8700K OC Adventure

Hello to everyone,

I hope we are all well,

I finally have my chip and obviously want to see what it is capable of, I have not done any CPU OC'ing before and and unfamiliar with VCCSA/VCCIO and things like how cache/BCLK/FCLK and cache/memory and all these things interact with each other. I understand simple OC'ing and raising clocks as I've read OC'ing guides and stuff on chips before, but never done any myself. I will be reading up on it all now that I have my chip and understand what you can tinker with and find out where the performance in your silicon lies.

My goal is to tinker and understand this stuff more for future experience, but ultimately once I find the limit of my clock I want to create 3 profiles:

1. for synthetic benching and simply pushing as high a score as I can
2. A good workload profile that pushes good performance, but not drawing every inch out of thew chip
3. a Gaming profile that is a good balance of power to performance. Still on 1080p and so I do not need all the frames, I only need to hold 160fps for 144hz and anything comfortable over 60 for SP titles (although this is almost irrelevant except for CPU driven titles, of which I barely play any, if any.)

More than anything I want to have stable temps and clocks, as I know some intel chips tend to spike temps quite hard even at idle.
Note: The cooler and case will change once I receive another PSU and so these temps will target the H105 cooling capacity, then will be moved to a 140/120mm Rad once in the new case.

System specs are as follows:
Sea Sonic 750w snow silent Platinum
MSI Z390I gaming Edge AC
i7 8700K (With H105 on it) - CM MasterGel Pro TP on the chip.
HyperX Fury 2666mhz 16GB
Vega 64 LE
Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ITX

Just off of the top of my head, I am more than happy running at 4.5Ghz as that seems like good power to performance, but I really have now idea what kind of power consumption these chips hit and so will come back to this once I have a better theoretical understanding of what is capable.

Lastly, any benchmarks that I should be running, I know Prime95 and Aida64 are heavy synthetic benches, and wondering if there are any others that are good for testing stable clocks.

TIA <3

Hi Toy Machine

Overclocking is awesome and I'm surprised that you haven't tried overclocking before.

Blender is one of the best applications to test a CPU with.

You are going to be held back by your AIO and RAM though - 2666mhz RAM is slow for a modern system and I'd try overclock it to 3000mhz or as close to that as possible.

The AIO is going to be overwhelmed very quickly as you pump a ton of heat into it and it is unable to dissipate it. The iTX form factor runs hot as is (I had an i7 - 3770 and an Asrock Z77 ITX system) and there's little space for fresh air to remove the heat.

I see your other thread regarding space - what you could end up doing is moving to a mITX chassis in the meantime for space and then replacing the cooler and RAM later on.

RAM wise, nothing under 3200CL16 and AIO wise, nothing under 280mm.

Yeah the RAM should be able to hold 3000mHz+ Fury is a good set of ram, otherwise I'll upgrade it if necessary in a trade, but not just to see a prettier(higher) number in a benchmark, that's meh.

Having a blower style GPU helps with heat in the case and I have 2x 140's pulling through the front and 1x 120 exhausting out the back. AIO on top with 2x 120's pulling into the case. It's IMO the best option for the case to move air through it.

If I go mATX then I'm going Carbide Air 240 so no 280mm option available unless I have adapter brackets made. And the point in going with that case is mainly the dual chamber and fan compatibility options. Not really interested in any of the other cases at this point, except maybe the Lian Li0-11 mITX chassis, that's a beauty, but pricey.

Dipped my toes last night.

Changed nothing but multiplier - x48 & Voltage peaked at 1.18 which I thought was pretty decent, 4.9 needed 1.25v however to stay stable.

Put mem to 1.25v - 2800mHz as it wasn't happy @3000mHz

FCLK is set to 1gHz
Clock @ 4.9gHz but I need to tweak it since temps do peak into the 80's and max core during a stress was 88c so now to tweak little by little and see what it can hold and how low I can get the Voltage whilst staying @ 75c max all cores.

This shouldn't be this fun xD

Edit: Is there a way to set clock speeds to certain loads? I know of adaptive & offset, but would they limit the CPU from spiking unnecessarily when under something like 10% load. No need for a spike into 3gHz+ when browsing the interwebs.

I've got a stable overclock on 5ghz, 1.224v, LLC3, Adaptive. (This is my 24/7 Setting)

Motherboard : MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC
CPU : 8700k
HWInfo Reading : VCore 1.235v (Max)
Cooler : H110
Case : Corsair 750D
CPU-Z VCore Reading : 1.235v
Max Temp While Running Intel Extreme Utility: 82 Degrees
SpeedStep Enabled : Yes (So Downclocks when not fully utilized)
Throttling : None that I could detect or see (Intel Extreme Utility Detects this)

Sirus_the_virus said:

I've got a stable overclock on 5ghz, 1.224v, LLC3, Adaptive. (This is my 24/7 Setting)

Motherboard : MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC
CPU : 8700k
HWInfo Reading : VCore 1.235v (Max)
Cooler : H110
Case : Corsair 750D
CPU-Z VCore Reading : 1.235v
Max Temp While Running Intel Extreme Utility: 82 Degrees
SpeedStep Enabled : Yes (So Downclocks when not fully utilized)
Throttling : None that I could detect or see (Intel Extreme Utility Detects this)

Click to expand...

How did you test stability? / I.e. Did you run Aida64 for 2 days or for 30 mins and call it stable? not really one to do long term stress tests like that for multiple days.

Toy Machine said:

How did you test stability? / I.e. Did you run Aida64 for 2 days or for 30 mins and call it stable? not really one to do long term stress tests like that for multiple days.

Click to expand...

I actually went and got AIDA Sunday night and then ran tests for the last 2 days. On the above OC AIDA failed within 5 minutes (All 4 options Checked in AIDA)

I then upped the Voltage to 1.25v and then ran AIDA Again. Now it was Stable. Max Temp on one core was 93 degrees, all the others were below this, some didn't even hit 90. I ran the test twice for 30 minutes at a time, after each other. Once each day. I also don't believe in running for days at a time because WTF are you going to run for days at a time with this CPU? For that you need a Enterprise Server CPU.

So will post Bios settings later this evening for anybody wanting to try this. I have adjusted 3 more settings besides the ones above as well, but can't remember the names and exact settings. This CPU could go more if it was Delid probably. But for now this is all good for me.

Settings are as follows:

Multiplier - 50x
CPU Ratio - Dynamic (To Downclock when not underload)
AVX - Auto
Ring Ratio - 47
EIST - Enabled
Enhanced Turbo Boost - Enabled (This pushed all cores to 5ghz and not only 1)
Load Line Calibration - 3
CPU Core Voltage Mode - Adaptive
CPU Core Volt - 1.250
CPU SA Voltage - 1.130
CPU IO Voltage - 1.080
CPU PLL OC Voltages - 1.1150

The above settings are 5ghz stable 24/7.

Sirus_the_virus said:

Settings are as follows:

Multiplier - 50x
CPU Ratio - Dynamic (To Downclock when not underload)
AVX - Auto
Ring Ratio - 47
EIST - Enabled
Enhanced Turbo Boost - Enabled (This pushed all cores to 5ghz and not only 1)
Load Line Calibration - 3
CPU Core Voltage Mode - Adaptive
CPU Core Volt - 1.250
CPU SA Voltage - 1.130
CPU IO Voltage - 1.080
CPU PLL OC Voltages - 1.1150

The above settings are 5ghz stable 24/7.

Click to expand...

So I got 5ghz to run for Cinebench R15, but Intel burn test doesn't hold nor does prime95.

Multiplier - 50x
CPU Ratio - Fixed
AVX - -5
Ring Ratio - 42
EIST - Disabled
Enhanced Turbo Boost - don't know
Load Line Calibration - don't know
CPU Core Voltage Mode -Override
CPU Core Volt - 1.280
CPU SA Voltage - Auto (1.2v)
CPU IO Voltage - Auto (1.2v)
CPU PLL OC Voltages - Auto

FCLK - 1ghz

Edit: Tried your settings and getting around the same results, doesn't survive burn test.
Even though CPU ratio is on adapative. I'm staying on 5ghz all core constantly, might be windows power plan though. (it was this)

XMP disbled and @ 3200mHz 1.3v on the RAM. Haven't messed with timings (Vengeance LPX CL14)

^^ up to 1.35v oholding Prim95 stable. Thermal throttles after 3-5minutes, but it is no longer crashes. 5gHz all core achieved(prelimnarily)

5/5.1ghz! FOKKEN MOOI MAN.

This is only short 3-5 minute test before throttling kicks in and frequency fluctuates. Not optimal airflow(but sufficient, more than enough) and holding the stress test (Intel burn test successful too) is not too bad at all 😅

I had some fun with this, thank you for chipping in 🙏