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i7 2600k worth OCing?

Cappuccino

Cappuccino

Diamond Member
Is it worth OCing my 2600k?

My rig

390
SSD
Some EVA 750w PSU
16GB
Windows 10
4 fans.
Idle temp around 30-40
Gaming temp around 70+
What kind of temps will I get if I OC my 2600k? What kind of fps increase am I going to get? Is it worth it? I game on 1920x1080.

Really appreciate the help. :thumbsup:
 
Absolutely it is worth it, since it costs nothing, and will yield a performance gain. I don't see the type of HSF mentioned, this will be the limiting factor. A stock Intel HSF may only tolerate a mild OC, depending on your CPU and ambient temps.
 
crashtech said:
Absolutely it is worth it, since it costs nothing, and will yield a performance gain. I don't see the type of HSF mentioned, this will be the limiting factor. A stock Intel HSF may only tolerate a mild OC, depending on your CPU and ambient temps.
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Hi thank you 🙂
May I ask what kind of performance increase? Huge increase? I do have a HSF but I can't remember what it's called. It's a mid tier cooler iirc.
 
Cappuccino said:
Hi thank you 🙂
May I ask what kind of performance increase? Huge increase? I do have a HSF but I can't remember what it's called. It's a mid tier cooler iirc.
Click to expand...
You should be able to go 4.5GHz on air without doing much more than increasing the multiplier, going above that usually also requires to increase Vcore and installing a water block.
 
Sheep221 said:
You should be able to go 4.5GHz on air without doing much more than increasing the multiplier, going above that usually also requires to increase Vcore and installing a water block.
Click to expand...

Me don't think I'm going to install a swimming pool inside me case 🙂
What ghz should I set to without me worrying?
 
Mine's not a swimming pool but yes it is watercooled 😉

No idea what idle temp is. Load temp is the only one I really care about (idle means nothing), plus my CPU is never idle. I run a DC project (WCG to be exact) so my CPU has been at full load nearly 24/7 for several years.

At load it is running at 65C right now, which tells me my radiator is plugged up with all kinds of dust and crap lol. When everything is clean it is usually a little cooler, closer to 60C. I have my 7950 on the same loop (OC'd to 1GHz core) and the radiator isn't at peak performance due to some old damage from a long time ago that separated a bunch of fins.
 
Sandy is a nice girl 😀 This one's been running at 4.5GHz 1.3v daily for the past four years with load temps in the 6x°C range in daily workloads, yet...

tfInpx.png



That's on air cooling (TRUE Spirit 140 Power, 6x8mm heatpipes) to see how high it'll go just for the sake of it and stable enough to run some light benches. 5GHz on the other hand is stable and doable on most 2500K/2600K out there at more reasonable voltages if you ever need to go that high and have the cooling to keep it under control. Below that, overclocks around the 4.5GHz range are trivial to do, and require little to no effort.


What I mean is, there's lots of free performance in every 2500k/2600k out there that isn't overclocked. You could get your 2600k to a safe and easy 4.5GHz @ around 1.3v depending on how good a CPU you have, and you could enjoy a free ∼30% performance increase from stock 3.4/3.8GHz. You don't need that much of a cooler either to keep that under control, a cheap CM 212 Evo could handle that.
 
Cappuccino said:
loool 😀
Is the 2600k really that gud???
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I <3 Sandy, and tolerate Ivy.
Have never, ever had bad luck overclocking any Sandys (2400, 2450P, 2500K, 2600K, 2700K), but have some stubborn Ivys (3570K, 3770, 3770K).

You should be able to get ~4.5-4.6GHz (as much as 4.8-4.9GHz) on Sandy with decent cooling.
 
Cappuccino said:
What is your idle temp and gaming temp? Your rig? Do you have swimming pool setup?
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72C is Tcase for sandies, if you wont go over that in full load on long term basis you are going to be fine.
Also full load varies, gaming usually does not cause same load to CPU than for example distributed computation, although for both of these task manager will display 100% utilization. For most games CPU is not even under max load either. I got 4.7 GHz on mine 2550K with 77C on tiny CM hyper 103 under full load of WCG.

However I have to admit, although this is OC forum, overclocking is not good solution for most scenarios and it definitely is not a free performance. Your OC will increase your performance by 10% but will increase heat output and power draw of entire rig five times more as well, CPU's TDP greatly increases, which also causes more additional heat to be generated not just by the CPU but by VRMs, and PSU too. Package TDP of 2600K is 95W, but if you do OC it to the point of requiring installing water loop, it means its new TDP is greater than 140W(upto 140W, CPUs can still be cooled by air). What I wanted to say is that if your OC will give you additional 5 FPS in games I'd say it's not really worth bothering with overclocking it beyond curiosity how high it can go.
 
If you want to know what kind of bump you will get from a 500 MHz overclock, then first do a 500MHz underclock and see if you notice anything. It's relatively safe and very easy to do. It just takes a two line batch file:

Code: 
powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX 85
powercfg.exe -setactive SCHEME_CURRENT

The 85 is a percent of whatever your stock clock is. For a 2600K, this would put you at about 2.9GHz, not counting turbo. Use CPU-Z to verify that it is clocking where it should.
 
sm625 said:
If you want to know what kind of bump you will get from a 500 MHz overclock, then first do a 500MHz underclock and see if you notice anything. It's relatively safe and very easy to do. It just takes a two line batch file:

Code: 
powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX 85
powercfg.exe -setactive SCHEME_CURRENT
The 85 is a percent of whatever your stock clock is. For a 2600K, this would put you at about 2.9GHz, not counting turbo. Use CPU-Z to verify that it is clocking where it should.
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Frequency scaling is not linear, you cannot assume that if you downclock 500Mhz, the performance lost will be same as performance gained when you overclock 500Mhz.
Let's think of CPU stock(not turbo)clock rate a baseline, that means that the more you offset this value, the change becomes less apparent. It means that if 500Mhz overclock will give you 5% increase in performance, overclocking additional 500Mhz will give let's say another 3% gain, not 5. It is also true that downclocking will cause higher performance decrease than overclocking it would give higher performance increase.
In case of downclocking by 500MHz you would likely lose 15% of your CPU's stock while going down another 500 could drop your performance by 40% or more.
Downclocking would be good idea in terms of finding best performance per watt, because stock clock is usually highest safe clock CPU is capable of withstanding. You can easily downclock your 95W CPU by few bins down and its TDP will drop to 35-50W area, which is over 50% decrease, while it will also lose some performance, it will still perform very well.
That's why hardcore overclockers who run extreme cooling and so on, have their CPUs perform only by few % faster than someone running mediocre OC on air, although they increased frequency by another few thousands. Both up and down, at some point specific for each CPU, frequency will stop to affect performance.
 
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Sheep221 said:
Frequency scaling is not linear, you cannot assume that if you downclock 500Mhz, the performance lost will be same as performance gained when you overclock 500Mhz.
Click to expand...

No but it will be a rough approximation. Certainly enough to be able to say whether the user will even perceive a 500MHz overclock, without going through as much time and effort to do so.
 
I had a 2600k and it OC'd so easy. Its very much worth it, but its also worth noting that if your GPU is already maxed out then you may not see much improvement in games. I'm willing to bet you will see improvements. By OCing that 2600K, you essentially give yourself a jump in performance that's worth about 3 or 4 CPU generations of performance increases...for FREE. And yes, they can take it for a long time. I am still using a sandy 6 core and I must say I still blush every time I look at it.
 
Definitely OC! Free performance is free. My 2700k does 4.6 at stock volts. It's a pretty significant boost over stock performance. I dont see myself upgrading for another year or two.
 
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