It's beneficial to keep the i7 7700K overclocked.
It's beneficial to keep the i7 7700K overclocked.
Your GTX 1080Ti stopped working and your friend lent you his RTX 3070. You’re playing at 1440p, but your older CPU might be limiting performance. You mention frequent microstutters and suspect your GPU could be the bottleneck. Using Asus’s MCE and syncing all cores to your 7700k’s turbo boost (4.5GHz) seems to reduce those issues. However, you’ve noticed MCE might increase voltage unnecessarily. Monitoring shows 1.25V at 4.5GHz with temps near 70°C, while your average is 62-65°C. You’re also using the H115i AIO. Considering your current setup, would upgrading the 7700k to around 4.8GHz with load line calibration at level 5 be beneficial?
Search results indicated 1.25v could be the voltage for 7700K, while others were pushing over 1.35v at 5ghz overclocks. It seems safer to maintain the voltage and aim for the strongest stable boost. I strongly suggest trying extreme load tests (such as prime95 Small FFTs with AVX) to verify stability and cooling performance.
It makes sense considering the i7 has just four cores and is quite old, with limited boost speeds. Still, it’s worth trying in these older generations for efficiency. For better performance, go with 1.25 or 1.3 volts and test how far you can push the clocks. If your cooler is solid, you might even try higher voltages like 1.4 or 1.45—though Intel’s max voltage for 14nm is 1.52V. Unless your cooler can maintain under 80°C, you might face diminishing returns at those levels. If your cooling is capable, it’s worth a shot with the 3070 processor.
Ensure compatibility with up to 1.45v. Use HWinfo64 for monitoring and verify under vcore.