Overclocking G3900 on ASRock B150 Gaming K4/Hyper?

[VirtualLarry]

Anyone else here try overclocking on that board?

I've BCLK overclocked locked SKL G4400 CPUs on my ASRock Z170 Pro4S ATX board(s).

Not too different overall, to bus-overclocking locked S775 CPUs. Although, the iGPU gets shut off.

Should have some results in a few days, once my boards arrive, and I get the chance to build them.

Also, as a bonus, I have a G3920 to try out, and see if it OCs any better than my two G3900 samples.

This ones for you, escrow4. The sweet taste of "forbidden" budget overclocking.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, I got my first rig built. B150 K4/Hyper, Celeron G3900, two 8GB (2x4GB) kits of Geil DDR4-2400 EVO Potenza RAM, and a Radeon R7 250X 2GB I had laying around. Using a copper-cored stock Intel 115x heatsink I got off of ebay. (Included HSF was all-Al.)

Overclocking with the Hyper board wasn't really in any way significantly different than doing a BCLK OC on my Z170 Pro4S board. In fact, I wish now that I had picked up maybe a couple more of those boards.

Anyways, picking DDR4-2400 RAM helped, as there are a bunch of various RAM speeds to pick from, once overclocked.

I settled on 150.0 BCLK, 1.300V, LLC level 1, DRAM clock 2400, 16-16-16-36-2T. That's 4.20Ghz.
(Edit: OCCT CPU test at those settings, hits 69C max on CPUTIN.)

I tested up to 157.0 BLCK on 1.300V, as well as 160.0 and 162.0 BCLK on 1.375V, but those proved unstable under OCCT. (Temps were below 80C, though, which was good.)

So, in short, these G3900 CPUs, well, the first one I tested, anyway, weren't any better or really worse overclockers than my G4400 CPUs.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Cinebench 11.5:

CPU: 3.92
CPU (single core): 2.01
MP ratio: 1.96x

 

[jihe]

Any way to oc and keep igp?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Any way to oc and keep igp?

Not that I know of. That alone makes the G3258 a better deal for budget OCs, as you don't need a dGPU too.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I decided to push for a little more at 1.300V. Now OCCT testing at 4.34Ghz, 155.0 BCLK, 1.300V, hitting 70C, 9min in, no crashes.

Edit: 15min of OCCT:CPU, I'm calling it good.

Edit: Hooked up the K-A-W. 57-60W idle (internet radio playing in browser, CPU-Z open, Win10 1607 64-bit), 92W under OCCT:CPU 64-bit load. Couldn't test with Linpack+GPU in OCCT, couldn't find Direct9 or 11 libraries in Win10 for some reason.

This is with a R7 250X 2GB PCI-E 3.0 x16 dGPU installed, with an EVGA 600W PSU. (80Plus, their entry-level PSU. Not the Bronze model.)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Subjectively, I like my G4400 @ 4.455Ghz with Radeon HD7950 3GB and 2x4GB DDR4-2400 @ ~2500 better than my G3900 @ 4.34Ghz with Radeon R7 250X 2GB and 4x4GB DDR4-2400 @ ~2480. Both running Win10, but the G4400 / 7950 rig is running VSR, for a 2560x1440 display on one of my 24" 1080P HDTV monitors.

Of course, it IS faster, by a little bit, but I sense that the larger (50%) L3 cache of the Pentium, and the higher multiplier, and the higher-end dGPU makes a difference.

Or maybe there's a latency difference between the Intel 219V LAN on the G4400, versus the Atheros "Killer" K2400 NIC (using non-Killer drivers) that's noticable when browsing as well.

Still, the G3900 @ 4.34Ghz is no slouch, but it just feels... Celeron-ish still. It's hard to put a finger on it. Maybe I'm just imagining it, I don't know, but the 2MB of L3 seems a bit limiting in real-world situations.

Much like my first Pentium II rig, an SL2W8 PII-300, that was a re-badged PII-450, and overclocked with 100FSB back up to 450 easily. I found it performed better for real-world multi-tasking tasks than the Celeron 300A did, due to the larger (but half-speed) L2 cache. (512KB versus 128KB)

Edit: The differences browsing, could also be due to my switch. I've got a WD Gigabit ethernet switch, that has fixed QoS "priorities" for each of the physical ports, and I might have this box plugged into a "low" port. I should replace it with another non-QoS switch, but I've been lazy about it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I wonder if the issue has to do with the Cache speed. I think that the UEFI, in the "OC Tweak" section, displays the CPU Core speed / CPU cache speed / something, and the cache speed is only 2700 (2.7Ghz). With a 4.34Ghz Core speed, that seems like a significant limitation. I haven't found any easy way to increase the cache speed.

Maybe that's why this still feels like a Celeron, even when overclocked?

Also, the RAM... I have DDR4-2400 CAS16 1.2V RAM, fairly generic (Geil EVO Potenza), and when I manually set the primary timings, CPU-Z reports that the tRC (row refresh cycle) timings are 386, when the SPD tab shows it as 55. I'm not quite sure what's going on here, or if tRFC and tRC are the same thing or not. I do have all four RAM slots filled. I tried setting it manually to 55, and it wouldn't boot. I mean, I don't think it's holding me back all that much, but that number seems kind of high, for timings.

Maybe I'm wrong about the RAM timings, or it's a change in CPU-Z 1.77.

On this Asus H110 board, with one 4GB DDR4-2133 Kingston stick, it shows on the Memory tab, it shows:
DRAM Freq: 1063
FSBRAM: 1:16
CL: 15.0
tRCD: 15
tRP: 15
tRAS: 36
tRFC: 278
CR: 2T

While the SPD tab shows:
JEDEC #7
Freq: 1067
CAS Latency: 16.0
RAS to CAS: 15
RAS Precharge: 15
tRAS: 36
tRC: 50
Voltage: 1.20V

 

[VirtualLarry]

After using my H110 / G4400 rig, without a discrete GPU, and with a slower-benchmarking SSD, for browsing, it actually seems a bit faster than the 4.34Ghz G3900 with dGPU. Weird.

Then again, on the G3900 rig with 16GB of RAM, Waterfox was using nearly 3GB of it, even when I closed it back down to a single tab, and there was a bit of lag loading a Newegg sale site page. CPU usage for Waterfox was reported as high as 82%, which is pretty good for not being very multi-threaded, LOL. They must have started some e10s work.

On this G4400 using iGPU, with only 4GB of system RAM (running at only 2133), it's showing 635MB of memory used by Waterfox, for like 10 tabs, and 20% CPU usage max.

Edit: But the overclocked G3900 does benchmark better.

Using CPU-Z 1.77's Benchmark tab, the stock 3.3Ghz G4400 scores 1621/3219. The overclocked 4.34Ghz G3900 scores 2000+/4000+.

Edit: Now that I have 20 tabs open, most of them of this forum with the ads, my G4400 is starting to get a tad sluggish too. So I guess, my OCed G3900 IS faster, by virtue that it only got sluggish after like 50 tabs.

 

[waltchan]

Fry's Electronics is now dumping Pentium G4400 for $33 as two-day sale. Almost sold-out. Zero depreciation for first 5 years.

 

[waltchan]

Successfully got one on reservation for today's pickup. This one is going to be my very-first LGA1151 processor.