Gadgetory

welcome to my Devil's Canyon and Pentium anniversary edition overclocking guide now the drawbacks of overclocking your CPU are many overclockable hardware is more expensive if it's done incorrectly it can cause your computer to blue screen or otherwise be unstable it makes your PC consume more power and output more heat it can make your processor not last as long it voids the warranty on any components and finally doing it right can be downright time-consuming so why do we do it because we want to go fast now before we get into this guide when it comes to running things beyond their specifications I don't think I have to spell out that nothing is guaranteed so with that out of the way let's get into the parts we're using for our guide today for the CPU we actually have two different choices the first it's a 4790k which is a quad-core with hyper-threading clocked at a little faster than the older 4770k from our last overclocking guide at 4 gigahertz base and up to 4 point 4 gigahertz boost it features an upgraded thermal solution for cooler temperatures versus its older brother and due to refinements in Intel's chip selection process promises more consistent overclocking results a fine choice oh and like its predecessor it's a K series SKU which means it's unlocked in overclocking ready which leads us into our second CPU the pentium g 32:58 anniversary edition this chip is truly remarkable it's not the fanciest thing in the world with no hyper threading only two processing cores and a mere 3.2 gigahertz stock clock speed but it's unlocked which means maybe a massive overclocking potential for cooling we're using a corsair h 100 liquid cooler i recommend a good tower air cooler or a dual fan all in one liquid cooler for the best overclocking results for our power supply we've gone with the corsair ax 850 we could have gone overkill with the latest ax 1500 i but getting a great overclock is not about having a high wattage power supply as much as it's about having a good quality one with stable rails and very little ripple so this one will be ok the ax 1500 i would have been better but this one will be fine speaking of overkill we've gone slightly or kill on the motherboard with a Z 97 WS from a soos both Luke and I are very fond of WS series boards they're just so dependable and easy to work with they offer great compatibility with other components amazing build quality while they lack some of the fancy extras that rog or tough series boards might have they've got it where it counts and they'll overclock with the best of them these days the motherboard actually doesn't affect overclocking results much unless you're pushing things to the limits with exotic cooling anyway so as long as you pick and a soos motherboard you should be able to follow along with our guide exactly we have other brand motherboards having similar options with just a little bit more digging required on your part to match up the stuff we're changing to what it looks like on the other board finally for memory we're using an 8 gig kit of 20 400 megahertz g.skill memory high speed memory isn't a huge deal these days but how much less expensive it's gotten lately compared to standard 1600 megahertz stuff and how easy it is to dial in at high frequencies with XMP profiles we figured what the heck it's optional but we'll show it to you anyway ok line is enough preamble how do i overclock step 1 don't overclock start by updating your BIOS and drivers running a stress test for an hour or two doing at least a couple passes of mem test 86 and playing games for a couple of hours to ensure that things are functioning correctly out of the box after all you wouldn't take a new card on a track and try to go 200 kilometers an hour in it until you made sure it can stay in a straight line going 60 clicks right step 2 gather your software toolkit while I mentioned I'm test 86 already you're going to want a couple of other things in your bag of tricks for stress testing cpu-z lets you see how your processor is running so you can verify your settings and core templates you monitor your CPUs temperatures in real time to see if they're getting out of hand if you want an all-in-one utility and a nice user friendly package I 264 gets a solid recommendation from us it's what we use and it includes monitoring stress testing and diagnostic stuff but it does cost money everything else I mentioned is free step 3 set aside the time to do it properly be prepared to have your system not be usable for a day or two if you want to correctly dial in an overclock I'm not saying it will take that long I'm just saying it can take that long especially if you're a real stickler about validation I've seen stress testing programs fail after even a full day of burnin and my personal standard is that if it's not a hundred percent stable I'd rather turn it down a little rather than risk losing valuable work and data so I typically validate for 24 hours or more step four the tour of the UEFI BIOS on most motherboards pressing delete will land you in the you fi BIOS if you're not sure about your motherboard consult the manual a soos drops you into a simplified UEFI by default that gives you all the basic info you need like temperatures and lets you adjust your fan speeds change boot order and enable your memories X and P profiles but doesn't really allow for any serious tuning press f7 to get to Advanced Mode most modern motherboard BIOS does have a ton of features that we didn't have in the old days you can navigate through the menus manually or you can create your own favorites menu with the settings that you use most frequently you can make quick notes as you progress through your overclock and review them later you can save profiles for known good settings so it's easy to revert to something that works when you're done experimenting and you can even have the motherboard take care of overclocking for you on its own we're going to experiment with that feature later on to see how close it can get to the performance of our manual overclock now if you want a bit of a deeper rundown of every setting things actually haven't changed a lot since our last has well overclocking guide in this guide we're going to leave most of the dials on auto and explain only the ones that we're changing as we go let's jump into the AI Tweaker heading where most of this stuff is found now most enthusiasts grade memory these days has an XMPP profile and if you set this setting to XMP it will dial in into its optimal settings you can push memory past it's rated speeds but because of how difficult memory and stability is to diagnose I really don't recommend doing it unless you have a lot of patience moving on down the CPU core ratio is where most of the magic happens this ratio times the base clock locked at 100 megahertz for all intents and purposes is how the processors final frequency is derived as for the settings here sync all cores is faster and easier to dial in because it run every pore at the same speed which is easy to stress test but setting up different maximum turbos depending on how many cores are active could yield slightly better results in dual or single threaded applications we're going to stick with single cores next up is the CPU core voltage increasing core voltage improves CPU stability at higher clock speeds but higher voltages are also the main reason that overclocking causes higher temperatures and a shorter life span for your processor now there are actually several ways to set CPU voltage we're going to use manual voltage the generally regarded as pretty safe voltage being one point three bolts for Haswell base cps to find our max overclock then to save power we're going to switch to adaptive later on adaptive gives us better power consumption characteristics from the computer is not working hard and ramps up whenever the CPU needs more juice but it's not good for stress testing when you're actually validating the overclock because certain stability testing applications can cause voltage spikes that can hurt your CPU in adaptive mode so now that we're familiar with the settings that will be running it's time to overclock we're going to start by leaving our CPU at stock voltage so 1.25 volts this is different from Auto which will actually scale voltage as you increase your frequencies thanks to the same bios wizardry that will automatically be handling all the other settings in here that we didn't cover then we're going to turn all of our cores multiplier up a little bit let's say 244 which would give us a speed of 4 point 4 gigahertz actually equal to what turbo boost will do on its own but let's just see if it can do it all the time so now we press f10 to save our settings boot into Windows and do some stability testing if the CPU passes a short let's say 5 to 10 minute stress test and temperatures are within your comfort zone remember higher temp equal shorter CPU lifespan then we move back into the BIOS and push it some more if it fails then we add a bit more voltage and see if that makes it stable it's important to go through this process to find out where you're needing to crank up the voltage a lot for a very small CPU frequency return that's the way to find the balance between the longevity of your chip and the extra performance that you crave another thing to consider is the conditions in which you're overclocking is it optimal is it the worst case scenario overclock that you set up in the winter might not work correctly in the summer so leave yourself some buffer room or save a couple of other profiles that work in case you need to grab one of them when the weather heats up another thing to consider if you're working on other more advanced settings within the bios let's say you want to do some tuning to the RAM timings is to throw another step into the routine not everything you tweak will have a positive result so run a short benchmark rather than just a stability test to see if what you're doing is actually helping or hindering performance once you've dialed in your overclock using manual voltage switch over to adaptive then use a real-world stress test like Cinebench to validate your load voltage I found that just doing the math and keying in the same number actually didn't work so I used a I suite to make sure the voltages were right and even though the software voltage readouts are typically not very accurate the system was stable and my load temps were similar once I turn things up a little bit more so it seemed to work a digital multimeter would actually be preferable if your board has voltage check points though that's a great feature for overclockers unfortunately not found on WS boards so following this methodology we achieved a 4.8 gigahertz on our 4790k at 1.3 volts with a load CPU temperature of around 65 degrees and rock-solid stability and want four point seven gigahertz on our G 32:58 at one point three six five volts with a load CPU temperature of 49 degrees I gave the Pentium about 0.06 5 volts more than the typical best practice setting for Haswell for a couple of reasons number one is that temperatures were still great since it's a dual core and doesn't output much heat and number two is that as a $75 chip I'm a little bit more willing to live on the wild side with it both of these results are going to turn into some significant real-world performance improvements but by now you might be saying they're kind of going well Linus this is all fine and good but ain't nobody got time for that is there another way well actually there are two other ways that I alluded to before to overclock on an asus motherboard number one is to simply navigate to the easy tuning wizard in the bios answer a couple short questions about your setup and let the bore apply one of the pre-done profiles that a Souza's engineers have cooked up this resulted in a lower more conservative overclocks at higher temperatures for both of our chips temps were still reasonable at only a couple of more degrees on both CPUs but it's just plain not as good as a manual overclock the second alternative way is to use a CSIS AI suite software's 5 way optimization feature to have the board overclock itself it actually goes through much the same increased speed until unstable then increased voltage until stable rinse and repeat process that we did except it does it completely on its own and it actually works reasonably well the automated system ended up a hundred megahertz slower on my 4790k and one hundred megahertz faster on my D 32:58 with the only issue being that in both cases it was applying more voltage than I was really comfortable with and since I'd already tested the system and found it to be stable with less voltage it seems like a soos was overdoing it a bit in both cases not a huge deal if you just want a quick and dirty overclock since it can dial it in in about 10 minutes and you don't even need to touch it and they were both stable it's just not the proper way to do things either and that pretty much wraps it up thanks for checking out this overclocking guide if this answered your questions then happy overclocking if it didn't and you still want some one-on-one help try the CPU section of the Linus tech tips form our community is full of helpful individuals and I'm sure one of our knowledgeable members would be happy to help you and I think that's pretty much it thanks to Intel for sponsoring this overclocking guide thanks to you for watching like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment with any funny overclocking stories you might have and as always don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips for more videos just like this one if you haven't already alright and there's a support us link in the video description you can give us a monthly contribution change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code and you can buy a cool t-shirt just like this one 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