overclocking guide for 17 920?

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bradyapba

Gawd
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Nov 30, 2004
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I thought i saw one on here, but i cant find it. Do you guys have any good links to easy to read, well written, guides to overclocking these chips?

Thanks!

I have the ASRock X58 Extreme mobo.
 
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How much do you want to overvolt? Some of us, including myself, have great results with no overvolting.

I have my 920 running at 3.6GHz for 9 months now at stock voltage.

Set all your voltages to what they should be, do NOT leave set to "AUTO".

I am running at 20x180 at 1.136 vCore with water cooling.

Set your multiplier where you want it, then scale up the BCLK at 5MHz at a time. Once you get into the 150 range you might want to boot all the way to the desktop and run a stability test.
 
Ohhh, I love it when Kyle posts in my threads. :)

I dont mind over volting some. Its at stock right now, and running at 3.6 on air. But all i did was click on the auto overclock button in the bios, just to see what it would do. :) And i have no idea, what it actually changed, mutli, bclk, volts, etc.. i dont know what it did to get to 3.6 :)

Right now i have the true spirit on and stock fan on it.

But Kyle, you bring up good points, that I dont have answers too, that I should.

1. You said put the voltages where they should be, and not on auto. Well, "what should they be?" i dont know :) I believe by default my board has it at 1.2. What are the consequences of overvolting? Is it more board related, or PSU related, or heat related? I have way more PSU then I need right now, so thats not an issue.

2. How do i know where i want my multipler? I assumed higher the better, thus leave it at 20.

3. What about leaving hyperthreading, on, off, etc?

Thanks for any more tips.
 
Honestly, 3.6GHz on air is very solid for a 920. What are your core temps now under load?

1. Google should give you all the answers for that. Some motherboards have them listed. But I doubt Asrock does.

2. I would leave it at 20 if you are more concerned about CPU clock.....which you are.

3. Leave it on, no sense to turn it off cooling with air and not going for records.

What did the auto OC set your RAM speed at and timings?
 
1. Thank you, I will google it.
2. Thanks, thats what ill do.
3. thanks.

I just built this system this week, so i have not had a lot of time to test, but i did run prime95 on two different occasions for 1 hour each after i OCed

My cores seemed to settle in at 69,69,69,62 after 15 minutes and stay that way for the rest of the hour.

i have gamed for 4-5 hours a night the last few nights, playing COH and Borderlands, and they never broke 52C.

Also note, I do not believe my true spirit is seated right, i know its not in fact, one of the clips is broken, and part of my chip is exposed/not covered by the HS, and I have purchased the bolt kit, which is in my hands as we speak.

I dont know what it put my mem at, i can look when i get home from work (if i make it through the snow storm) and report back in a few hours :)

Again Kyle, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.
 
2) Like Kyle said, try to go with the 20x multiplier. There have been cases where people had issues getting the OC stable and needed to change the muliplier to 19 and increase the BCLK...just a heads up.

3) Also, try and keep HT on, no sense in loosing out to save a couple degrees for a moderate OC.

Unfortunately, I have a C0/C1 chip that requires extra voltage to increase the speed unlike many D0 chips (some may require very small amounts for a moderate OC). Right now my CPU is running at 3.7ghz with a 1.27xx or 1.28xx vcore (can't remember exactly). For a while I was running it at 3.8 but settled upon 3.7 since I didn't have to boost the vcore over 1.3 to keep her stable thus keeping the temps down.

Kyle, what are your temps on water with such a low vcore? Must be insanely low.
 
Man, if you have a 920 on air not breaking 52c at min load, I would suggest not touching it. But yeah, get the mount fixed.

My 920 is a C0, a retail I bought at Fry's when they hit the shelves on an ASUS P6T6. Sits on the desktop at about 43C. Have not looked at loaded in a while. Just turned on Prime95 and it it hit 63C and bounced around there. Rad and Pump and turned down fairly now to be quiet.

Edit: Shit, I forgot, I traded out my C0 for a D0 when they came out.........Sorry, I had forgot so all of this in on a D0. I think my C0 was at ~1.35v at 3.6.
 
I have a D0, i got from ewiz.

Mine sits at 37-39C at idle. 52 gaming 4-5 hours, 69ish prime after and hour.

As comparsions -

Before OC;

30-33C idle, 42-45C gaming, 56-59 Prime.

Ill get the other numbers from the bois when i get home in 30 minutes or so
EDIT: i also have 2 Scythe S-flex 1600's, modded into my case windows, blowing cold, outside case air, right onto the true spirit, which i guess could be helping my temps.
 
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ok heres what i see:

On the auto OC:

BCLK:180
PCIE: 100
CPU Ratio: 20
QPI = 6.480GT
uncore=Auto
memory timings:
8-8-8-18-63-9-5-5-5-16, 1T
without VDroop
DRAM, IOH, CPU VOlt = Auto
VTT = 1.48
CPU, PLL = 1.90
VCORE = (its bounced between) 1.104 to 1.120

now when i read CPUZ = vcore = .944, but when i started prime95, it jumped to 1.12 and stayed there.

I dont really like the auto thing, and would love some guidance on how to do it manual.
 
Another question:

I have 3 different programs to look at my cpu.... cpuz, core temp, and real temp...

All of a sudden, core temp is giving me some different readings.

CPUZ shows my OC.... 185 at 20 multi, 3600, real temp shows the same thing...

Core temp on the other hand, shows the cpu bouncing the mutliplier around between 14-15, to keep the CPU at 2.67, instead of 3.6.

What to believe? Whats going on? Is core temp right? Is there some function of the mobo chip, thats throttling it down?

Its not heat or anything, with prime running, its only in the 50's C...

Help!
 
one other question, when you say set your voltages... is there just one setting "vcore"?

i would like to try to do this manual with stock volts.

Is it as simple as setting my vcore, multi to 20, and playing with the bclk? No other voltages to set, or memory?

And how do i stop it from lowering the multi on its own, as my mobo seems to want to do?
 
ok, fixed the core temp issue, it was a setting in core temp.

I got the bracket on, and my OC temps under prime, dropped from highs of 70 C, to a high of 61 C.

Messed around with some of the settings based on what i saw some others did who have my board. Time for some more testing!
 
Repost from other threads, but here are the resources I've used for i7 overclocking research:

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2008/11/...p6t_ram_ocing/
The video helped immensely.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...rclocking.html
Some light reading on the new Nehalem architecture.

http://forums.pureoverclock.com/show...04&postcount=9
The data table I used as reference in for my own overclocking. Karancho RC's result is what I follow, but with a few modifications.

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?...Language=en-us
OP = The single best post I've seen regarding i7 overclocking by far.
 
There seem to be some issues with your links. None of them seem to work properly. The 3rd one doesn't load anything. The 4th one doesn't seem to have anything to do with i7 overclocking, the first two don't load the actual articles.
 
bradyapba said:
now when i read CPUZ = vcore = .944, but when i started prime95, it jumped to 1.12 and stayed there.
Click to expand...

That's the load line calibration "feature" in effect. Make sure you disable LLC explicitly in the BIOS because it can harm 45nm chips such as the i7 and presumably 32nm chips as well. I know ASRock is a subsidiary of ASUS so I assume their BIOS layout is pretty similar; if that is the case, just go into AI Tweaker and near the bottom there should be a Load Line Calibration option. It will probably be set to auto. Disable it.

bradyapba said:
I dont really like the auto thing, and would love some guidance on how to do it manual.
Click to expand...

Set your BCLK to 150 MHz as a starting point. Set DDR3 speed to the second lowest option available. Do not adjust timings yet. The board should automatically loosen timings at high clock speeds (somewhere around 9-9-9-24). You want to eliminate your RAM as a possible cause of crashes during stress testing. Uncore will automatically be adjusted. From there, set your DRAM bus voltage (VDIMM) to 1.66V. (I am assuming ASRock's BIOS is similar to ASUS' which from a quick search it appears to be.) You may get a warning about DIMM voltages over 1.65V being outside of Intel specification and damaging your processor - you can ignore those but don't go over 1.66V. The guideline is actually .5V from the DRAM controller voltage which is by default (and minimum) 1.2V so theoretically you could go as high as 1.7V without causing problems, but I'd stay on the safe side.

Set your CPU VCore to 1.25V as a starting point. On most chips 1.25V with a 150MHz BCLK (21x multiplier) should be stable, but those ASRock boards also tend to have slightly higher VDroop than ASUS' or Gigabyte counterparts.

For stability testing, I highly recommend Linpack over Prime95. For one, it is much faster (you should be able to make a decision on stability within 1-2 hours on a 920) and it stresses the CPU and RAM much more than Prime95. I suggest downloading LinX which is a Linpack GUI and running 20 passes minimum (takes an hour and some minutes on my 920 at 3.4 GHz w/ HT). If you pass 5 or 6 passes which should be within maybe 30 minutes, go ahead and increase your BCLK by maybe 10 MHz. Repeat. If you get a crash (BSOD, reboot or hang) increase your VCore a step or two. I'm not sure of how much precision those ASRock boards give you in terms of VCore though.

Once you've reached an OC you're happy with run the full 20 passes and make sure it's stable. If not, add a bit more VCore and rerun. :) I personally tend to run the 20 passes of Linpack and if it passes that, I'll set it to run 500 passes overnight. By the time I get up it usually has run a good ~110 passes and I know it's 100% stable no matter what.
 
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