Over clocking crashes after about 3 hours of usage

[Smits29]

Hey, guys. I have attempted to over clock my CPU to 4.6GHz at 1.4V, I ran Aida 64 for a good 4 hours and all seemed good, temps looked good at 68°C under load and so I proceeded to play my games. A few hours have passed and unexpectedly my PC froze and would not let me re-boot or turn off so I had to turn off the power supply itself.

I've made sure that I got 4.5Ghz stable at 1.3V and I have zero issues with it, it's only when increase the frequency by 100Mhz more and that's where the issues start.

i7 6700k

H55 corsair water cooler

MSI GTX 970

Asrock extreme 4 z170

16GB OCPC Ram 2133 MHz

Aerocool integrator 850 watt PSU (80 PLUS BRONZE)

 

[synphul]

It's possible that you've reached the stable limit for the cpu. Crashing means it's not stable and when you back it off it's fine? So 4.5ghz seems to be its limit. Three things come into play when overclocking, temps need to be under control and within tolerance for the cpu, core voltage needs to be within tolerance for the cpu and stability.

While programs to test stability like asus rog realbench are a pretty good overall system stability test pushing the cpu, ram, gpu etc in various combinations it doesn't matter if a pc passes all the stability tests out there if it crashes during normal use. Unless of course it's one specific game or one particular program, then things like the program, drivers etc could be the culprit. Unlikely in this case though if it's fine at 4.5 but crashes at 4.6 and the results are reproduced.

 

[Smits29]

It's possible that you've reached the stable limit for the cpu. Crashing means it's not stable and when you back it off it's fine? So 4.5ghz seems to be its limit. Three things come into play when overclocking, temps need to be under control and within tolerance for the cpu, core voltage needs to be within tolerance for the cpu and stability.

While programs to test stability like asus rog realbench are a pretty good overall system stability test pushing the cpu, ram, gpu etc in various combinations it doesn't matter if a pc passes all the stability tests out there if it crashes during normal use. Unless of course it's one specific game or one particular program, then things like the program, drivers etc could be the culprit. Unlikely in this case though if it's fine at 4.5 but crashes at 4.6 and the results are reproduced.

So basically have I lost the silicone lottery? Because if stable at 4.5 GHz and unstable at 4.6Ghz after prolonged use then that must be the case, correct?

 

[synphul]

That's possible. It's also possible you may need to fine tune the overclock a bit more, each cpu is different. You might try a variation of baseclock and multiplier overclocking, you may need to raise or lower your uncore/ring multiplier. You may also need to use an offset.

Here's a decent guide that may be able to help, this is just one of several out there.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1570313/skylake-overclocking-guide-with-statistics

If the cpu truly has hit its limit then it's possible it's not a great overclocker. Unfortunately overclocking isn't guaranteed, though 4.5ghz isn't totally a loss either. If comparing to stock speeds the cpu only turbo boosts to 4.2ghz and may not even maintain that if all 4 cores are active.

 

[Smits29]

That's possible. It's also possible you may need to fine tune the overclock a bit more, each cpu is different. You might try a variation of baseclock and multiplier overclocking, you may need to raise or lower your uncore/ring multiplier. You may also need to use an offset.

Here's a decent guide that may be able to help, this is just one of several out there.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1570313/skylake-overclocking-guide-with-statistics

If the cpu truly has hit its limit then it's possible it's not a great overclocker. Unfortunately overclocking isn't guaranteed, though 4.5ghz isn't totally a loss either. If comparing to stock speeds the cpu only turbo boosts to 4.2ghz and may not even maintain that if all 4 cores are active.

4.5Ghz is a very respectable over clock don't get me wrong and obviously won't bottleneck any GPU I throw at it for years to come but it's just a shame that sometimes there can be a fault in the fabrication process of building a CPU to limit its potential but if I can't get passed 4.5Ghz so be it

I'll give that guide a go and I'll let you know

Edit: The guide has worked well for me, thank you for helping me out!