OC'ing i7 guide... Where is the sticky?!?!

[MichaelD]

When I got my Core 2 rig in early 2008, I spent hours overclocking it and testing various settings. When I got my 2600K, I knew I wanted to overclock it but didn't want to spend hours doing it. So I clicked the button for it to find an overclock and have stuck with that so far, though I'll probably spend an hour or two tweaking it a little more. I need to swap out my CPU cooler first.

As far as stability, I've not managed to blue screen my box running at 4.4 Ghz using the overclock the BIOS applied. I've tried going higher (4.6 and 4.7) but those eventually crash and 4.7, in particular, was really unstable. I just don't want to push the voltage to 1.4 V so I'll probably push it a little more to 4.5 or 4.6 and leave it at that.

About the only thing I know about i7/i5 overclocking is that 1.40V and higher is considered dangerous to the life of the chip.

 

[Ika]

And by "No Fun" you mean "Didn't bang my fists on the keyboard until they bled and had to re-image my OS 12 times b/c it got corrupted by an unstable overclock" right? ():thumbsup: LOL!

I remember the A64 days fondly...took 3 weeks to get an extra 200MHz "sort of stable.' I.E. would only BSOD on boot half the time.

I'm curious as to how stable these "easy overclocks" on the i5/i7 really are. I took the proactive step of buying a good aftermarket cooler in hopes of hedging my bets with an OC to 4GHz+.

My Hyper 212+ easily handled 1.32v at 4.5ghz on my 2500k. This is tested 24h prime stable, 8h Linpack stable. It was a little noisy and maxed around 65C with the stock fan, but I tossed a Gentle Typhoon on there and it does the same temps at 300 less RPM (1000 instead of 1300 for ~55C max on my 1.20v overclock). With better air cooling you can easily top this, but I prioritize value and silence over a little bit of performance at the expense of heat and noise. It doesn't take much to find a good stable voltage. Auto will get you a ballpark figure. I ran prime for a few minutes, dropping 0.03v every time, until I got a BSOD or Prime error, then went back up 0.03v and took it stepwise. I can probably go a little bit lower but I want full stability on my new machine.

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks for sharing your method/results, Aflac. That's essentially how I overclock as well. Find the max at a reasonable voltage, then back off the OC and the voltage a bit. Unless you're going for benchmark supremacy, nobody can tell any difference b/t 4.2 and 4.5GHz anyway. I too, value stability above all else.

Ps
The fact that we are in an age where you can have a CPU (four of them!) running at 4.5GHz on AIR is just amazing.