Issues during OC with MSI M5 + 6600K
Issues during OC with MSI M5 + 6600K
NZXT S340 Case paired with Intel Skylake 6600K, MSI Z170A Gaming M5 Board, Crucial 2400 Ballistix Sport LT 2x8 16GB RAM, Cooler Master 212 Hyper LED CPU Cooler, Corsair AF120 Quiet Edition fans, EVGA 500W 80+ Bronze Power Supply, OCZ Trion 150 SSD, Western Digital Cavair Black 7200rpm HDD, Windows 10 Home Edition.
I'm facing significant challenges in achieving a stable overclock with this setup (MSI Z170A Gaming M5 and Intel Skylake 6600K). While I recognize that overclocking varies greatly, I believe the Skylake 6600K is manageable at lower voltages. I attempted a Vcore of 1.250v with XMP disabled, all power-saving features off, and Prime95 performance dropped after two runs. Intel Burn Test at 4.2ghz succeeded, but higher settings caused shutdowns or freezing. AIDA64 stability tests passed, Cinebench ran smoothly, and UEFI MemeTest86 completed without issues.
Currently, I'm at 1.300v in the BIOS with an Override Offset of 0.065mv to counter voltage drops. The CPU runs at 3900GHz with a FCLK of 1000GHz. Adjusting the offset raised the Vcore to 1.368v, though idle values are slightly lower (CPUID shows 1.384). My goal is a lower idle Vcore and better performance under load. I'm aware of other BIOS settings affecting voltage delivery, but I haven't explored them deeply yet.
I'm still working toward a stable 4.3ghz and need clearer guidance on voltage management before considering hardware changes.
No LLC? it seems to be a typical choice now.
Try auto voltage, set the desired overclock, then check the voltage under load to understand its limits, and manually lower it slightly to test stability.
On my board, at 4.5ghz with auto voltage it doesn’t overvolt, and the maximum voltage shown in the Intel BurnTest at that frequency with auto volts is 1.354v.
Yeah, it is odd that a board at this price-point doesn't have LLC. I believe MSI left it out of the M5 Bios so people would upgrade to the more expensive M7 motherboard, which has load-line-calibration. Apparently though I can just use the offsets which do the same thing as LLC does, at least that is what I have been told, even that those options are actually better then traditional LLC because I can dial it in manually and be precise, while LLC setting are usually limited to three or four % options, though I could be totally wrong!
I've done that also (auto-voltage) and have monitored everything. The only thing I can come up with is I'm not using a good base-bios setting to work from (like "Optimized Default"). Maybe there is a specific setting or settings that are holding everything back?
Thanks for the response,
-laz.