I7 6700k safe overclocking

[Middleton11]

Hey Guys,

So I recently made a rig with the i7 6700k. I see in BIOS it can go up to 4.6 ghz as a base overclock from the standard 4.0 ghz. However, I plan on keeping this pc for the long term, whilst I understand increasing the frequency to 4.6 ghz is different to voltage (I'm very new to overclocking so apologies if wrong) will this affect the CPU lifespan? And if so how much?

Many Thanks

Middles

 

[10tacle]

First of all, what is your CPU cooler? You will need a pretty decent air cooler (or closed loop liquid cooler) to run at 4.6GHz. Don't expect to do that on the stock Intel cooler. With that said, overclocking is mostly trial and error. Every chip is different, and some people get better chips than others (known as "winning the silicon lottery"). What this means is that they get a higher overclock with less voltage required than others. The reasons for these differences are complex, but in a nut shell, some days there is better silicon manufactured than other days.

I find that the best overclocking results start with knowing my stock speed voltage and temp use in a stress test program. That gives you a baseline to work with. You need to understand your CPU's "personality." From there, I will slowly crank up the multiplier and voltage (Vcore), watching temps in each step of testing. (D0 NOT allow the motherboard BIOS to adjust your voltage with Vcore set to "AUTO"...set that to manual and adjust in steps as mentioned. AUTO generally uses more voltage than is really necessary for a given clock speed).

The average voltage required at 4.6GHz should be around 1.35v, plus or minus a variation of .03v or so depending on how good your chip is. If you find you need upwards of 1.4v to run at 4.6GHz, then you didn't get a very good overclocking chip and need to dial it down to 4.5GHz or even 4.4GHz. The max long term voltage recommended to not exceed on a Skylake is 1.35v, although some are okay with up to 1.40v as 7x24 use (I would not recommend that). Intel says the max "safe" voltage is up to 1.45v. But on a 14nm chip, I wouldn't even come close to wanting to testing that without a serious liquid cooling system, as heat becomes exponentially a larger problem on thinner silicon and more voltage.


Finally as another thought, I have two different BIOS settings saved in my 4690K build. One setting is for overclocked, and the other is for standard/stock use. At startup I just go into BIOS and click when preset I want to boot with. Excellent tool that ASUS has, and I'm sure other board makers have something similar. When you manually set a voltage setting in BIOS, that is what it runs at all the time compared to running the CPU at stock and then letting it throttle down automatically when not under load. So there's another useful tip in extending the life of an overclocked CPU: don't always run it overclocked if you don't have to! Here's a good short review on overclocking the 6700K and results. Good luck!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9533/intel-i7-6700k-overclocking-4-8-ghz

 

[Gamer1985]

I wouldnt use the auto tuner to adjust your overclock for you. Do this manually, as it will have your core voltages bouncing around to keep it stable and sometimes it can go quite high. I have my 6700k overclocked on a stable 4.5ghz at 1.26volts which is near stock voltage and no problems. I can go even higher but i like my temps to stay low and keep my voltage at a minimum to reduce overvoltage and temperatures. I am not looking to push my cpu to its death either. Some users have there systems pushing 4.8ghz and even some watercooled are sitting 5ghz stable on a bumped vcore. You shouldnt have any problems achieving 4.6 but you should start off slow to obtain a comfortable overclock with the lowest voltage as necessary.

What board are you using? I followed a great tutorial by someone on oc.net, I used most of the settings and then tweaked my own to get a lower core voltage and then ran realbench to stress test my cpu.

Just a reminder, not everyones cpu is comparable and can achieve the same overclock with the same settings. Best way is to get comfortable navigating through your UEFI bios and work your way up slowly to a good overclock while monitoring your temperatures.

 

[ccampy]

Personally Ii wouldn't even go above 1.3v for long term use

 

[Middleton11]

First of all, what is your CPU cooler? You will need a pretty decent air cooler (or closed loop liquid cooler) to run at 4.6GHz. Don't expect to do that on the stock Intel cooler. With that said, overclocking is mostly trial and error. Every chip is different, and some people get better chips than others (known as "winning the silicon lottery"). What this means is that they get a higher overclock with less voltage required than others. The reasons for these differences are complex, but in a nut shell, some days there is better silicon manufactured than other days.

I find that the best overclocking results start with knowing my stock speed voltage and temp use in a stress test program. That gives you a baseline to work with. You need to understand your CPU's "personality." From there, I will slowly crank up the multiplier and voltage (Vcore), watching temps in each step of testing. (D0 NOT allow the motherboard BIOS to adjust your voltage with Vcore set to "AUTO"...set that to manual and adjust in steps as mentioned. AUTO generally uses more voltage than is really necessary for a given clock speed).

The average voltage required at 4.6GHz should be around 1.35v, plus or minus a variation of .03v or so depending on how good your chip is. If you find you need upwards of 1.4v to run at 4.6GHz, then you didn't get a very good overclocking chip and need to dial it down to 4.5GHz or even 4.4GHz. The max long term voltage recommended to not exceed on a Skylake is 1.35v, although some are okay with up to 1.40v as 7x24 use (I would not recommend that). Intel says the max "safe" voltage is up to 1.45v. But on a 14nm chip, I wouldn't even come close to wanting to testing that without a serious liquid cooling system, as heat becomes exponentially a larger problem on thinner silicon and more voltage.


Finally as another thought, I have two different BIOS settings saved in my 4690K build. One setting is for overclocked, and the other is for standard/stock use. At startup I just go into BIOS and click when preset I want to boot with. Excellent tool that ASUS has, and I'm sure other board makers have something similar. When you manually set a voltage setting in BIOS, that is what it runs at all the time compared to running the CPU at stock and then letting it throttle down automatically when not under load. So there's another useful tip in extending the life of an overclocked CPU: don't always run it overclocked if you don't have to! Here's a good short review on overclocking the 6700K and results. Good luck!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9533/intel-i7-6700k-overclocking-4-8-ghz

Oh yeah sorry! Forgot to mention my cooler is a corsair h60 hydro. I idle at around 19c

 

[Middleton11]

I wouldnt use the auto tuner to adjust your overclock for you. Do this manually, as it will have your core voltages bouncing around to keep it stable and sometimes it can go quite high. I have my 6700k overclocked on a stable 4.5ghz at 1.26volts which is near stock voltage and no problems. I can go even higher but i like my temps to stay low and keep my voltage at a minimum to reduce overvoltage and temperatures. I am not looking to push my cpu to its death either. Some users have there systems pushing 4.8ghz and even some watercooled are sitting 5ghz stable on a bumped vcore. You shouldnt have any problems achieving 4.6 but you should start off slow to obtain a comfortable overclock with the lowest voltage as necessary.

What board are you using? I followed a great tutorial by someone on oc.net, I used most of the settings and then tweaked my own to get a lower core voltage and then ran realbench to stress test my cpu.

Just a reminder, not everyones cpu is comparable and can achieve the same overclock with the same settings. Best way is to get comfortable navigating through your UEFI bios and work your way up slowly to a good overclock while monitoring your temperatures.

hey there, I'm using a z170 sli gigabyte board

 

[lodders]

High temperature is bad. High voltage is worse.
keep your CPU temperature below 75C and your Vcore below 1.3V, and you are golden.

Overclocking is easy up to a point, it is only the last 200Mhz which are difficult... fun to overclock to the max if it is your hobby, but makes hardly any difference to real world performance when using the PC normally

 

[10tacle]

hey there, I'm using a z170 sli gigabyte board

There are a lot of different models of Gigabyte Z170's, but even the lower-end ones should allow for good enough basic overclocking needs (BCLK, or CPU base clock is 100MHz at default, core speed...40 at default on your chip, and Vcore as mentioned is default on AUTO). BCLK used to be called the FSB, or front side bus, in older motherboard BIOSs. Today, it's called BCLK in ASUS BIOSs and CPU base clock in Gigabyte BIOSs.

I forgot to mention that I have also had success playing around with different combinations of BCLK and core speeds. For example if you up the BCLK to 102 and up the multiplier to 44, you will get the same speed as a stock 100MHz BCLK setting with a 45 multiplier combo (or close enough anyway). There are seemingly unlimited combinations to play with, and of course your chosen build components make a difference too in the success of an overclock. It's more of an art than a science.

Experiment, have fun, and just be careful to not go outside of the recommended voltage and temp ratings. Just remember, everyone's results are different for all the reasons listed above!

 

[Danra]

You have many answers here, most good, a couple bad. If you want your CPU/motherboard to last 8 years you need to make sure you are safe both with heat and voltage.

I am using a 4 1/2 year old [as of this writing] i5 3570K and run it at 4.0 GHz 24/7, and occasionally bump it up to 4.4 GHz for video editing. When my CPU was new 1.095 volts is all I needed for playing games stable.

Now that it is 4 1/2 years old I have bumped that up to 1.105 volts to run Microsoft Flight Simulator with add-ons and flying the Carenado B200 KING AIR HD SERIES [aircraft]. That may seem odd, however, that combination is VERY hard on CPUs. When the Microsoft team designed FSX they envisioned Intel shoving CPUs to 10 GHz to run the game/simulator smoothly, of course that never happened, and some add-ons make FSX even more demanding - and people think Crysis was hard on computers.

Also, when using MS-FSX my temps hang around 58 degrees [maximum] for core 0 and the rest of the cores are much cooler. At 4.4GHz core 0 [the hottest core] runs around 63 degrees and the rest run from 54 to 58 degrees C. I have found that I do not need to run 4.4GHz on any game, including FSX with demanding add-ons. I am using a Noctua NH-C14 140mm x 2 SSO CPU Cooler, I think they are no longer produced, it is still a good air cooler.

High quality lowest latency and lowest voltage RAM makes a difference with games that use a LOT of CPU power [HQ RAM will let you overclock higher because it will not give you problems. If you crank up the CPU frequency and wonder why CPU demanding games are crashing, show odd things on your screen, and so on, that can be caused by either bad RAM or RAM that is pushed too far [it may need to have extra voltage to run demanding games]. Many people overlook RAM, however, the CPU talks to your GPU by using your main board RAM [local RAM], and the slower your RAM moves data the slower your games will run - period.

Just a thought, I have had my CPU to 4.8GHz, however, I do not like running any speed over 1.280 volts - I want this rig to last another 4 1/2 years. [And, as slow as Intel is it will probably be another 4 1/2 years {8 years total} before a CPU from them is 50% faster than mine clock for clock ....]

If you want to keep your CPU and motherboard running for a long time, keep the volts and temps low.

NOTE: Edited for 2 spelling errors.