News 8.2 GHz and Beyond: Core i9-13900K is An Extreme Overlocker’s Dream

[Admin]

Extreme Overclocker Splave puts the Core i9-13900K through its paces and shows how he got it all the way to 8.2 GHz on a single core or 7.7 GHz on all cores.

8.2 GHz and Beyond: Core i9-13900K is An Extreme Overlocker’s Dream : Read more

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Nowadays CPU are sold with little to no headroom. And I'm sorry, but the "let me pour $400 worth of Liquid Nitrogen on my CPU" so I can get the CPU to run at X Ghz for 2 seconds is just lame. It's a gimmick that is played out, it serves no point at all to actual consumers and it is just an attention seeking contest.

 

[svan71]

Now if I could just keep it from throttling while not overclocking and running a single pass of r23.

 

[BogdanH]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s...

Agree completely -also with the rest of your post.
Nitrogen cooling has no relevance nowadays and never had... so why would I care to read about it?

 

[TerryLaze]

where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Now if I could just keep it from throttling while not overclocking and running a single pass of r23.

The two sides of the same coin right here.
The 13900k is a 125W TDP cpu that everybody runs at 250W if not completely unlimited so you automatically run it 20-22% faster, "not overclocked" .
If you have the equivalent of a fully copper Zalman you get 20-22% more performance while if you have crap cooling you run the CPU at TDP.
(probably still far above TDP in reality)

Instead of being forced to overclock it happens automatically, it is less "fun" but it is also far more approachable by normal users.

 

[drivinfast247]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Nowadays CPU are sold with little to no headroom. And I'm sorry, but the "let me pour $400 worth of Liquid Nitrogen on my CPU" so I can get the CPU to run at X Ghz for 2 seconds is just lame. It's a gimmick that is played out, it serves no point at all to actual consumers and it is just an attention seeking contest.

Hence the word "Extreme". This is a hobby that some people have. Just like building a 1000hp street car or a motorcycle that can go 200mph in a mile. Or the goon that wants his face filled with tattoos and piercings. People enjoy something so they do it.

What hobbies do you have.

 

[rluker5]

When I went from an average 12700k to an average 13900kf on my Prime Z690p and NH-D15 I saw the clocks go up by 800mhz with the same oc push. (I have a daily OC of +200mhzP/E. Same as 12700k. Other than stress tests it also runs cool.)
The 13900k uses more power but has 12 more cores. Mine will thermal throttle at more than 5.4/4.5 in CB23 so I just have to live with around 40.7k unless I get the notion to try harder. Intel's latest iteration of it's 7 node is just the fastest yet. And solid all around. Except apparently for cold bug for those using it in those conditions

Also nice to hear from an XOCer's point of view. Seems almost mundane until you remember all of the extra stuff they have to know and do, and that there aren't bioses setup to make their jobs easy and limits to keep them from wrecking stuff in no time flat.

 

[splave]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Nowadays CPU are sold with little to no headroom. And I'm sorry, but the "let me pour $400 worth of Liquid Nitrogen on my CPU" so I can get the CPU to run at X Ghz for 2 seconds is just lame. It's a gimmick that is played out, it serves no point at all to actual consumers and it is just an attention seeking contest.

There is an always and will be headroom. Intel is just better at giving you more out of the box now. Getting the best out of things is something I enjoy doing. To clarify also it's fully stable at those temperatures enough to run every benchmark not just idle CPUz MHz.

Intel and AMD highly value ln2 data and there is a translation into "real world" benefits. Taking away the thermal limits of a CPU let's you see the true quality of the silicon and these companies can track things like location on the wafer, leakage, etc and try to improve their process to match these qualities on the top performing cpus which will help them increase clock speed and thermals over time. They have entire departments that deal with extreme cooling!

 

[jasonf2]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Nowadays CPU are sold with little to no headroom. And I'm sorry, but the "let me pour $400 worth of Liquid Nitrogen on my CPU" so I can get the CPU to run at X Ghz for 2 seconds is just lame. It's a gimmick that is played out, it serves no point at all to actual consumers and it is just an attention seeking contest.

There is a pretty gross difference between a processor in the 90s and today. Back then clocks were completely static and overclocking was really just tweaking the clock to the actual thermal solution and pulling out built in margins at the expense of durability. Today virtually every processor dynamically and automatically adjusts clock to demand, thermals and core load balance. So in a lot of ways the headroom wasn't really removed, the chips just got smart enough to do it themselves.

 

[Arbie]

headroom wasn't really removed, the chips just got smart enough to do it themselves.

Meaning... headroom was removed. Headroom is what's left above the stock performance, and in olden times could only be accessed by "overclocking". While tweaking for efficiency can still make sense eg. undervolting or power-limiting, "overclocking" is now a waste of time for 99.999% of users. So - a huge amount of time is wasted.

I'm posting for that 99.999%, who don't yet realize this and get the idea that "OC" will make their new PC extra-special. The only sensible speed-up is to enable XMP in BIOS (for your DRAM). Everything else will eat far, far more time than it can ever save you in computing. And you won't notice it in gaming. And it will run so hot and loud that you'll go back to stock anyway.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Nowadays CPU are sold with little to no headroom. And I'm sorry, but the "let me pour $400 worth of Liquid Nitrogen on my CPU" so I can get the CPU to run at X Ghz for 2 seconds is just lame. It's a gimmick that is played out, it serves no point at all to actual consumers and it is just an attention seeking contest.

I don't think it's a gimmick. I guess at first glance it's a marketing ploy! 'Our CPU can do this!'.

But these particular articles, that I really enjoy reading, are more about pushing the absolute max they can get out of the silicon, to see how far it can be pushed. Yes, it's not gonna run a standard program at those speeds, but that's not the point of these OC's.

It's to test the absolute limits. You don't like it, don't read about it. This is an interest for others though.

I do agree with you that modern chips have less and less OC headroom, as the boost tech now, really gets the most out of these consumer chips in general terms.

 

[jasonf2]

Meaning... headroom was removed. Headroom is what's left above the stock performance. Tweaking for efficiency can still make sense eg. undervolting or power-limiting. But "overclocking" is a waste of time for 99.999% of users. So - a huge amount of time is wasted.

Posting for those in the 99.999% who don't yet realize this and are thinking to make their new PC extra-special. The only sensible speed-up is to enable XMP in BIOS (for your DRAM). Everything else will eat far, far more time than it can ever save you in computing. And you won't notice it in gaming. And it will run so hot and loud that you'll go back to stock anyway.

I agree completely. Under normal operating conditions stock configurations with normal boosts enabled do such a great job of utilizing the CPU resources that overclocking by definition has limited performance gains. To say that headroom has been removed though is really a misrepresentation. Not only do modern chips run up to their thermal ceiling much better, they also underclock as well. So in idle mode there is actually significantly more headroom with grossly reduced power consumption and thermal requirements than a hard clock machine was ever able to get. I for one overclocked alot in the early days and something is really being missed here, binning. Getting a good overclock back then was about getting a good chip and had an element of luck involved. The headroom you talk about was in a lot of cases put in because they needed that frequency margin to ensure that at yield the chips were stable. Just because someone was able to get a stable clock on a sku didn't mean that that was going to work for the next person. Today everything is tested and binned so the "headroom" need from a manufacture is greatly reduced from what was needed back then. I for one actually appreciate that we are able to utilize resources today that would have typically gone to waste on a hard clock CPU without tweaking.

LN2 clocks are neat, but have no real world application. However one thing that LN2 does indicate is really what the chip can do under best case scenarios. Back in the 90s we all thought that we were going to hit single core 10ghz in the early 2000s. It turns out that 4 ghz frequency wall took a bit longer than that to break. It is pretty amazing though that right now the only thing holding back 8ghz is thermals. Hopefully future nodes will be able to be able to maintain this level of clock stability as efficiency is gained , moving the thermal speed cap closer to that 8ghz+ figure.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Nowadays CPU are sold with little to no headroom. And I'm sorry, but the "let me pour $400 worth of Liquid Nitrogen on my CPU" so I can get the CPU to run at X Ghz for 2 seconds is just lame. It's a gimmick that is played out, it serves no point at all to actual consumers and it is just an attention seeking contest.

What's funny is that not only did they typo the title of this review, but you did as well.

@Admin , might want to fix the title of the article so it doesn't say "Overlockers" and instead says "Overclockers". LOL.

Also, why does the article say 13900k but then reference the LGA 775 socket? Don't we do any editing anymore?

What does it take to cool the Core i9-13900K? You can use an inexpensive solution if you want, but the quality of your experience on these chips is directly proportional to the quality of your cooling.

If you have a stock LGA775 intel heatsink set on top of your motherboard,

 

[larkspur]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

And it was "cool" in the 00s and the 10s. My 2009 i7-920 D0 went from 2.66ghz all core to 3.8ghz all core with a $60 air cooler and a few hours of pure fun while I tweaked it. My 2012 i7-3770k went from 3.5ghz all core to 4.5 ghz all core in my portable mini-ITX case with a rather pedestrian Corsair H80 AIO cooler and a few hours of pure fun while I tweaked it. These were 24/7 OCs that would stay under 80c in all of my apps and rendering jobs. I still have both systems and they run great (though I haven't booted the i7-920 in a couple years). But during those 10 years that I used them as daily drivers and eventually slave renderers there was a significant performance difference when rendering and any other well-threaded app. This made it absolutely worth the money for the aftermarket coolers and the short time I spent tweaking the overclocks.

I agree though that the modern chips see diminishing returns much faster. These days you just get the best cooling you can afford and remove the power limits and your chip will basically tweak itself. Of course you can do better, but not as much as we would in the past. But seeing what these chips can do when temperature is no longer limiting is really cool [sorry for the pun] and (as the author/OC God pointed out) is valuable data to designers and manufacturers.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Agreed. My 2015 6700k had MUCH better performance with an all-core 4.8Ghz OC than it did with it's 4.2Ghz turbo boost on a single core, 4.0Ghz for two cores, and so on. People tend to look at the paper specs and say, well, it already does X frequency so if you can only manage another 200mhz it's not worth overclocking, yet they are not considering that X frequency is only with a single core while any OC is assuredly an all core proposition in addition to the fact that the all core boost is likely several hundred Mhz less than the single core boost so in reality you might be looking at as much as a 600-800Mhz bump in performance, per core, than the stock profile. Multiplied across 6 or 8 cores, it could be considerable performance you stand to gain, even these days.

Given the TDP of these last two Gens, heat might be a different story, especially on the biggest CPUs.

 

[10tacle]

My first overclocking experience was some 23 years ago with the Celeron 300 -> 450MHz. I've had a lot of chipsets over the years and overclocked them all. However, as we got higher and higher resolutions and games got more and more complex rendering the GPU more and more important, overclocking CPUs started not being as important. Single thread or multi thread. I first started noticing it when upgrading from 1080p to 1440p circa 2010. Now that I've been running 4K for a couple of years, it's clear that gaming is mostly on the GPU. The good news is that overclocking GPUs still matters when squeezing out every last frame. Now if you want to chase record FPS at 1080p still, then overclocking the CPU still matters too.

 

[motocros1]

What's funny is that not only did they typo the title of this review, but you did as well.

@Admin , might want to fix the title of the article so it doesn't say "Overlockers" and instead says "Overclockers". LOL.

Also, why does the article say 13900k but then reference the LGA 775 socket? Don't we do any editing anymore?

i believe the article was referencing the very poor heatsinks from that sockets(lga 775) era. on a side note, i think it would be easier to move to antarctica and overclock using ambient air temps.

 

[Darkbreeze]

My first overclocking experience was some 23 years ago with the Celeron 300 -> 450MHz. I've had a lot of chipsets over the years and overclocked them all. However, as we got higher and higher resolutions and games got more and more complex rendering the GPU more and more important, overclocking CPUs started not being as important. Single thread or multi thread. I first started noticing it when upgrading from 1080p to 1440p circa 2010. Now that I've been running 4K for a couple of years, it's clear that gaming is mostly on the GPU. The good news is that overclocking GPUs still matters when squeezing out every last frame. Now if you want to chase record FPS at 1080p still, then overclocking the CPU still matters too.

While you are KIND of right, you are kind of wrong too because there are plenty of games out there today that are highly CPU intensive. Not all or even the majority of them to be sure, but enough that you really can't say overclocking the CPU doesn't matter. And, there are plenty of systems out there that can benefit from overclocking the CPU that are NOT gaming machines. In fact, not that the majority of them would ever be overclocked because stability plays a far greater role than it would on a gaming system (Stability is important on every system, just don't ask gamers about that), there are probably FAR more systems out there that could leverage some extra CPU horsepower because they are scientific machines, or running high end CAD software, or doing professional graphics or video editing, or folding, or a ton of other CPU intensive tasks, than there are gaming systems. By far. Of course, most of them aren't owned by people or run by specialists that would be inclined to want to overclock them, but even in the private sector and dealing only with personal machines there is still a pretty huge enthusiast community that does not specifically or primarily concern themselves with gaming endeavors.

 

[jkflipflop98]

Jesus, if that little bit of LN2 costs you $400 then you need a new supplier. LN2 is cheap and plentiful.

 

[peter jaques]

I'm just stunned that there's such a thing as a "professional overclocker."

 

[in_the_loop]

Agreed. My 2015 6700k had MUCH better performance with an all-core 4.8Ghz OC than it did with it's 4.2Ghz turbo boost on a single core, 4.0Ghz for two cores, and so on. People tend to look at the paper specs and say, well, it already does X frequency so if you can only manage another 200mhz it's not worth overclocking, yet they are not considering that X frequency is only with a single core while any OC is assuredly an all core proposition in addition to the fact that the all core boost is likely several hundred Mhz less than the single core boost so in reality you might be looking at as much as a 600-800Mhz bump in performance, per core, than the stock profile. Multiplied across 6 or 8 cores, it could be considerable performance you stand to gain, even these days.

Given the TDP of these last two Gens, heat might be a different story, especially on the biggest CPUs.

In addition to that, when you overclock you set it to a static stable frequency. With "Turbo boost" the frequency will vary up and and down. This is bad for real-time dependant applications like DAWs (digital audio workstations used for music production). You have a bunch of software synths, audio tracks and digital effects and suddenly there is a drop on a core (or several) which is heavily used by a track that has lots of heavy plug-ins on it. That means it will crackle and be useless in real-time recording.
You must be assured that the clock stays absolutely stable for all the cores and not "Dynamically" go up and down depending on heat/load.
The same real-time performance demand is probably the same for games with drops in min frames if the CPU is dynamically clocked down.

In addition to that, you still have to buy some type of k-processor to get all the cores/highest possible top frequency anyway. Also the motherboards that has all the features and ports (Especially I need loads of USB-ports. Even with 10 ports I have now two usb four port hubs) are the overclockable z-boards so you already have bought both the processor and motherboard that will overclock anyway, so you might as well OC it!
The question is where the sweet spot for : 1. Motherboard and 2. Cooler is when it comes to price/performance.

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

There is a pretty gross difference between a processor in the 90s and today. Back then clocks were completely static and overclocking was really just tweaking the clock to the actual thermal solution and pulling out built in margins at the expense of durability. Today virtually every processor dynamically and automatically adjusts clock to demand, thermals and core load balance. So in a lot of ways the headroom wasn't really removed, the chips just got smart enough to do it themselves.

And thus effectively making manual OC'ing obsolete. These days it's just a good cooler, some undervolting and thats it. Maybe some benefit in running faster or tighter memory in regards of timing, but the "good days" are over. I remember a Cyrix PR200+ that ran on 166Mhz OC'ed to 183Mhz would make a world of a difference. Now you need loads of Mhz in order to get or experience the same. CPU's have'nt got faster for quite some years then where we are at now. And 8Ghz seems to be the uplimit for what X86/X64 chips on even liquid helium (-298C) can do.

But on the other hand; you buy a CPU with so many cores and threads these days with base clocks of avg 4 to 5Ghz and your set for quite some time. Where PC's in the past where to be updated roughly every year, here you'll have a system that is good for the next 3 to even 5 years.

 

[jp7189]

The two sides of the same coin right here.
The 13900k is a 125W TDP cpu that everybody runs at 250W if not completely unlimited so you automatically run it 20-22% faster, "not overclocked" .
If you have the equivalent of a fully copper Zalman you get 20-22% more performance while if you have crap cooling you run the CPU at TDP.
(probably still far above TDP in reality)

Instead of being forced to overclock it happens automatically, it is less "fun" but it is also far more approachable by normal users.

That's a fantastic chart. Source?

 

[jp7189]

Overlocking was cool in the 90s, where a regular person could easily get a 30% increase in performance by changing out the stock cooler with a fully copper Zalman.

Nowadays CPU are sold with little to no headroom. And I'm sorry, but the "let me pour $400 worth of Liquid Nitrogen on my CPU" so I can get the CPU to run at X Ghz for 2 seconds is just lame. It's a gimmick that is played out, it serves no point at all to actual consumers and it is just an attention seeking contest.

Almost all products have safety margins that apply to the masses, but those that are willing to run with tighter tolerances, better components, and more knowledge can push things further. Personally I enjoy pushing computers and cars. My goal is to get more out of them without sacrificing daily usability, but there are those that like to slide further out on the edge and its inspirational/instructional to the rest of us. There are plenty of racing series where they teardown the engine after each race. XOC is like that. Both are out of my reach, but I enjoy seeing what's possible.

 

[TerryLaze]

That's a fantastic chart. Source?

From this list of all benchmarks.
The chart is from the first one on the list, computerbase de.
https://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/la...lake/launch-analyse-intel-raptor-lake-seite-4