What are the most important BIOS settings for performance without excessive heat

[sebazvideo]

I'm trying to do a mild overclock on my new system based on a 3930k, which should show on the signature. I don't care to take it to 4.5 or even close, I just want to get a little more juice without decreasing the life of the CPU or motherboard, something like 4 Ghz would be fine.

I don't know much about the dozens of different settings in the BIOS, I know enough to build a system and get it stable, but not when it comes to OC, plus every BIOS has different names for some things.

So I've been trying different things to do this OC, or at least get the best out of the system with stability as a top priority. My RAM is supposed to be XMP, but when I select that in the BIOS, it takes the voltage upwards of 1.3v and after a few minutes of Prime95 temps are already close to the 72C top for this CPU, so I went back to the default.

I also tried doing the auto tuning in the Asus Ai Suite, first the "Extreme" and then the "Fast" both of which turned the Vcore to over 1.3 and it was at 71C within a few minutes of running P95. Evidently autotuning is as harmful for the computer world as it is for the music world.

So I went back to defaults for everything (or so I thought) and then I set the Vcore to 1.195 and VCCSA to 1.005, which was stable on Prime95 for default BIOS settings, but this time I raised the ratio to 40 to get 4 Ghz. After a few minutes of running Prime95 it crashed a worker, so I opened the TurvoV EVO module of the AI Suite and increased Vcore and VCCSA two clicks each. This time Prime95 ran longer, but eventually crashed a worker.

So I raised both values two more clicks to 1.215 and 1.025 respectively, and I was able to run Prime95 for 3 hours without crashes in Blend Mode, and shortly after that I started running it in Small FFTs mode and it's been running for two and a half hours without crashing, so without being 100% that it's stable, at least it's a good start. Best of all, it's keeping the CPU temp at 60C without the fans going crazy.

But I'm wondering if there's anything else I can improve in the BIOS or the Ai Suite without getting excessive heat. I don't want to take it over 65C so I know there's not a lot of room, but without knowing what most of these settings mean (nor having the time to learn each and every one of them), I wonder what other settings besides the CPU ratio are really important when it comes to real life performance, especially for video programs like Premiere and After Effects.

And no, I don't want to buy water cooling or a really expensive cooler, this machine is a beast even at stock speeds and to me stability and a long life are more important than speed.

To give you an idea of what I'm dealing with, here are a few screenshots from the important modules in the AI Suite:

In the second screenshot you can see that some settings are on High and Extreme. I'm not sure why that is, I think I loaded the Asus optimized defaults in the BIOS, and maybe those are it. I would set everything to standard, but seeing that the overclock seems stable so far, I'm going to hold on that for now.

So which of these settings are safe to bump up and to how much?

Thanks,

Sebastian

 

[Yuriman]

The way I understand it, heat increases linearly with frequency and exponentially with voltage.

I'm not sure what VCCSA is, but vcore is going to be by far the largest contributor to heat. Some people have reported slightly reduced temperatures by dropping PLL voltage without loss in stability, but it's a small decrease. (I lowered my PLL voltage from 1.85v to 1.50v and only dropped maybe 1-2c tops)

Pick a frequency and see how much voltage you need to get stable at it, and if it's higher than you're comfortable with, drop your target frequency a little and then begin working your voltage down again.

Hopefully others will chime in that are familiar with that particular software.

 

[Idontcare]

Keep your temperature as low as possible - get a better HSF, more fans, use water-cooling, use better thermal paste, etc - and set your Vcore as low as you can while still be stable.

None of the other settings in the BIOS are going to do much to reduce CPU power-consumption without simultaneously reducing the CPU performance.

^ By reducing the operating temperature you reduce the power usage (reduction in static leakage) from the horizontal purple line the declining green line. For my chip at 4.6GHz this reduction in power was around 12% if I did not reduce the voltage at all, just reduced the temperature.

Furthermore, by reducing the operating temperature you also reduce the voltage that is required by the CPU for stable operation at any given clockspeed.

This reduction in the required voltage then goes towards further reducing the power consumption (reduces both leakage and dynamic power), dropping the CPU power consumption from the green line to the red line in the graph above.

^ all told, by reducing the temperature I was able to reduce the voltage needed for stable operation by some 5%, netting a 21% reduction in power consumption by the CPU all because I reduced the operating temperature by some 40°C through a combination of replacing the stock HSF with a lapped H100 and by delidding the IB chip.

Conclusion: To reduce temperature you must reduce voltage and improve cooling, both of which feed back on itself enabling even lower operating temperature because of the reduced leakage.

 

[sebazvideo]

Thanks for the long reply, but I was looking more for a simple advice like which of all those settings in my screenshots are the ones that are important in which ones not so much. I know that Vcore is the most important one when it comes to reduce temperature, and that you need to raise it if you raise the CPU ratio or multiplier, but I'm sure Vcore is not the only important one, and there's some others in there, but I have no idea what they mean.

Like I said, I don't care to buy a new cooler or go through the hassle of water cooling, since I don't want to overclock this CPU for a competition, I want a very stable machine that will last me for years. I just want, if possible, a little extra juice from it without making its life shorter and without sacrificing any stability.

 

[Yuriman]

Basically you're just going to be working with vcore, find a balance between it and operating frequency. None of the other settings will have much of an impact on power usage and temperature.

Lowering your temperatures would go a long way toward dropping power consumption at a given frequency.

EDIT: Just thinking out loud, 2 sticks of DDR3 probably draw somewhere in the range of 5-10w, so even if you cut their power consumption down by 25% (a massive drop) it's going to be a quarter of the effect on total system power draw that you'd get by lowering your CPU 100mhz, and the vcore drop that would allow.

 

[moonbogg]

Thanks for the long reply, but I was looking more for a simple advice like which of all those settings in my screenshots are the ones that are important in which ones not so much. I know that Vcore is the most important one when it comes to reduce temperature, and that you need to raise it if you raise the CPU ratio or multiplier, but I'm sure Vcore is not the only important one, and there's some others in there, but I have no idea what they mean.

Like I said, I don't care to buy a new cooler or go through the hassle of water cooling, since I don't want to overclock this CPU for a competition, I want a very stable machine that will last me for years. I just want, if possible, a little extra juice from it without making its life shorter and without sacrificing any stability.

I did what you want to do. Slide all that crap to the far left and select standard for everything. Nothing has to be on "high" or even "medium". I got mine to 4.3 with everything set to standard, or the lowest setting possible for all that voltage control garbage. Leave CPU voltage on offset/auto.

 

[Gryz]

I have a i5-3570K with an ASRock Extreme4 Z77 motherboard.
I wanted to overclock it a bit, but just like you, without increasing heat and noise too much. And with a minimal amount of changes to the default settings.

So I changed 2 settings:

1) I wanted to make sure the motherboard would not increase voltage by itself. I looked at a number of voltage settings. But I couldn't figure out what they all meant exactly. So I picked an option that I thought that would be pretty safe.
I set the "voltage offset" to the smallest possible value: "-0.005V".
My reasoning is that if the voltage is set in "offset mode" then the motherboard would most likely behave like it always did before. Just with slightly lower voltage. I could also have set it to "+0.005V" I guess. There was no way to set it to "offset 0".

2) And the other thing I changed was the frequency multiplier. The default was 34x (34x 100MHz = 3.4GHz). I did increased it to 36x and then tested it with Prime95 and IBT. I iterated a few times. And then I got to a frequency multiplier of 40x (= 4GHz). IBT showed problems at 42x, so I stopped at 4.0GHz.

While testing, I kept an eye on voltage (with GPU-Z) and temperatures (with CPUID HWMonitor). It looks like the voltage indeed is slightly lower than it was before. And temperatures (and fan-speeds) have hardly increased. So I am happy. I got from 3.4GHz to 4.0GHz. While changing only 2 settings. And with hardly any change in temperature and noise. Maybe with a lot of tweaking I can get to 4.4GHz. But I am not sure that will be worth the hassle.
Hope this helps.

 

[Idontcare]

Thanks for the long reply, but I was looking more for a simple advice like which of all those settings in my screenshots are the ones that are important in which ones not so much. I know that Vcore is the most important one when it comes to reduce temperature, and that you need to raise it if you raise the CPU ratio or multiplier, but I'm sure Vcore is not the only important one, and there's some others in there, but I have no idea what they mean.

Like I said, I don't care to buy a new cooler or go through the hassle of water cooling, since I don't want to overclock this CPU for a competition, I want a very stable machine that will last me for years. I just want, if possible, a little extra juice from it without making its life shorter and without sacrificing any stability.

Ah, understood.

In the second screenshot you can see that some settings are on High and Extreme. I'm not sure why that is, I think I loaded the Asus optimized defaults in the BIOS, and maybe those are it. I would set everything to standard, but seeing that the overclock seems stable so far, I'm going to hold on that for now.

ASUS "optimized" bios settings set the phase control to extreme which prevents a lot of the power-saving features of the CPU from functioning correctly.

Anywhere you see the menu option for "Phase Control" you want to make sure the slider bar is set to one tick below "extreme". It will usually say either "optimized" or "75%" when you set it one tick below Extreme.

You will see lower temps and more power savings if you do that.

(this advice also applies to everything labeled "load line calibration" or "LLC"...ASUS will default them to "extreme" but you want to set them to one tick below extreme.)