Overclocking 4690k and Asrock Extreme4

[OCNewbMitch]

Hi All,

I've been a user of these forums for many years as they've helped me with a load of problems I've had in the past when it's come to overclocking, so firstly I'd like to

Bit of a background info first. It's been a number of years since I last overclocked anything, last being my Q9550 back when FSB was the thing to look at. Having recently upgraded my system I am not a fresh faced young lad when it comes to OCing again as everything has changed.

My setup:
4690k with Noctua D14 or whatever it was
z97 Asrock Extreme4
R9 780
16gb Corsair Vengence 2400mhz
120gb Kingston SSD
1tb WD mechanical
600w Seasonic PSU

So I've set everything up and tested the system out at stocks for a day or two in games. Everything is running well.

What I wanted to attempt to do was diarise my attempts at getting this system overclocked as it has been some time since my last OCing experience. What I've found difficult was finding guides by people talking about their experiences with this setup or something very similar and I wanted to share some information for those with something identical or close.

As it stands, I've been playing around with getting 4.4Ghz out of the CPU. I've followed a few peoples guides who have been banding around that the CPU should do 4.4Ghz easily at 1.20v Vcore etc. I think I may have one of the crappier chips as so far I haven't been able to get 4.4Ghz without upping Vcore to around 1.28v. Even then I'm not getting 100% stability from the system.

So, from the start, looking at the Asrock board it is pretty evident that its reference names differ from other brands. Link to a video of the bios here:

I have upgraded the bios to 2.30, the latest version from the Asrock website, and am working with a pretty blank slate. So from my understanding the following has to be sorted out for OCing on this board.

Turn off all power saving feature and set voltages to Overrides instead of auto / adaptive.

Enable overclocking on all of the cores of the CPU

Change the CPU multiplier and the cache multiplier, keeping the cache multiplier around 2 - 4 less than the CPU whilst testing or leave it untouched at 35x.

Either leave the BCLK at Auto or set to 100Mhz stock.

Disabled Speedstep and Spread Spectrum

Set Vcore voltage to Override and set to 1.2v

Set CPU cache to either Auto or 1.15 depending on cache multiplier.

Set CPU Input Voltage to 1.900v, which I believe is pretty much stock with this board? However, through monitoring this, it does seem to rise slightly to 1.944v and lower to 1.850v from time to time. This has also been set to override however.

Turn C states off, power saving feature

And finally turn off any additional options that are not required for OCing purposes to start with. I believe I have LLC at level 3 currently? Unsure as to what I need this set to to be fair.

So Day 1 - I've set CPU multiplier to 40 and Cache to 36 with Vcore at 1.150v Override and autos on pretty much everything else. I've set my ram to 1600Mhz and turned off all power saving.

I've run Aida64 for 2 hours with max temps hitting mid 50s
Run IBT standard 20 cycles hitting 62c max, high 20 cycles hitting 64c max and very high hitting 64c max as well.

What I want to do now is increase the multiplier by one and test each step at 1.150v until I fail stability. I estimate I may be able to hit around 42x on this chip in which case I shall up the vcore in 0.025 steps until I'm stable. I won't be touching the cache multiplier or ram until I hit 4.4Ghz stability.

Next I'll test 41 and 42 multiplier.

Let me know how you got on with this chip and board and if you had issues with stability at lower overclocks.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

Used the chip, but the ASRock Z97 OC Formula and got to 4.8Ghz, at 1.373, now 1.378 (Don't run it there, and changed to Adaptive to get my idle back) all cooled by a Noctua NH D15S, although my RAIJINTEK Pallas got to 4.7Ghz.

I use OCCT for ten minutes as a preliminary stability test. If it runs, I go on. If not, I need to up the voltage.