Gadgetory

excellent what's up guys how's it going today's video is going to be all about overclocking non overclockable Intel processors specifically skylake processors and if you're wondering how that's done well first off you need a z170 motherboard similar to this one this is e170 extreme for tremaine's to demo overclocking well not this CPU this is a 6600 K this one is unlocked so you could easily do a multiplier overclock on this what I want to get is something that gives us a little more bang for our buck hopefully something that's still a quad-core something that still will make for a very nice gaming system for that I'm going to go for an i-5 6500 but I don't have one so let's go to micro sensor could I use micro Center see if they're playing any of Jays videos 600 k's 6100 there's the 6500 it's weird that other than the retail pricing on them right yeah they have retail pricing okay that's why it's a big healthy stack of paper 212 Evo's then I might as well get one success what's in the bag I managed to get away with just six oh god it's bright out here I showed great self-restraint and I only came out with my hyper 212 and the 6500 that should be all I need for today okay I managed to make it back I got my 6500 got my z17 extreme for from has rock out of the box here I was just taking a look I figured let's go over this really quickly before I move on as rock actually sent this motherboard over directly so that I could use it to demonstrate the BC LK overclocking with non K Intel skylake processors so thank you guys rock for that I also wanted to point out that as rock is not the only one with this capability Asus Super Micro were two of the other sort of originators along those those are the three kind of firsts to sort of bring this to the forefront I don't know who was absolutely first but I heard it first from as rock so put it that way MSI and EVGA have also followed suit and I believe gigabyte will be as well so pretty much all the motherboard manufacturers are able to enable this simply by giving you a BIOS update for the motherboard as a couple things to point out here one is that the BIOS update is not typically available directly via the standard ways you go like you know go to the motherboard webpage on a Xerox website go to the download find your BIOS and download it you've got to download it from a special place that's because it does a couple things to the motherboard and I want to point those out before I dive into this one is that it's going to disable turbo and C states for your processor which isn't a huge deal to a lot of people who only care about how fast is it and that kind of thing but if power consumption is a concern of yours it's definitely something to keep in mind one probably more important thing to keep in mind is that this is going to disable the I GPU when you load up that BIOS so you're going to need a discreet graphics card you're not going to be able to use the eye GPU along with this overclocking method that said here is a look at the board and the z170 extreme for is a part of the extreme series so it's definitely not quite as budget oriented as like the pro line is although this is more of a budget series so the extreme series head there's like a 3 a 4 a 7 there's a 6 and a 7 this one goes for about $145 us as of the time of this video and there was also a $20 million rebate so down $225 after that mail-in rebate so you can get this fairly inexpensive you do have a couple by 16 see i express slots right there so you can do to a GPU configurations there tripple slots paste I thought that was kind of nice it's got a pretty much all black look there's some copper accents on some of the heatsink or not the heat sinks but this little shroud right here this is a plastic shroud by the way has a purity sound logo on it and then the rest of the heat sinks are made of metal but they're fairly minimalist I mean fairly you know they're not too gaudy or anything like that so you can see that sort of shiny or asrock logo again with the copper color and then there's a gold caps also kind of scattered across the board looking at the upper edge we can see the vrm heat sinks that are at the top right here and this is actually part of the reason why I chose this board I wanted something that wasn't crazy expensive I definitely didn't want a top of line 200 $250 plus overclocking board but the power delivery is important when it comes to skylake z170a skylake processors and overclocking so this has a 10 phase power delivery these are niche econ 12 K gold caps in there as well and definitely not the best when it comes to overclocking but certainly better than a lot of the more bare-bones say hundred dollars and less D 170 options that are out there you also of course have four RAM slots which is pretty nice to have and then there's some other kind of bonus features like you got a power and reset surface mounted right there you've got a debug LED was which is nice to have SATA Express on all these which I are they making SATA Express drives I feel like they must have given up on that you also have an ultra MDOT 2 port right there PCI Express gen3 by 4 which is definitely very nice to have it's not in my favorite position since it's right below the primary graphics card slot so that will be blocked by your GPU actually very much of a concern if you're considering water cooling let's this board but there's probably not a whole lot of people considering that lastly here's the IO and a a ps2 port I don't mind that it's a combo port - you got six USB 3.0 ports here here and here and here you also have all the connectors for your eye GPU including a full-size DisplayPort and HDMI you've got your integrated NIC right there which is I believe Intel based and then you also have your 5.1 surround audio and then they've added on a USB 3.1 controller there and they're giving you a type-c connector as well as a type egg connector and USB 3.1 it's nice it's super fast I think that is quite enough talking for now though let me get this all put together and then I will start overclocking so as test setups go everything came together pretty easily here I've got the hyper 212 installed on top of the 6500 I've got the memory video card storage in place and I actually spent a couple hours last night going through just messing around with stuff and trying out the overclocking capabilities of this configuration so yeah full disclosure it is Friday morning now but I am happy to say that I was able to overclock my 6500 K I settled in on just over 4.2 gigahertz for the overclock but let me quickly give you a closer look at this setup before I move on so here's the flip side and I'm coming over here to memory you will see that I have g.skill this is Ripjaws 5 and this is 3200 speed rated memory I'm not running it at 3200 but I want a memory that was fast enough to keep up with them some potential weird overclocking numbers that might be thrown at it since we are doing vc l ik b CL k adjustment which is going to affect the cpu frequency as well as the memory frequency although fortunately not much much else for graphics card I just dropped in a 980 I that's because it was sitting there to my rights and it was available I know I'm matching some high-end hardware up here with this guys but this is really just purely for testing and overclocking purposes 980 T has day though and then the Plextor m6e is sitting in there just below it for our main operating system lastly just so you guys can see what I'm doing I have this HDMI cable going out of my graphics card and into my Elgato Game Capture HD 60 and then that's being captured by my capture system and that is how I'm able to well see what's going on on this screen over here then also see and capture stuff over there which I'm showing you guys too much behind-the-scenes stuff right now let's say hey whether we're in the operating system and let me just show you guys the default specs for the 6500 so up here I 5 6500 core voltage is going to be jumping around because right now all those little the power saving functions are still in place core speed is going to be jumping a little bit it's going up like three point four and then it's resting down when it's idling and that sort of stuff at a lower frequency I did notice that the bus speed is a little bit higher than it should be it's at 100.8 3 which is why we're seeing some slightly weirder numbers here but ultimately what you have here is a core speed of 3200 megahertz and then this processor will automatically overclock itself depend on how many cores are being used so we'll go up to 3.6 on a single core if it's using 2 cores it will go up to 3.5 if it sees in 3 cores it'll go to 3.4 and if it's using all 4 cores it only do 3.3 so only 100 mega Hertz boost over what was there before you can see that also reflected over here on hardware monitor or we can see the vcore for example at one point 184 note here that apart from the voltages we can also see all of our core temperatures and then as we move a little bit further down here we can see the actual clock speed so this has been topping out again on a single core at 3.6 gigahertz or so but that it's also under clocking itself down to 800 when it is idle okay next up I need to restart and show you guys what's going on in the BIOS so I've been going through all the overclocking I have made use of a couple features of this motherboard one is the fact there is a dual BIOS switch right there so I just switched back over to my overclock setting the other thing that I was making use of is the clear CMOS which is actually a button over here on this side when I would start an overclock and then I would get the hang or it would stop responding or whatever I would basically hold down the power switch and tell the system shut off then I would turn off the power on the power supply over here hit the power again to flush all the power that's out of the system and then flip everything back on and then generally it would start up again if that wasn't working which only happened one or twice as I was trying some more outlandish things then I would do all that and with the power supply supply turned off hold in the clear CMOS button for about five seconds that clears everything and resets it back to default on the BIOS that you're set to and then you can kind of go back and key in your your overclocks again fortunately I didn't really have to do that more than once or twice but I was getting some pretty frequent lock ups when it comes to attempting higher overclock so I was going for 4.4 or 4.5 and this processor wasn't really able to hit it bear that in mind when you're overclocking CPUs it's it's a shot in the dark how far your CPU might be able to overclock some of them do better some of them do worse this one happened to do pretty recently I think but anyway on a typical startup I would reset oh gosh I didn't hit that clear seam no I didn't the hell's going hot that was weird okay so on a typical start startup I'd reboot and then as its booting up you tap delete and that's how you get into the BIOS so here's the the BIOS from asrock they have a graphical layout you can use your mouse to navigate around and you'll notice here in the top left the version I'm using is 2.61 that's not currently available directly from the asrock website it's available in the beta download section or you can find direct downloads for certain places they're actually not only on 2.4 right now but thanks to a stock for pre loading this BIOS up for me I thought that was nice and apart from that we can get our first glance at stuff like the deer and that's installed and what it's running at and if the XMP profile is on what storage is in there I had the fan set to silence now which is actually pretty nice and quiet and I'm happy to announce that that was actually functional when I was running some tests on this just now alright so we're gonna go into advanced mode and that's how you do the overclock in here again we see a layout of kind of what the motherboard is and CPU and all that good stuff OC tweakers where we're going to be doing our OC tweaking and here up at the top you can see the settings that I went for so I finished on 4.2 to make gigahertz there's also the cache speed which also ramps up my base clock or BC LK speed is one point one hundred thirty one point eight seven five and I did that so that 42:20 would be a nice round number memories running at just over 2800 so let me just kind of run through and show you guys what I did first off I went to DRAM and I was initially playing with XMP settings what you should do probably is going here tell it to use XMP settings but then which I can do right here there's a profile one I'm not going to mess with it right now but once you tell it to do XMP settings it's going to try to set your DRAM frequency in the case of this memory to 3200 I didn't want to do that so after it was set you can go in here specifically and tell it what frequency you want to run at I'd recommend sticking between 21 33 and maybe 2,600 ish or so I was able to be pretty stable at 2800 so that's what I went with but this is kind of where I would start out after you've done that and go back and then we will go into the voltage configuration voltage is one of those things that you just need more of if you're looking at overclocking one of these lower end CPUs simply puts you're going to be increasing the TDP theoretically you're going to be generating more heats in order to do that you need to tell it give me more voltage I'm at 1.35 right now although I was messing this one point three to five one point three to five for Sandy Bridge processors is a good starting at point you might range up to one point three five one point three six one point three seven if you notice in your operating system as you're running benchmark tests and putting a load on the system that you're hitting one point four above I had dial it back you probably don't want to sit at one over one point four volts with these CPUs and also bear in mind with voltage I'm specifically talking about the skylake CPUs here because voltage tolerances tend to vary a bit from CPU to CPU anyway set it to fixed mode instead of auto are offset and tell it's one point three five in this situation but I would say start off on the one point three to five and then only add a little bit more if you need it finally the CPU configuration in here is where the rubber meets the road or so to speak and again I'm not doing a whole lot of advanced settings in here I'm pretty much mainly just messing with the B CLK frequency and here I started off at well I did one ten first and then I was like that's boring and then I went to one twenty and then I went to one thirty at one thirty I was stable tried to go to one forty which one of the woods one forty even do if I key it in here one forty gives us almost a four point five gigahertz overclock as you can see up here four point four eight but that was not stable so I ended up dialing it back and I've just completely lost the number I even had said anything that's okay the nice thing about this is you can use the plus and minus actually Jess so I'm just going to hold - down to roll ourselves back down to four was at four point two - yeah and it'll get us all the way back down here now one last thing you should do before you restart and load into your operating system and see if it's stable is double check your target memory speed that's going to be reflected here if this is too high or if it's higher than you want it to go again just jump back over to DRAM configuration use a different frequency drop down here and set it manually to what you want it to be at once you've done all that hit f10 save and exit it will restart go back into the operating system and you should be all set to go now again it's this is very much a your mileage may vary situation when it comes to what motherboard you're using I'm using an AZ rack motherboard if you're doing this on an MSI or a gigabyte or an asus or an EVGA the interface is going to look different some of the labelings of things might look a little bit different but the basic stuff I talked about as far as BC ok and as far as what else the memory as far as well although all those labels should be roughly the same so you should be able to figure out what's going on ok so we're back in Windows so this is Windows 8 and as you can see her hopefully as you can see we have a successful overclock let me zoom in okay so and CPU Z you can see the bus speed is at one thirty one point eight ish core speed is at about 40 to 20 and you know it's going to fluctuate here and there just a little bit multiplies to 32 so here's where you can see maybe more directly the difference between overclocking via bus speed and overclocking via multiplier overclocking via multipliers what you would do if you had like a 6600 K or one of the case Q's it was unlocked multiplier overclocking is simply taking a bus speed of which usually usually is 100 granted you can do both but I usually the bus speeds 100 times your multiplier so multiplier of 44 for example with a bus speed of 100 would be 4.4 gigahertz or 4400 megahertz for the overclock in this case we're leaving the the multiplier locked because it is locked and we can't touch it which is in this case at 32 and bear that in mind when you're overclocking it's going to be when your BC okay overclocking it's going to be adjusting that based on the base multiplier of the CPU not the turbo multiplier so taking a bus feed of 131 times 32 gives us our overall overclock of 42 20-ish we also of course are working on four cores and four threads so let me point out some of the other quirks though of this overclocking method because I will say there was a few them that um I don't know they were funny I was hoping I would have to deal with quirks but anyway here's our V core which is at one point three four actually just slightly below the one point three five that we set it to so that's cool also we can see system temperatures but if we scroll down there is no actual temperature listings on our I five sixty five hundred here we can see Lupo sorry it's jumpy jumpy we can see voltages needs of powers clocks utilizations but we can't see the temperature it's weird as weird when overclocking I kind of got used to it it's a little bit more like overclocking in the dark often when you're overclocking you want to you want to take a look at your temperature because when you see like hey I'm heading ninety ninety five degrees Celsius that's too hot so this was a little bit stranger since you can't see the temperature of your CPU and that's just one of the things that goes along with this overclocking method since it's not really like fully Intel sanctioned I didn't run into too many issues as far as I could tell I'm sitting here right next to it and I have a general idea based on past experience like how hot like a heat sinks getting based on the CPU and these CPUs are lower TDP s overall which means chances are they're not going to get that hot but something the to bear in mind also notice here for our clocks the what they are at right now is this column this is the lowest and this is the highest so you'll notice the turbo-boost is not taking affect we have 42 15 and 42 24-hour minimum and max clock speed so it's always going to be running at that higher frequency as far as power consumption that's means that you're going to use more power but it's not the end of the world for sure and but again just one of those little quirks and something to keep in mind when you're doing this after I got booted up into the operating system after dialing in my overclock loading up CPU Z and a little bit of hardware monitor to kind of keep an eye on things I was just using Cinebench in order to run through it and kind of validate very quickly if everything was stable fortunately most of my instability came upon boot up when I actually did boot into the operating system I haven't had any issues with instability so far going through a single run of Cinebench is not necessarily a like load burnin test I would want to take something like prime95 and run it overnight to make sure everything was nice and stable but by and large if you can get through Cinebench Cinebench run you're probably going to be okay down here that you can see what kind of performance increase I got at least with Cinebench by doing over clocks at the bottom is the baseline score of 548 that's right here and that's running at default frequency and then I have several others I 565 hundred tests that you can see right here this is the four point two two gigahertz overclock right here I know Cinebench doesn't show that but trust me it is we got up to 689 points and that was an increase of about 26 percent overall when comparing the overclock speed to the none overclock speed pretty nice I would say but ultimately I'm still left a little bit torn I guess I what I wanted to do with this entire project was come to you guys and say here's a list of parts here's a computer you can put together here's a few fairly simple two steps you can take to get yourself up and running and get yourself more bang for the buck that's what it's always about more for your money it's a little bit more complicated than I had hoped it's definitely not like crazy complicated like if we go back to you know overclocking in the 90s or anything like that but there are some quirks and some things that just make it a little bit less accessible for somebody especially who has never built a computer before what I think this video warrants is another follow up video with some additional testing so that's what I'm going to do split this into another part what I want to do next is first get that 6600 K installed in here and see how I'm testing and scoring compared to that hour on it run some more benchmarks apart from Cinebench I want to do some gaming tests and see what kind of actual gaming improvements we're getting also comparing to the 6600 K I'm just kind of show like if you want to go this route it's a little bit more niche it takes a little bit more effort after the fact you got to do a little bit of tweaking and tuning with overclocking overclocking is always you know a variable as well you never know exactly what you're going to get I got to 4.2 here pretty stable II a lot of other people who have been reading articles for online have hit 4.4 and above but it depends on how much voltage you're willing to drop into it depends on your cooling solution I'm using a very effective but also budget oriented cooling solution here so all of those things kind of play a part anyway though I'm going to follow this video up I promise next week with some more testing some more benchmarking so let me know in the comments section down below what if anything in particularly you would like me to test out on this rig if you have any other suggestions for things you want to see me do with this configuration to give you guys some better ideas of what you can do when it comes to getting those less expensive skylake processors and overclocking them last thing I want to point out is that I went with the 6500 but a lot of the lot of the actual benchmarks and other tests I've seen going on on a line in the past month or so have said a 6400 might be a better bet I like both of those processors because they're actual quad cores and they're the cheapest full quad cores you can get in the sky like lineup so I might even go for 6400 and see how that goes maybe just kind of see if I get a better luck of the jaw when it comes to the kind of overclocks I'm able to achieve anyway though guys I know I've rambled a lot in this video but I get excited about this stuff there's lots of tests there's lots of potential there's lots of variables to account for so again let me know in the comment section down below what you think I should be doing for the follow-up for this video thanks so much for watching this one hit the like button too while you're at it if you enjoyed this video subscribe to my channel for more stuff just like this and we'll see you next time you