Overclocking (Main Thread)

Yeah, my Z68 Extreme 4 is also throwing out way too much voltage -.- I managed to lock it at 4GHz with 1.170v right now by using that +0.031v offset. If I just leave it on auto and bump the multiplier up to 40, the voltage spikes all the way to 1.38V, and then the temperatures start getting pretty abnormal.
When you guys run your Prime95 tests, is it best to use that middle Large FFTs test? That's the one that really pushes the cores to their max temps, I guess.

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=2030182 This looks alright to me... though the temperature is sitting around 67C :/

Is 67 degrees normal for stock settings? I guess so. My Mugen 2 is hitting 50-56 degrees on the cores, while the CPU itself stays somewhere between 50 and 52 °C

Rock loves playing with fire when it comes to overclocking processors. 😁

For some benchmarks:

small fft - just the CPU
large fft - both the CPU and the RAM
blend - mostly the RAM

copperhawk19, seriously—either grab a decent cooler or dial back the overclocking. Don't go frying your chip for no reason.

I suspect that's how it will play out. By dropping the voltage further, I managed to stabilize my temperatures at around 65-66°C—the first core sits at about 62-63, while the second one stays at 65-66.
That's running at 1.160V with a +0.031V offset (sorry, I guess I'm still a bit shaky on all this overclocking terminology :P),
and just a heads-up for anyone looking at buying a Rock—so many people are running into this exact same issue and there still isn't a fix. Honestly, I'm surprised I didn't see a warning about this in any of the reviews.
http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/4...-received.html
plus those 0x00101 BSODs.

My older PC started doing this two days ago... even when everything is set to default, I'm averaging about two or three blue screens a day. It's a total mess. The irony, I suppose, is that while I have it overclocked, I haven't seen a single blue screen.
If you don't believe me, feel free to tell me that a missing pin wouldn't cause any issues.😍

Man, what a thread. 😁 On my rig, I managed to hit these stable voltages:

4.0 GHz - 1.21
4.2 GHz - 1.25
4.5 GHz - 1.31
4.7 GHz - 1.34
5.0 GHz - 1.38

I didn't push it any further—didn't really feel like risking a total meltdown or some other kind of disaster.

Didn't want to clutter things up with a new thread, so I'll just drop this here;

I've got an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX in a high-end rig (was running a 4890 before this)

I need to know what the deal is when picking up a second card for SLI. Does it have to be from the same manufacturer? And does it matter if the VRAM capacity isn't identical?

Also... how does overclocking work with SLI? Is there a way to set individual profiles for each card within the Control Center?

Look, you’ve gotta make sure the cards are from the exact same series—the manufacturer doesn't matter, obviously—but you can pair an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX with any other 88xx model, just don't try pairing it with something like a 7xxx series. As for the memory and GPU clock speeds? Well, if you decide to mix and match different cards, the whole system is basically going to throttle down to the level of whichever card is the weakest link. Like, if you try to pair a 512 MB card with a 1 GB one, both cards are just going to settle for 512 MB each. Honestly, it's way better to just stick with identical cards.

Hey there, just had a quick question for anyone who might know the answer. 😬
In my laptop, I've got an Intel Core i3-330M (1.90 GHz / 2.50 GHz Hyper-Threading). When I check the system properties, it shows it's running at 1.90 GHz. Does that 2.50 figure mean I can overclock it up to 2.50? To be specific, I'm using a Dell Latitude 3540

Yeah, Hyper-Threading just kicks in whenever it needs to—you don't actually have to go messing around with any settings yourself.

What kind of clock speeds are you guys running for 24/7 stability on an i7-2600K? Also, what's the highest temp you’re seeing when hitting it with Prime95?

Thanks.

The temperature shouldn't be crossing that 70 mark.

Benjamin King2 said:The temperature shouldn't be climbing past 70.

What kind of rig are you running for your day-to-day stuff? I noticed you’ve got quite a few "junkers" lying around just like me, so I figured you’ve seen some things. Personally, I’ve been messing around with this tech since 1980. I’ve survived everything from those old MRX and VAX systems to RISC architectures, and even those heavy-duty IBM machines—the 2000 dark series and the 7000s. I remember back in the day actually having to load software using punched cards 😂 then eventually moving up to a server that weighed a literal ton and had maybe 64k of virtual RAM, which was such a joy at the time 🤣. Man... the years just fly by. About 6 or 7 years ago, we had a 400MB hard drive delivered to us via a literal delivery truck, and the thing weighed about the same amount. It was a total marvel. There were five of us just hauling it inside. When we finally hooked it up and it wouldn't even spin up... well, you can imagine the comments we got when we had to lug that thing right back out to the truck for decommissioning. Nowadays, everything at my job is just these lightweight, slim Dell servers everywhere and tiny hot-swap drives...

What, you running a museum for old PCs over there? 😁
Don't go comparing this to those fried circuit boards... you're a bit older than I am—I was already messing around with the Spectrum back in the early 80s.

I've got an i5-2500K sitting at my place.

Benjamin King2 said:What, you running some kind of computer museum over there? 😁
Don't try to lecture me about busted cards... you’re probably a bit older than I am, honestly. I was messing around with a Spectrum back in the early 80s.

I've got an i5-2500K at home.

😂

What's the overclock on that i5 looking like, and what kind of temps are we talking? I finally finished the build after listening to your advice—just went with a single SSD this time. Got the clock set to 4.5 and now I just need to tweak a few things in the BIOS. Then I can actually start playing games, surfing the web, and watching movies instead of spending all my time building and tinkering. It's been going on for ten days straight now, and honestly, just finding a decent case and an SSD was half the battle. 🙂)

You make a good point about the drive. Even on my old rig, the disk score is sitting at 7.9 😂 while the memory, CPU, and 3D scores are all right there at 7.9 too.

Clockan is sitting at 4.5 GHz—that’s with all four cores pinned at 100% load.

60 degrees is actually pretty chill for that clock speed. Wather? Personally, my cores hit about 70 degrees when I run Prime95 at 4.5, so I’m thinking about dropping down to 4.3 and hoping I can stay under that 60 mark. 🤷

I know this is an Overclock forum, but let's be real, this question fits right in here too. What's your go-to recommendation for an SSD? My RAID setup is running on AHCI, so what should I be doing to really optimize things? On my other rig I've got plenty of RAM, but I'm stuck with just 8GB on this one—should I go ahead and disable the pagefile here? I've already turned off hibernation, standby, defragmentation, and disk spin-down.

What exactly is Wather? 😕

I went ahead and moved my page file over to the mechanical drive—honestly, my page file usage is basically nonexistent anyway, and I didn't feel like letting it hog precious space on my SSD for no reason.

The 955 Black Edition—it can basically be overclocked just by cranking up the multiplier, right? Nothing else required? I’m wondering if most people can hit 3.8GHz while sticking to stock voltage. What do you all think about pushing it that hard on this specific board, considering it's a budget option with a meager 4+1 phase VRM setup Look, my goal is to reach 3.8GHz using nothing but the multiplier adjustment. Is that actually feasible, and am I going to absolutely murder this motherboard by asking for that kind of clock speed?

That’s a stretch—we're talking about a 125W processor here, so I seriously doubt you'll break past 3.5 GHz on stock voltage. Plus, the motherboard doesn't even feature Load Line Calibration, which means you should probably brace yourself for some massive vdrop and messy overvolting—you'll really need to keep a close eye on those voltages if you don't want to fry something.

Would it be a smarter move to just drop in an Intel Core i5-2500K—which is technically about 5% slower since it lacks that L3 cache—just because it’s $33 cheaper, pulls 95W, and lets me stop obsessing over overclocking altogether?

And, one more thing. I was told that AMD processors usually cap out at 1333MHz memory, yet I went ahead and bought 1600MHz modules, and my motherboard actually supports 1600. If I set them to 1600, does that even count as overclocking, or am I just... what?