i7 4770k@4.2Ghz requires 1.25V, silicon lottery?

[Sam_250]

I've been attempting to OC my CPU for the past couple days, so far I've been unable to achieve a stable OC below 1.25v at 4.2Ghz, Windows won't even boot below this voltage. Is it possible to have lost the silicon lottery this badly or could there be another cause? My PC is almost 4 years old at this point, bar the RAM, SSD and cooler.

Here are my specs:
i7 4770k
Hyper Cooler 212 Evo
2x8GB Corsair Vengeance @ 1600Mhz
GTX 770 Gigabyte Windforce 4GB
Maximus VII Ranger Motherboard
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
2x 2TB Seagate Barracuda
750W Asaka Venom PSU

I've turned off all the applicable power saving settings I could find in the BIOS and increased Initial Voltage to 1.9V, stress tests temps peak at around 80c and idles hover around 40c.

Cheers for any replies.

 

[Barty1884]

Can you go higher, at 1.25V? <1.3V is fine and, while 1.25V is pretty high for a fairly moderate OC, the middle ground shouldn't matter too much - the upper end of OCing vs the 'stock' settings would be my main consideration.

What are your auto voltages at stock? Each board handles it a little differently.
IIRC, typical is around ~1.12-1.15V. If your boards starting point is higher (say 1.15V+), then your OCing voltage would likely need to be increased proportionately.

From there, see what kind of clocks you can push @ 1.25V. You have a little headroom, but not a ridiculous amount. Perhaps you can net 4.4-4.5GHz @ 1.25V too, at which point, that's a pretty decent OC on a 4770K.

 

[Eximo]

My i7-4770k requires 1.29 volts to do 4.3Ghz, it would do 4.5Ghz but only at 1.35 volts which lead to 95C+ temperatures.

From what I recall those were the average chips. The really bad ones couldn't manage 4.0Ghz at any voltage. The golden samples would hit 4.5Ghz on 1.28-1.3 volts.

Devil's Canyon (i7-4790k) averages about 300Mhz over the i7-4770k for a given voltage.

 

[Sam_250]

Thanks for the replies. I was unable to boot windows at 4.3Ghz @ 1.25v or 1.26v, I had to increase to 1.29v to pass a 20 minute stress test on Intel's XTU program, with temps peaking at 88c.

At stock settings, 3.5Ghz, according to the BIOS core voltage is at 1.040v, cache is at 1.200v, and initial voltage is at 1.856v.
When I turn Turbo Boost on and leave everything on auto the core voltage gets set at 1.200v.

Also my 4.2Ghz @ 1.25v had a BSOD 15 minutes into CS:GO, so I'm not confident that's stable anymore.

 

[FH2K]

I run my 4770k @ 4.5GHz with 1.225V. I'll try 4.7 with 1.280V.