overclock help

[samule]

so today I decided to overclock my 3570k because I finally had the free time to do so. I'm not going for a huge overclock I just wanted about 4.2 ghz or so so i went into the bios on my asrock extreme4 z77 and upped the multiplier, I didn't mess with any of the voltages because I just wanted to see if it would be stable on "auto" it booted fine and I ran prime95 small FFT for about 3 hours or so, I topped out at about 82* C on the hottest core with my h100 and voltages were around 1.17 volts which is probably kind of high for 4.2 ghz but I was going to try and mess around some more to get the lowest voltage and still a stable clock. so after about 3 hours of prime i decided that should be good since no tests had failed and temps were good. I know some of you guys like to go longer than that but im impatient lol. so after prime I let the cpu cool down for about 10 minutes or so and then decided to jump into a game of BF3 for some in game testing. everything went well for about 45 minutes then the game crashed and blue screened me. so I restarted, set everything back to stock and went into bf3 again for about 2 hours, no problems what so ever. so I thought i might try my luck again, maybe it was just something weird. so i set the multiplier up to 42 again, voltage at auto and everything else untouched, i played for around 3 hours with no hiccups and no blue screens. so I was wondering, should I test further? up the voltage? or could it be a ram issue? I would automatically say its ram but since it has worked for a month straight with vigerous gaming and testing at stock settings why would it just fault now?

thank you for any help you can give me

 

[dma0991]

Just stick to 4.2GHz at auto voltage, it'll work just fine. Manual tweaking starts after 4.2GHz. Prime95 stresses the CPU but doesn't mean that it'll test every part of the CPU. You would have to test it with different types of stress testing software. Check here to know what is the minimum stability standard.

 

[Vectronic]

4.2GHz @ 1.170 can be a little high, mine will do 4.2 @ 1.104.

I'd say up the voltage... if it passed the stress test (assuming you were doing other things while it was running... simply hitting "Run" and wandering off isn't much of a test)... and played for that long before crashing, you probably only need to up it to about 1.185

Z77 Ext4 is a tricky little board though... it has tons of weird little quirks.

Anyways yeah, raise the voltage, you're still in tolerable temperature areas... but I would look over your cooling... H100 should be able to keep you much cooler than 80C @ 4.2GHz.

 

[samule]

Everything seems to be going smoothly ever since i turned the clock back up so i guess we'll see. if it does it again I will try upping the voltage and if that doesnt work then I will just assume its ram. and the h100 from what I'm told is actually performing pretty well. I asked on these forums about a week ago when everything was stock if 60C was normal at stock and I was pointed to a spreadsheet by "idontcare" and he said that my temps were pretty good for a 3570k at stock. he seems pretty reputable lol. it does seem odd that 80C is the max at just 4.2 ghz though. I kind of thought it would be better than that but whatever I suppose. I wasnt planning on going much further than 4.2 ghz anyways.

 

[Vectronic]

Oh you could still go further... Small FFT/LinX is MAX... if you're getting 80C @ 4.2, you could probably go for 4.4 maybe even 4.6GHz for a 24/7 config.

If your temperatures scale decently, you would probably hit 95C at 4.5GHz with Small FFT... which is high obviously, but it's testable... under normal/daily usage, you'll never get temps that high, it will be about 20 to 30C lower than what you get with SmallFFT/Lin.

So... 95 - 20... 75C... nice temp.

I get 103C with LinX @ 4.5GHz, however... if I use a normal application that maxes out my CPU, for instance, LightWave, render some giant scene using 4 or more threads, my temps max out in the mid 70's... gaming is low 60's... etc.

 

[samule]

Oh I know I can go higher but I went from an old phenom 2 dual core that I unlocked to a quad so I'm pretty happy with what 4.2 lol. I have spent countless hours today trying to recreate the blue screen I experienced yesterday but 5 hours of BF3 later and a couple prime runs I was not able to get it to crash again so I may be in the clear. I will try to run Linx and some of those other benchmarks to see if they fail but at the moment it seems pretty stable.