Gadgetory

ever since our core i9 review we've been planning to do an X $2.99 overclocking guide but at that time the whole lineup hadn't even been launched yet so fast forward to today we've finally got our 18 core chips and get this Intel wanted to sponsor an overclocking guide so we were like heck yeah let's do it okay so if you're in a hurry to squeeze a little more performance out of your system you could just Ronnie Seuss's easy tuning wizard or the equivalent from your motherboard manufacturer but you're here watching so my guess is you want more so then first order of business is component selection you're going to want to choose a motherboard that can handle the juice that your hike or count CPU will need pick one with two EPs 12 volt connectors to spread the current out over more wires like the asus prime x2 99 deluxe or even a rampage series board and a high quality power delivery system with good cooling without robust VRMs and adequate ventilation you should not attempt x2 99 overclocking and this is especially true for the power-hungry Extreme Edition which brings us to the next item on our shopping list the power supply you won't need to harness the power of the atom but core I 9 HCC chips alone can pull as much power as an entire mainstream gaming system when overclocked up to 500 Watts off the 12 volt rail so most 850 watt 80 plus gold and higher units will do you nicely but double check with a power supply calculator for your setup and the continuous load table before you buy I would actually even start at a thousand red with an 850 watts for a 14 core or higher next up then is cooling you'll want a lot of it from our review the core I 9 series gets pretty toasty under load even at stock speed so whether you choose to get adventurous and replace the thermal compound under the heat spreader via the method that we showed off here or decide to keep your warranty more intact we recommend at least a two hundred eighty millimeter AIO like the corsair h 115 i or a large air cooler knock to as NHD 15 and for the first time in years actually a custom water cooling loop is actually highly recommended for the best results as for the rest of the components higher spec Ram wouldn't be a terrible idea but it should be noted that in most cases it doesn't affect performance too much beyond 3000 megahertz and the rest pretty much comes down to personal taste and the goal of your build your SSD or your graphics card won't affect your ability to overclock unless they get lodged in your cooling fan okay then so you've got your build put together and a fresh install of the OS of your choice time to get down to business we still prefer using the BIOS over tools like Intel's surprisingly versatile extreme tuning utility in Windows cuz we're old-school like that so first off XMP if you spent a few bucks on fancy Ram you'll probably want this on but if you run into stability issues turn it off then let us know in the comments if you'd like a separate video down the line discussing tuning ram frequency and timings manually next weather XMP is off or on you'll need to disable CPU s vid support and speed step which prevents the CPU from communicating with the external voltage regulator and from down clocking to save power while idle once you've finished with that find where your UEFI BIOS keeps its power control options listed on our Asus board as external DIGI+ power control we are interested in a few items in here for a load line calibration start out with a lower value like two or three this provides extra voltage so that as the CPU goes from zero to a hundred when you fire up a demanding load it doesn't wind up starved for power momentarily causing an error it should be noted though that this setting can exacerbate the thermal issue there is a reason why it's off by default CPU current capability should then be set to a hundred and forty percent which will allow more power to be supplied to the CPU you this prevents a difficult to diagnose condition known as vrm throttling then spread-spectrum should be disabled for stability and cpu power phase control should be set first to extreme and then dialed back if possible once you've found a stable clock speed that you like your final stop sort of overclocking can be a bit of a rabbit hole is CPU core ratio which we recommend changing to by specific core which allows you to specify ratios and voltages for each individual core along with an asterisk here that denotes the higher tolerance turbo boost max cores so 4.2 gigahertz is the non max single core turbo speed for the 7900 X so we'll use this as a starting point tweak the multiplier higher rebooting in between each set until you reach an unstable level where the system won't boot then you've got a couple of choices you can either bump the voltage up and see if you get stability we chatted with our friends over at gamers Nexus they figure about 1.25 volts on decent water cooling is a about as high as you want to go or you can drop back to the last stable setting or to be safe one and permit lower and try it again now those asterisk scores those can clock higher with lower voltage so be sure to take this into consideration while you're tuning the more you can control the heat output of your chip the better your results and the lower the voltage the less heat speaking of you may actually not need or want to add much voltage if you can help it unless you've got a custom loop in some cases like our asus board using offsets will actually offset from the auto voltage meaning that you might even want to push them negative depending on the readings that you get remember guys even small incremental bumps and voltage count for a lot when we're talking about up to 18 cores though the can be alleviated somewhat by using what's called an AV X offset which down clocks the CPU by a set amount when running complex a VX enabled workloads so a Souza's bio shows the a VX frequency separately so you can actually see the offsets results alright then so if all goes well you've got some settings dialed in that will work for your CPU here's what we're using if not clear the C millicent try again until you do now it's time for burnin testing now the traditional wisdom says to run a full system load like prime95 for 24 hours to validate your overclock make sure your CPU is not going to spit out any calculations that aren't correct but while that's a good idea and we would still recommend it we've seen a lot of situations where even a 24-hour pass doesn't mean it's fully stable the real test for us lately has been in heavy start/stop loads we've actually caught more stability failures using the 3d modeling software blender which hits the CPU hard across all course so there are free scenes that can be used to benchmark and passing longer ones like the classroom Barcelona pavilion or the gooseberry production benchmark tends to be the final pass for us now if you're working on this and you feel like you're close but you're not quite stable you can maybe try increasing your CPU input voltage starting at about 450 millivolts above your core voltages it can help you can also try boosting the system agent voltage and bringing VCC i/o up to within 50 millivolts of it to account for variance in CPU memory controllers especially if you're using XMP or overclocking your RAM once everything's stable and you're comfortable with your thermals which you can monitor using a free tool like hardware info 64 you've got a few options you can increase the clocks and rinse and repeat go through this whole process again you can just stick with what you have or for the adventurous you can actually start trying to reduce CPU core voltages re-enable power say features and reduce voltages for the uncor PLL and vc cio to help tame the heat output then validated all over again it is a long process if you really want to get it dialed in perfectly but once you've done so you'll be left with a nice performance bump over the stock configuration in our case we managed some good gains in clock Hungary gaming and our already good productivity performances unsurprisingly even better which means you can get your work done faster and get back to ponen noobs all without ever leaving the comfort of the glow of your battle station so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there we've got cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum which you should totally join