i7 6700K dying?

qwertytheasdf

Commendable
Jul 13, 2016
12
0
1,510
Out of the box and it has been less than 1 month. At first it will OC to 4.6 GHz but lately my system won't boot up and I have to declock more and more, down to 4.5 which works fine for about a week, then 4.4, again 1 week, and now its at 4.3. Any higher, the system won't boot. I'm afraid that at this point if it continues it will get to a point where it won't even hold stock clock anymore. I'm only altering the BLCK frequency, not touching anything else. Any ideas? Does this warrant a RMA?

I'm using a Corsair H100i v2 water cooling system with the pre-applied thermal paste.

Specs:

Core i7 6700K
Asus Z170-A
EVGA DDR4-3200 16GB RAM
2x Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB
1TB WD Black
Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1070
EVGA SuperNOVA G2 650W
 


Single core mult is at 42, then the rest is at 41 with a 102 blck freq
 
Assuming the TEMPERATURE (cooler) is okay, reasons include:

1) Motherboard - not supplying clean voltage to CPU

2) PSU - not supplying clean voltage to motherboard (I doubt it's the PSU)

3) CPU - it's possible the CPU is "dying" to a certain extent. If it is the CPU then probably part of it managed an overclock initially but then couldn't handle it. It probably will settle down and stabilize.

*WARRANTY - you are not guaranteed to achieve higher than the default, 4.2GHz Turbo value at the default voltage specs. So under load you'll get roughly 4.0 to 4.1GHz.

I suggest you go back to the DEFAULT setup (with XMP for memory) and test the system for a while. OC later if you wish, but if you can't achieve much above this then I would stay at default.

4.2GHz Turbo is still going to give you an awesome experience, in fact a higher frequency generally won't give any noticeable improvement for gaming.
 
I think what MrN1ce9uy means is that with an unlocked K processor, you'd normally never mess with the base clock frequency. The blck doesn't just affect the CPU, but also things like the RAM and PCI bus speeds, which typically do not respond well to even slight overclocking.
 


Update:
ignore what I said.

Yes, the BASE CLOCK should not be touched. He's probably introducing instability in the memory or PCIe bus. (I'm not up to date on Skylake overclocking but I think that still applies)

1. Go back to default settings (but XMP for memory) then confirm it's reliable
2. use the BIOS OC tool, or Motherboard's Windows OC tool, or even Intel's tool

Intel's Tool: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/24075/Intel-Extreme-Tuning-Utility-Intel-XTU-
 
Yeah, there's no real reason to OC with the BCLK if you have a K series CPU. It's not as bad to do it with Skylake as it was with previous generations because the BCLK actually ISN'T tied to PCI-E clock, anymore, but it's still a better idea to just use the multipliers. Easier to do and easier to troubleshoot.
 

PCIe is no longer tied to BLCK. for Skylake. RAM (and FCLK) are still affected.
OP, were you paying attention to what speed your RAM ended up when you were increasing the BCLK?
 


It was pushing 3296 or so, from base 3200. Ran fine for a few days.

 
Did you stress test to verify stability when you originally over clocked? Could have been only semi stable, causing only infrequent crashes. Although it would seem like backing off the over clock like you did would have solved that. What were you doing with the voltage as you were changing the over clock?
 


I didn't touch the voltage at all. Initially I did use the onboard OC tool, which pushed it to 4.6 on water cooling. It would post but Windows would crash and refused to load until I reversed w/e the auto overclocking did. It did boot at 4.6 but only after I manually changed it.

Stress test ran fine overnight btw.