Something wrong with my OC?

[PinnacleFit]

Hey guys, long time reader, first time poster. I've been learning how to OC for over 6 months now, and really been pushing them underwater for the past 3. But I've always noticed that my score is never as good as those people with similar setups on 3dmark and heaven.

I've always been tinkering with PCs, but built my first gaming setup last October. It was meant to be a media editing workstation for my youtube fitness channel. Check me out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUqYomNmLlI&list=TLvBr-01BaZIc

Anyway, long story long, Ive pored over anandtech and many others to get advice. In fact if you watch the video I posted, you'll see how i got my start in fitness the same way. Funny how the internet works :hmm:. Any advice would be appreciated, Im definitely not above criticism, and if you think I'm an idiot for doing something I've done, I'd love to hear why...

i7-4790K
16GB 1600MHz Crucial Ballistix Tactical CL 8 or 9
ASUS Z97-AR
EVGA 770SC
EVGA 750 G2
WD RED 3TB
WD BLACK 2TB
SAMSUNG 840 EVO 256GB
WINDOWS 7 PRO SP1

My 770 is OC'd at 1320MHz, running 1.280V @~35-40 C. I don't know whats going on with my 4790K though. It's delidded, and under an EK nickel supremacy EVO, with the naked Ivy mount. However it keeps maxing out at 100C running prime95. It's really scaring me. I put the blocks on using Noctua NT-H1.

I went with my GTX 770 because it was either that or a way overpriced / underpowered Quaddro card...Let it be known that it spends way more time being used for gaming. I've always been a tinkerer, so I started looking into overclocking. I never manually overlocked my CPU, as my mobo always ran it at 4.4-4.6 GHz anyway...

I decided to watercool my system (more because it looked awesome than the performance benefits) but now that I have a solid cpu gpu loop Im looking for help to unlock max potential.

In the loop i got 2 280mm x 45 alpha cool rads with push config on both (one rad inlet, one rad outlet) EK blocks for the GPU and CPU, and a swiftech MCP655. I've pulled the trigger on the 980 Classified, and Ive already ordered the block for it. I'm going to wait till i get paid next week before i order the Classy.

Like I said, I'd love to get an opinion on what I might be doing wrong, and there's nobody better to ask than some of the same people from whom I got advice from to begin with. So have at it!

 

[iiiankiii]

Try to mount it with the heat spreader. Replace the TIM between the cpu die and the heat spreader. See if that helps. It sounds like you're not getting good contact between the bare die and the cooler. Also, the latest prime95 uses avx2 which overvolts your CPU above the select voltage in the BIOS. That's the reason why temperatures are shooting up like that.

 

[flexy]

a) No proper contact of die with HSF?
or
b) You feed the CPU too much voltage (say, 1.40+ in BIOS)

So or so, 100C for a *delidded* one is way too high.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

. . . . I never manually overlocked my CPU, as my mobo always ran it at 4.4-4.6 GHz anyway...

Maybe I'm reading between the lines. But it's a 4790K, which has stock settings which only enable part of the cores to go to 4.4 (if I remember correctly).

So I deduce -- at least a suspicion -- that you used the onboard "auto-overclocking" features?

I think our "search path" choices toward a solution to the problem has a very high probability attached to that scenario. That is -- flexy's "b)" scenario.

The OP doesn't even mention the CPU voltages, but proper stress-testing with a monitoring program like HWMonitor would show loaded, peak and minimum voltages. And it's not just folklore: those shortcut OC features of motherboards AL-ways overvolt the processor beyond what's necessary.

With my sig-rig, I remember succinctly with my aging fault-prone brain. It was either through such a feature in my motherboard BIOS or the Ai Suite "Turbo-Evo:" 4.4 Ghz was "easy" -- but it left the processor at 1.44V. Manually, I can achieve stability for that speed at something between 1.25 and 1.28V. The delta adds a lot of heat to the equation.