Gadgetory

so there's been plenty of buzz about Intel's new skylake processors and now they're finally here which means it's time for an overclocking guide so today will not only be running through the benefits and risks of overclocking as usual we'll also be showing you some new features of the skylake platform that could make fine-tuning your shiny new rig a little bit easier than ever before you so first off we need to answer that question new PC builders and even some experienced ones have been asking themselves since time immemorial what the heck is overclocking and why do we want to do it well the idea behind overclocking is pretty simple it's just the process of tuning your hardware to make it run faster than its original specification many parts of a system can be overclocked including the CPU video card rant and even your monitor but the most common target for people who want to tinker is the CPU and that's we'll be focusing on today but keep in mind guys that overclocking isn't just a matter of cranking up a virtual vial and expecting everything to automatically run smoothly there are some possible drawbacks more power consumption and heat output system instability a shortening of the lifespan of your process or even but while there are never any guarantees with overclocking the benefits are that it can substantially improve your computer's performance particularly in CPU bound programs which can include everything from image and video editing software to demanding video games some of which are actually relatively CPU bound and can see real performance gains from a faster CPU with all that said then let's get down to it today we're going to be looking at intel's all-new core i7 6700 k skylake processor running at a four gigahertz stock speed with a turbo boost clock of up to 4.2 gigahertz and like other LGA 1150 whatever core i7s the 6700 K has four physical cores and eight threads with hyper-threading you also get the standard complement of PCI Express Lanes so you got sixteen either sixteen individually or 8x8 X for your graphics cards and then four more that go through the new version of intel's direct media interface DMI 3.0 that links the CPU to the chipset at around four gigabytes per second twice the speed of the last few chipset generations but there are a few really special things about skylake that should be very enticing to both novice and advanced overclockers first of all early tests suggest that skylake provides a much more distant overclocking experience then has well which had a reputation for varying greatly from chip to chip so while obviously not every skylake chip will be exactly the same it looks like you may not need to worry as much about losing the silicon lottery as you did in the past second sky lik offers a much more flexibility with a key setting that can let you hit very specific frequencies I'm talking of course about the processor base clock in the past the base clock affected the speed not only of the CPU but of other system buses like SATA and PCI Express which could lead to data loss from your storage devices when overclocked by more than even a couple of megahertz not a worthwhile trade-off for a slightly faster SuperPi time well not so with skylake if you're feeling particularly daring you'll have much more flexibility to play around with the base clock to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your system more on that later third power efficiency has been much improved to the point that higher overclock should now be possible without investing in a super expensive motherboard in the past enthusiasts would you know lust after boards with 8 12 or even 16 power phases what do to skylights low power consumption a good motherboard with this few as four phases can give you a great overclock meaning that you won't have to shell out tons of money for the beefiest motherboard you can buy instead focusing on buying one that has the right features for you things like onboard Wi-Fi for example so with that out of the way let's jump into it and have a look at the rest of our test setup remember that skylake primarily supports ddr4 Ram so we're using 16 gigs of a data xpg ddr4 memory running at 2400 megahertz with a mere 1.2 volts our CPU and RAM are sitting on the Asus e170 deluxe and although it might lack some of the eye-popping bells and whistles of the rog series boards the deluxe packs plenty of features some even designed specifically for overclocking like a dedicated water-pump header for total control over your CPU cooling and the ability to completely customize the speeds of both your DC and PWM fans with export in the BIOS including a new setting that prevents rapid fan speed changes which can be distracting mm-hmm and for those of you who like a little more flash you can also use the adjustable RGB lighting on the chipset cooler that can even change in real time according to CPU temperatures or whatever music is playing in your PC there's also like key Express which allows you to assign macro functionality to normal Keys on a standard keyboard was just kind of neat and yeah I guess that's pretty much it solid board rounding out our test setup we used a cooler master Neptune to ADL closed-loop cooler with dual 140 millimeter fans to keep our shiny new CPU from overheating when we're pumping the juice through it and then finally a cooler master v6 50 power supply rated at 80 plus gold efficiency and featuring us on the modular power supplied so let's get started power on your rig and start spamming either delete or f2 to get into the Zeus UEFI BIOS the settings that you'll be working with are in Advanced Mode which you can get to easily by hitting f7 immediately once you're there select AI Tweaker at the top of the screen to bring up a buttload of settings related to overclocking go ahead and dial in XMP so that your RAM will run at its rated speed and voltage then have a look at the CPU core ratio this setting controls the CPU multiplier which is the most straightforward way to overclock although it only works on unlocked that is K or extreme edition processors on the intel side and it's usually the safest your cpu speed is actually the result of multiplying its base clock which is typically 100 by default by a multiplier so for example our CPU runs at 4 gigahertz in stock with a 100 megahertz base clock and a default multiplier of 40 for the skylake core i7 i recommend starting at 4.5 gigahertz and working your way up so for now select sync all course to make sure that all of your processing cores are running at the same speed you can also assign different numbers per core later but it's harder to stress test and only really improves performance in programs that use one or two cores it's kind of like customized turbo boost alright so once you've keyed in the multiplier that you want scroll down to CPU core voltage and switch it over to manual mode for stress testing an overclocked manual mode allows your CPU to run at near constant voltage but once you've validated your overclock a popular choice is to set it to adaptive mode for everyday use so that you're not running the full voltage through the CPU when it's just idling which can reduce its lifespan although most processors are capable of slight overclocks on stock voltage any serious overclocking will require you to give the CPU a little bit more juice or voltage our i7 shipped with a stock bullet of around 1.2 volts but your mileage may vary on that one so have a look at what it runs at stock but then regardless of that overclocking voltages should be somewhere in the 1.2 to 1.4 range I would keep it below 1.4 for wouldn't go much higher than about 1.4 2 volts so key in the voltage you want to start with and press Enter when you're all done save your settings and boot into Windows from there you can bring up the stress testing applications of your choice so here at the office we use a Sioux Cesaro G real bench and I 264 for CPU validation I 264 also allows real-time monitoring of CPU voltages and temperatures which is why you want to keep those voltages as low as you can while retaining stability because the higher the voltage the higher the temperature and while real bench is free I 264 is not after the trial so programs like HW monitor and CPU Z are good no cost alternatives to keep an eye on numbers during your testing after you've got your software up and running run a stress test for about 15 minutes and watch for any system instability this will come in the form of blue screens of death random shutdowns freezes or sometimes your testing program actually just telling you hey your system is unstable and if none of those things happen congratulations go back into the BIOS and try pushing the multiplier up a little bit further if your system did crash though try giving your CPU a little more voltage being sure not to push it outside of a safe range once you get the multiplier as high as it can go while maintaining a reasonable core voltage of course go ahead and run a longer stress test to ensure stability over the long I mean you don't want to decide everything is okay after a few minutes only to have your PC crashed during a crucial moment two weeks later it's also a good idea to use more than one program for validation we've had over clocks pass stress tests in I 264 but then crash within a minute or two in real bench which can be it can stress in different parts of the CPU differently a good approach is to stress test on real bench for at least four hours then I'd say do at least a 24 hour validation on Ida 64 or another program if you'd like so don't plan on using your PC for a while quick note though a lot of people still use prime95 for stress testing we don't recommend the newer versions of it there are actually power viruses which are programs that can push so hard that you can actually damage your hardware so keep an eye on that now other things to keep an eye on temperatures I have alluded to this but I haven't really given a solid guideline for me personally the comfort zone is anywhere from the 80 to 85 degree mark once you start getting there the long-term lifespan of your chip can be affected so that's why investing in a quality CPU heatsink is so important for overclocking now although we're using a 280 millimeter radiator all in one you can actually get just as good results a lot of the time with a large air cooler just make sure that you're not using like the Box heatsink or something like that I mean maybe that's why they stopped including them with k-series overclockable chips outright so results time using this procedure we were able to achieve a rock-solid overclock of 0.7 gigahertz using 1.3 to 5 volts under load our maximum temperature stayed around 75 degrees Celsius and our test system drew around 330 watts from the wall during real bench's stress test but even if you get good you know clock speed numbers like we did it's a good idea to run some real world style benchmarks as well and not just stress test programs like Cinebench pc mark or even your favorite games can be very useful for determining a if the system really is stable like really really and also how much performance you even gained with your overclock if everything looks good but you want to tweak your speeds a little bit more tuning your base clock might be the way to go as I mentioned earlier with skylake you now have the freedom to tune your base clock to a much greater extent than you did before so we were actually able to crank our base clock all the way up to 200 megahertz which with a CPU multiplier of 23 gave us a very solid overclock of 4.6 gigahertz using the same voltage as we did when we adjusted the multiplier only and with similar thermals and power draw do keep in mind though that playing with the base clock is a little bit more complicated because while PCIe has been detached from it it still does affect your RAM speeds so if you're experiencing freezes and crashes after overclocking your base clock go back into the BIOS and have a look at your memory settings certain memory dividers are often inherently more stable than others and it's also important to pay attention to ensure that your RAM isn't running at a speed way beyond its specifications after you adjusted the base clock providing a little more voltage through advanced settings called system agent and VC C IO might be helpful in these cases and but for our test setup we found that keeping the RAM in its rated speed of 20 400 megahertz gave us a stable overclock without having to really change any voltages and I personally find memory overclocking to be the most difficult to do stable e because RAM errors can take a really long time to manifest and show up at the worst possible time so in general I recommend just leaving them alone alright to Linus you've thrown a ton of information here but what if I don't have the time to tinker with voltages and validate for two days and all that kind of stuff surely there has to be an easier way never fear most motherboard manufacturers offer a more you know one-click overclock option of some sort and a soos is no exception head into the BIOS and you'll find the easy tuning wizard where all you have to do is indicate what you'll be using your PC for and what kind of cooler you have and it will apply an overclocking setting automatically the drawback is that you typically won't get the same performance as you would with a manual overclock as the board will try to apply safer settings that may be necessary bar motherboard gave us an overclock of just about 4.6 gigahertz with 1.3 volts definitely not too shabby but not quite as good as our manual process alternatively you can use a ceases AI suite which is available on their website or on the disk that came with your motherboard and selecting extreme tuning and turning off frequency and voltage targets will cost the software to push the CPU as far as it can go though when we tried this it tried to take our skylight processor past 5 gigahertz and then completely refused to boot so and then set a target of 4.8 which seemed to work but the CPU actually ran below 4.7 K anyway the point is we recommend the idea that the manual the manual process and that gave us the best results which pretty much wraps this up so if you followed along I hope you've gotten an overclock that will be the envy of all your friends or at least the ones who know what overclocking is don't stop tinkering guys and thanks for checking out our skylake OC guide if you enjoyed the video wait no I usually do this one first well if you hated it press dislike if you enjoyed it go ahead and press the like button get subscribed to Linus tech tips or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon buying a cool shirt like this one or even with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum you get like a cool badge and stuff now that you're 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