Suggestions for reducing voltage on IB OC?

[jkauff]

I'm running a 3570K with a stable overclock of 4.4, which I achieve with nothing but multiplier and voltage settings. Voltage is 1.30, which is not terrible and gives me acceptable temps, but the system is not stable at anything less.

It seems to me I should be able to get a stable 4.4 with this chip at a lower voltage. I don't care about power savings, just looking for maximum performance. What other settings can I change to bring the voltage requirements down, or should I even bother?

 

[Liquid_Static]

Some chips are just worse than others, for example my 3770k simply will not go past 4.2ghz, even upwards of 1.35v...

 

[2is]

I'm able to run slightly less voltage on my 3770k when I enable "internal PLL over-voltage"

I'm only OC'd to 4.2 so I don't use it, but when I was going for 4.4 I did use it an it helped.

 

[Tristor]

Ivy Bridge overclocks are heavily affected by temperature, more so than voltage. Lowering the temperature under load can greatly reduce the required voltage to stably hit a particular clock speed and in so doing amplify this effect. Although somewhat counter-intuitive, if you have sufficient cooling you can sometimes achieve stability by reducing voltage rather than increasing it. At the end of the day though, some chips will do it and some won't.

 

[jkauff]

My Thermaltake air cooler does a pretty good job, but I suppose I could investigate water cooling. Or just accept that this is the best this chip is going to do. The only real stress I put on the system is running hour-long Handbrake encodes, and the temps stay in the low 80s the whole time, so maybe I should just learn to live with 1.30v.

 

[nwo]

If you already have a decent air cooler going into water cooling won't help much unless you invest triple digits into it, which is not going to make it worthwhile. What you could do is delid the CPU, which should help with the temps almost as much as, if not more than, a liquid cooling setup.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'm able to run slightly less voltage on my 3770k when I enable "internal PLL over-voltage"

I'm only OC'd to 4.2 so I don't use it, but when I was going for 4.4 I did use it an it helped.

I'll preface my own post here with the quote from 2is. Also -- just to qualify the value of my hot-air, I'll state this disclaimer that I didn't experiment with an IB-K firsthand. I did, however, read through an online OC guide that addressed it specifically without excluding the SB cores.

What is your current setting for PLL Voltage? This is a separate item from 2is's "PLL Overvoltage." I would guess that the BIOS default is ~1.8V.

Try and test this, but it's fairly well-established that you can reduce that default to ~1.65 to 1.68V. I saw at least one case where the system was stable under overclock settings at PLL-Voltage = 1.55V!!

You may notice a slight decrease in temperatures -- a slight one. I'm betting stability would be improved.

Second, tweak your OC settings and strategy to avoid enabling PLL Overvoltage. And also -- see how far you can go with "current capability" at its stock 100%. You can try different phase-power settings, but see what you can achieve without the "Extreme" settings. THEN go back and tweak them individually if you're having trouble keeping the system stable with your target OC speed.

Also, try and limit VCCIO to below 1.1V. Defer any RAM overclocking until you get where you want to go or can go for the CPU.

Oh. One more thing. Unless you plan to use the iGPU, turn it off by disabling all its BIOS items -- particularly Render Standby.

And yet another thing; Are you using an LLC setting higher than default? If you plan to use LLC, choose the setting that still allows for maybe 20 mV of vDroop. "vDroop -- is good." That partly fits either way with two Michael Douglas movies.