instead of just having one
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field where you punch in your desired CPU frequency it's a great question
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because even many enthusiasts are only familiar with overclocking with the
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multiplier and i get why the easiest way
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to adjust your CPU speed is to ignore everything else and bump up the
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multiplier adding voltage when it becomes unstable this approach does have
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some drawbacks though unless you're running AMD you will need to buy an
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unlocked k or x series processor and on
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both the blue and red team you'll need to buy a supported motherboard
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furthermore multiplier overclocking doesn't offer very fine control so if
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your system is let's say stable at 4.5 gigahertz but then crashes immediately
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at 4.6 who's to say that it might not have been
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also stable at 4.57 you could be leaving performance on
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the table with this method so now let's move on to the base clock so as it turns
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out your CPU GPU and RAM are not the
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only things inside your system that have a speed rated in megahertz and the base
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clock's job is to keep your pc's components in sync with each other so
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the base clock is provided by your chipset and you can learn more about
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chipsets up here but what you need to know for now is that the chipset
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basically serves as a kind of coordinator between your CPU and your
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other components and this base clock will tend to be much lower than the
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rated speeds of your processor and your memory a common default base clock is
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just a hundred megahertz but while that
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might be adequate for some hypothetical low speed controller or something it
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would be incredibly slow for a modern CPU so that is why your processor uses a
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multiplier that allows it to run multiple cycles for every one system
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cycle provided by your base clock it's really hard it's like you know this
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whole thing so if you have a processor that's rated for 3.5 gigahertz what's happening is
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that by default your system is probably running a 100 megahertz base clock with
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a 35 times multiplier so this base clock
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times multiplier paradigm lets your CPU match up with the rest of your computer
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while still allowing it to run at a high speed and even though many cpus actually
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have a high tolerance for overclocking even further
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many other components such as your pci
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express lanes or your SATA controller cannot deal well with running out of
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spec that means that adjusting your base clock by more than a tiny amount like a
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couple percent can often cause stability issues because it connects to so many
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different components and instability in just one of them can bring down your
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system fun fact in many cases base clock
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overclocking can lead to much worse types of instability where instead of a
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blue screen you end up corrupting your os or even losing a bunch of data so
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with that in mind then what's the point of being able to change the base clock
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at all well some cpus and motherboards
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are more tolerant of base clock adjustments than others and some
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processors even support what are called straps these are base clock values
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significantly above the default that might be stable enough and can be useful
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not just for boosting your CPU's speed but also that of your memory and
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sometimes your GPU while the speed of other components will remain unaffected
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so you may want to look up what straps your particular platform can support
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and even if you don't end up using a strap that's much higher than the default speed adjusting the base clock
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can still be useful if you just want to squeeze every last megahertz out of your
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hardware and hit a clock speed that's in between two multiplier settings it
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really depends on what parts you specifically have so
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don't be afraid of some trial and error that is as long as there's no important
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data on your machine just remember to keep your expectations and possibly your
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CPU speeds reasonable
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speaking of reasonable this segue isn't great but by my standards it's pretty
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