Need help
Need help
I got a 9700k and I'm curious about overclocking. Any tips on whether to keep it on or off? Also, how do voltages and other factors affect CPU performance? Don’t worry if I sound clueless—I’m just starting out. Thanks for the advice, everyone! You’re all great, and I really enjoy this forum.
Adjust settings for optimal performance. Enable XMP, configure ring/cache ratios between 4.6GHz and max, set CPU multiplier to 4.8GHz with v-core 1.28-1.30. Test required. Save via F10 and restart. Basic overclocking done. Happy gaming!
Specifics will depend on the motherboard, though here's a rough guide for what to do. This is for daily settings, if you want to do more competitive stuff it's a bit different. Head into the BIOS, set VCore mode to fixed and the voltage to 1.4V. Adjust the LLC to something somewhat droopy (on MSI and ASRock boards it's a higher level but not the highest that is usually optimal, on ASUS it's reversed and level 2 or 3 is optimal, and Gigabyte is weird) and change the CPU multiplier to 50 (for 5GHz). Disable the power saving tech (C-States is the main one, I forget the other ones since I just auto pilot through disabling them at this point), then boot into Windows. Run a stress test (your pick, Prime95 small FFTs is the absolutely most intensive) and have HWiNFO open in the background. Watch the temps and CPU VCore (not VID), they should all be under the motherboard section, make sure clocks don't drop, the temps don't go above 100C, and check where the VCore is so you know roughly how much VDroop you've got. If it crashes immediately and temps aren't over 100C, increase voltage until it either goes over 100C, clocks start dropping, or it stops crashing and is stable. If it is too hot or clocks start dropping, decrease voltage until it stops hitting thermal limits and possibly decrease multiplier to get it stable. If it's fairly stable (runs Prime95 Small FFTs for 20 minutes), increase the multiplier by 1 and repeat the last step. It's basically a balancing act between thermals, voltage, and clock speeds where you're trying to keep the clock speeds as high as possible but keeping the others in check. After you've tuned the core clock, you can try tuning the uncore/cache/ring (it's called different things on different boards). This is a bit weirder to stress test, but it can offer pretty big performance gains depending on the workload. This is somewhat optional, I generally don't bother that much for daily settings, just setting it to ~85% of the core multiplier and calling it a day (rarely is that not stable and it's within a couple percent of max performance anyway), but you can go through the effort of stabilizing it if you want to, it's just that cache errors show up a lot less frequently compared to an unstable core and it takes a lot longer to stress test (in my experience at least). If you want to do competitive benchmarking and stuff, it actually depends more on the benchmark your trying to run for what you end up doing.