Question Help trying to break the 4.9GHz barrier on i5 8600k

Mar 16, 2019
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I'm new to overclocking, and recently started to see how far I can push my chip, and so far things were going well until I hit that 4.9GHz point. The issue here is when trying to push my clock speed to 4.9GHz, I require a substantial increase in voltage (and with it, an increase in temperatures). I previously found it to be stable at 4.8GHz overclock at 1.275v with temperatures going from 75-85 when stress testing on RealBench and Prime95 (latest version, no AVX, small FFT test) - when gaming I only hit to high 60s to low 70s with Apex Legends.

From trying to get to 4.9GHz, I have been increasing the voltage all towards 1.34v so far (and still increasing as I have not found that stable point), and either get too high temperatures with the overclock on the stress test (up to 85-95 degrees as said by HWMonitor), or instability issues such as Prime95's rounding errors and RealBench crashes.

Increasing the voltage doesn't seem to solve those problems either, as I still get those instability errors and temperatures are just getting higher to the point where I reached high 90s. I just failed Prime95's small FFT test on 1.34v at an even earlier rate than the previous lower voltages (such as 1.32v), and that doesn't seem right.

I have a be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 air cooler, an AsRock Z370 Extreme4 mobo, all in a Meshify C case (with x2 140mm front intake, x1 120mm back exhaust and x2 120 mm top exhaust). I also use a GTX960 and HyperX 2400MHz 2x4GB RAM DDR4.


My BIOS settings that I have only changed so far are:
  • Core Clock Speed: 49
  • AVC Offset: 2
  • LLC: Level 1 (highest for this mobo, tried Auto)
  • Vcore: 1.34v (have reached this point so far)
My questions are;
  1. Did I get bad luck on the lottery and reached my limit on overclocking?
  2. Is there any settings I need to concern myself with to actually get it to stabilize? I heard things about Cache Ratio and Power Limits, but I don't have a full understanding of what it does yet and don't know what values I should enter. I also am not looking to delid.
  3. Shouldn't the Dark Rock Pro 4 be more than sufficient for cooling at this point? I feel like it's not enough even though its advertised to be able to handle it/
So if anyone can point anything wrong, please do so and thanks!
 
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Your nuts... But that being said so am i and xD dumb your ram down as you oc you cpu you slightly oc your ram with it so you could be stressing your ram tell you mobo it ram is a step or two behind what it is. So if it's ddr3 1866MHz tell it it's 1600MHz. However i doubt you have ddr3 hardly anyone does anymore
 
To be honest anything below 5ghz is a good speed for a gaming computer no need to keep stressing your cpu out for no reason because its about luck and one wrong move your computer could break. My I7 700k overclocked to 4.8ghz last week got worried but my temp were fine so went into bios found out the settings was on 4.8ghz but changed it back because dont want my comp to break on me
 
Mar 16, 2019
7
0
10
Your nuts... But that being said so am i and xD dumb your ram down as you oc you cpu you slightly oc your ram with it so you could be stressing your ram tell you mobo it ram is a step or two behind what it is. So if it's ddr3 1866MHz tell it it's 1600MHz. However i doubt you have ddr3 hardly anyone does anymore
I think my RAM is on default settings.

To be honest anything below 5ghz is a good speed for a gaming computer no need to keep stressing your cpu out for no reason because its about luck and one wrong move your computer could break. My I7 700k overclocked to 4.8ghz last week got worried but my temp were fine so went into bios found out the settings was on 4.8ghz but changed it back because dont want my comp to break on me
Currently I'm leaving it as 4.8GHz, I just want to understand what the problem is unless its actually is luck and the lottery.
 
Yes it is luck of the lottery on processors.. However your ram being default means it's trting to run them at stalk settings you need to dumb them down because as you oc you cpu it auto oc your ram with it.... It never changes it in bios it just continues to boost it and boost it as you boost your cpu something tells me your more then new to this. It's something all computers do when cpu's get oc'd the computer trys to boost the memory with it
 
Mar 16, 2019
7
0
10
Yes it is luck of the lottery on processors.. However your ram being default means it's trting to run them at stalk settings you need to dumb them down because as you oc you cpu it auto oc your ram with it.... It never changes it in bios it just continues to boost it and boost it as you boost your cpu something tells me your more then new to this. It's something all computers do when cpu's get oc'd the computer trys to boost the memory with it

I'm confused, is Auto not the default setting?