[SOLVED] Old doofus trying to overclock his Alienware PC

[mercster]

I used to overclock my PCs in the 90s. Eventually I decided, it's not worth it. Get a new PC if you want something faster, I said. It's just gonna wear out your hardware, I said.

The other month I bought an AlienWare because it was $600 off. A $2100 PC for $1500. It has an i7-9700K.

SO now I'm into flight simulation and I'm wanting to overclock this thing. AlienWares are supposed to have built-in overclocking, but the OC1 and OC2 presets ended up crashing my machine. I took a look in the BIOS/UEFI, and the voltage looked low. So I googled about the i7-9700K and someone said, don't go above 1.4V voltage. So I went in there and changed it to 1.3V, and it seems stable. People talk about other timings like cache, I don't see anything.

Here is a screenshot of the BIOS/UEFI screen, and what I've set it to. It seems stable but I don't understand the "PWR Limit" stuff; I'm also not sure about the voltage and my overclock (the default overclock was like, 1.215V which seemed awful low. "Core voltage override" is what I set to 1.3, but it seems variable when I benchmark. Should I have "Core Ratio Limit Override" higher? it seems to be what the CPU freq is set at, but again, it seems variable.

Please help an old UNIX admin with this crazy stuff.


My UEFI screen on overclock settings

Thank you.

 

[EndEffeKt_24]

Your options regarding overclocking will be dependant on your motherboard chipset. Other then that the main rules from 1997 still apply ;-)
Could you please list your full system specs?

 

[mercster]

It is an Alienware Aurora R8. The motherboard is some Dell OEM thing; we could both arrive at the same info by just googling Aurora R8. As far as generalized specs:

i7-9700K
16G ram (2993mhz)
2080Super

But all I wanna do is overclock the CPU so nothing else should come into it. The UEFI screenshot I linked to is as far as the UEFI (BIOS) options go. I backed the Voltage override thing down to "1275" and it still seems stable.

 

[EndEffeKt_24]

You said "its variable when I benchmark" thats most likely some internal calibration like LLC going on. Is your VCore even applied? Does it go down with your change of settings or is it irrelevant what you type in? 1,275v is good but not unrealistic. Might be you just have a good chip.