News How to Overclock a CPU

[Admin]

We cover all of the nitty-gritty details of how to overclock your CPU.

How to Overclock a CPU : Read more

 

[randomizer]

It was more fun when you did it by drawing on it with a pencil.

 

[mamasan2000]

I think it was the AMD 1400 XP or whatever it was called. I tried a solder pen on it to be able to OC it. I failed 3 times and gave up. It was around year 2000 anyway.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It was so simple when you just had to fiddle with the jumper box...

 

[mac_angel]

I'm curious. What are people's thoughts, and tests, with under-volting?
Sometimes it seems that thermal-throttling is an issue, especially with these newer CPUs pumping out so much heat, even for a decent AIO.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I'm curious. What are people's thoughts, and tests, with under-volting?
Sometimes it seems that thermal-throttling is an issue, especially with these newer CPUs pumping out so much heat, even for a decent AIO.

Once I find a stable overclock on standard voltage, I always try and drop it down. I was able to get 4.2ghz all cores on my 3700X with 1.2v, which is quite an under. This 5950X does 4.65/4.5 on 1.3v which is technically an undervolt.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Optional — Disable Intel SpeedStep — You can either have the chip always run at its overclocked frequency, or have it drop to a lower clockspeed during idle or low-load conditions. If you leave SpeedStep enabled, the 'High Performance Windows power plan will not allow the processor to shift into a lower frequency, so you'll need to enable the 'Balanced' plan to enable downclocking.

This was not an accurate statement prior to Windows 11, unless you had SpeedSHIFT enabled. With SpeedSHIFT disabled and SpeedStep ENABLED, you could configure your overclock to automatically reduce both frequency and voltage so long as you went into the advanced options for the power plan and manually set the "Min" to something between 5 and 10 percent, or wherever you wanted to see it live while at "idle".

In fact, I've never encountered that behavior with any Intel CPU until recently upgrading to Alder lake and Windows 11, and I've configured plenty of overclocks on everything from Sandy through Coffee lake refresh, and now just this one Alder lake i7, which does seem to act as you describe although it did not seem to matter whether Speedshift and Speedstep were enabled or not, it would not downclock unless the balanced power plan was chosen regardless of any changes to the advanced options for the power plan. There might actually be some variance in this behavior based on board model since we know that board manufacturers don't adhere to the Intel spec in every case. In fact, not in a lot of cases.

 

[KyaraM]

I'm curious. What are people's thoughts, and tests, with under-volting?
Sometimes it seems that thermal-throttling is an issue, especially with these newer CPUs pumping out so much heat, even for a decent AIO.

It's quite awesome, honestly. I went the adaptive + offset route with my 12700k, it's now running at 1.280V and offset -0.135V. Tested stock speed and 100MHz over, both worked. Now at stock, it runs at an average of 1.065V gaming. Not overly interested in overclocking, though, so that was good enough for me. Still, been far enough away from max temps to try more one day.

 

[Johnpombrio]

The heady days of getting a large performance boost by overclocking are long gone. Most new processors are already "overclocked" by running the CPUs fast enough to get better numbers to sell the processor while barely sticking to the TDP. Add to that the boost clocks and the question becomes "why bother?" Some of the higher-end CPUs recommend water cooling even without overclocking. I am finding that I am getting less and less boost for even minor overclocks while having the CPU rapidly heat up and rarely notice any difference in performance when I do. About the only difference is in benchmarks, to be honest. Is it still worth overclocking when you have to go to water cooling just to add a few frames per second on a game benchmark?
I also run the memory at its rated setting as I see no difference when using the machine on higher memory settings.
For the first time in my life, I bought an Intel Alder Lake CPU that was NOT the top end just to avoid having to water cool the chip. I air cool and don't bother to overclock it due to the boost clocks pretty much doing that for me.
The end of an Era for me which reached its peak with Sandy Bridge.

 

[escksu]

I'm curious. What are people's thoughts, and tests, with under-volting?
Sometimes it seems that thermal-throttling is an issue, especially with these newer CPUs pumping out so much heat, even for a decent AIO.

Oh it works very well esp. with CPUs that has limited power and thermal envelop.

I undervolt my Intel NUC using the Intel oc software so it will boost higher.

 

[escksu]

The heady days of getting a large performance boost by overclocking are long gone. Most new processors are already "overclocked" by running the CPUs fast enough to get better numbers to sell the processor while barely sticking to the TDP. Add to that the boost clocks and the question becomes "why bother?" Some of the higher-end CPUs recommend water cooling even without overclocking. I am finding that I am getting less and less boost for even minor overclocks while having the CPU rapidly heat up and rarely notice any difference in performance when I do. About the only difference is in benchmarks, to be honest. Is it still worth overclocking when you have to go to water cooling just to add a few frames per second on a game benchmark?
I also run the memory at its rated setting as I see no difference when using the machine on higher memory settings.
For the first time in my life, I bought an Intel Alder Lake CPU that was NOT the top end just to avoid having to water cool the chip. I air cool and don't bother to overclock it due to the boost clocks pretty much doing that for me.
The end of an Era for me which reached its peak with Sandy Bridge.

Yes, those days are long gone. Still remember the old days of Celeron 300A... Easily 500+MHz (most common was 512mhz) ... A few could hit 600mhz.. that's double the original speed. Even faster than the "premium" pentium II...lol

 

[escksu]

Overclocking was much harder but alot more fun. Remember the days of original athlon slot-A cpus. You need to swap positions of the SMD resistors to change the multiplier...

Then pentium days oc was done with jumpers instead.

Later, the athlon-xp had laser cut contacts...

PhenomII with it's "hidden" CPUs was really cool

Now, there isn't even a need to oc since AMD and Intel does it for you.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Pfff overclocking. My days over overclocking are over. The gains are so negligible (other than bragging rights) and are too expensive when the inevitably prematurely die.

These days I'm team undervolt. Get the same performance but with less power, heat and longer life of the components.

 

[Misgar]

I overclocked my first computer in 1985 by unsoldering the HC6U crystal (if memory serves me right) and fitting a 2-pin crystal socket. I borrowed a selection of crystals from the Transmitter Department at work and tried them out. I got a decent CPU overclock out of the system. No such thing as controllable BIOS in those days. I've left my 7950X at stock, because I prefer stable operation when processing video files overnight.