[SOLVED] Overclocking i5 9600K without changing voltage.

Aug 17, 2019
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As the title says.

Would i be able to overclock my 9600k on my motherboard ( Z390 UD) without changing the voltage? Even if its a small overclock.

And how would i go about it? I've read that you would have to set the voltage to a fixed point first then overclock.

Thanks in advance!
 
Solution
The questions isn't, and is never, IF you can get a great (or any) overclock without changing the voltage, whether higher or lower, because we already know that most systems come with more standard voltage in the default profile than what is actually required to maintain stability. The question is, is YOUR system stable, regardless of WHAT you've done to it.

To be frank, I like the idea of even testing a completely bone stock system for stability as well, because every CPU is different, and every motherboard does things differently as well especially when comparing across the different brands. Chances are good that you can eek a bit more performance out of most Intel CPUs that are unlocked without a voltage increase, but don't ever do...
Can you? Yes. You can set the multiplier to whatever you want and never touch the voltage.

Will it be stable? No, it probably won't. It "could" be, but generally speaking if you increase the multiplier you will usually need to increase the voltage as well.

You are not going to get a "yes it's ok" answer on this. Not here.

ANY kind of overclocking, no matter WHAT is is on, requires testing to verify stability, so you are the only person who can answer the question as to whether or not YOU can increase the multi (overclock) without changing voltage and that will be based on doing it, and then testing to see if it is stable. You cannot, EVER, make changes away from the default configuration when it comes to clock speed or voltage, without following that up by testing for stability.

If you are interested in doing that, then this might be a good place to start.

 
Aug 17, 2019
70
5
45
Can you? Yes. You can set the multiplier to whatever you want and never touch the voltage.

Will it be stable? No, it probably won't. It "could" be, but generally speaking if you increase the multiplier you will usually need to increase the voltage as well.

You are not going to get a "yes it's ok" answer on this. Not here.

ANY kind of overclocking, no matter WHAT is is on, requires testing to verify stability, so you are the only person who can answer the question as to whether or not YOU can increase the multi (overclock) without changing voltage and that will be based on doing it, and then testing to see if it is stable. You cannot, EVER, make changes away from the default configuration when it comes to clock speed or voltage, without following that up by testing for stability.

If you are interested in doing that, then this might be a good place to start.

Much appreciated!
 
The questions isn't, and is never, IF you can get a great (or any) overclock without changing the voltage, whether higher or lower, because we already know that most systems come with more standard voltage in the default profile than what is actually required to maintain stability. The question is, is YOUR system stable, regardless of WHAT you've done to it.

To be frank, I like the idea of even testing a completely bone stock system for stability as well, because every CPU is different, and every motherboard does things differently as well especially when comparing across the different brands. Chances are good that you can eek a bit more performance out of most Intel CPUs that are unlocked without a voltage increase, but don't ever do it and not put in the work to verify that the configuration is stable or you'll be really sad later. It's more than simply dealing with blue screens or crashes, or restarts and errors. Micro-errors from unstable CPU or memory overclocking, will be completely unnoticeable to you but will corrupt your files, operating system, games, etc., in rather short order. Just not worth it. Either be willing to do the work, or leave things alone.
 
Solution
Aug 17, 2019
70
5
45
The questions isn't, and is never, IF you can get a great (or any) overclock without changing the voltage, whether higher or lower, because we already know that most systems come with more standard voltage in the default profile than what is actually required to maintain stability. The question is, is YOUR system stable, regardless of WHAT you've done to it.

To be frank, I like the idea of even testing a completely bone stock system for stability as well, because every CPU is different, and every motherboard does things differently as well especially when comparing across the different brands. Chances are good that you can eek a bit more performance out of most Intel CPUs that are unlocked without a voltage increase, but don't ever do it and not put in the work to verify that the configuration is stable or you'll be really sad later. It's more than simply dealing with blue screens or crashes, or restarts and errors. Micro-errors from unstable CPU or memory overclocking, will be completely unnoticeable to you but will corrupt your files, operating system, games, etc., in rather short order. Just not worth it. Either be willing to do the work, or leave things alone.

Awesome thanks a ton!
 
If you leave voltage on auto and increase the multiplier, the mobo will pump more juice in.
To counteract this, I just set a "voltage offset" to bring the core voltage back down to what it was when the CPU was at stock frequency.
And yes, as DB said, you test to make sure your settings are stable. The closer you get to your final settings, the longer you test. For me, 24 hours of error free stress testing is stable.

There are more in-depth methods, but voltage offset is the answer to your question.
 
I've never seen a system error out on another stress utility if it could pass 8 hours of Realbench AND maybe 15 hours of Prime95 small FFT OR with custom settings for 8 hours as shown in the spoiler below, with AVX/AVX2 disabled.

Final testing with Prime95

It is highly advisable that you do a final test using Prime95 version 26.6 or the latest version WITH AVX and AVX2 disabled, and run a custom configured Blend test. You can also use the Blend mode option as is, but after a fair amount of personal testing, asking questions from some long time members with engineering level degrees that have forgotten more about memory architectures than you or I will ever know, and gathering opinions from a wide array of memory enthusiasts around the web, I'm pretty confident that the custom option is a lot more likely to find errors with the memory configuration, and faster, if there are any to be found.

Please note as this is rather important, if you prefer, or have problems running version 26.6 because you have a newer platform that doesn't want to play nice with version 26.6, you can use the latest version of Prime95 with the Custom test selected but you will need to make the following change.

In the bottom of the Torture test selection popup menu there will be some options for disabling AVX. I recommend that you do so, not because we are doing thermal testing and require a steady state workload (Which AVX wouldn't affect anyhow, as Computronix explained to me), but because the last thing you need during memory testing is having to worry about CPU temperatures, and you will, with AVX enabled.

So, uncheck the option for AVX2. That will un-gray the option for AVX, and uncheck that box as well.

Now open Prime95.

Click on "Custom". Input a value of 512k in the minimum FFT size field. Leave the maximum FFT size field at 4096k. In the "Memory to use" field you should take a look at your current memory allocation in either HWinfo or system resource monitor. Whatever "free" memory is available, input approximately 75% of that amount. So if you currently have 16GB of installed memory, and approximately 3GB are in use or reserved leaving somewhere in the neighborhood of 13GB free, then enter something close to 75% of that amount.

So if you have 13GB free, or something reasonably close to that, then 75% of THAT would be 9.75GB, which, when multiplies times 1024 will roughly equal about 9984MB. You can average things out by simply selecting the closest multiple of 1024 to that amount just to keep it simple, so we'll say 10 x 1024= 10240mb and enter that amount in the field for "Memory to use (MB)". We are still well within the 13GB of unused memory BUT we have left enough memory unused so that if Windows decides to load some other process or background program, or an already loaded one suddenly needs more, we won't run into a situation where the system errors out due to lack of memory because we've dedicated it all to testing.

I've experienced false errors and system freezes during this test from over allocating memory, so stick to the method above and you should be ok.


Moving right along, do not change the time to run each FFT size.Leave that set to 15 minutes.

Click run and run the Custom test for 8 hours. If it passed Memtest86 and it passes 8 hours of the Custom test, the memory is 100% stable, or as close to it as you are ever likely to get but a lot of experts in the area of memory configuration suggest that running the extended Windows memory diagnostic test is also a pretty good idea too.

If you get errors, (and you will want to run HWinfo alongside Prime95 so you can periodically monitor each thread as Prime will not stop running just because one worker drops out, so you need to watch HWinfo to see if there are any threads not showing 100% usage which means one of the workers errored and was dropped) then you need to either change the timings, change the DRAM voltage or change the DRAM termination voltage, which should be approximately half of the full DRAM voltage.

There are also other bios settings that can affect the memory configuration AND stability, such as the SOC, VCCIO and system agent voltages, so if you have problems with stability at higher clock speeds you might want to look at increasing those slightly. Usually, for Intel at least, something in the neighborhood of 1.1v on both those is pretty safe. There are a substantial number of guides out there covering those two settings, but most of them are found within CPU overclocking guides so look there in guides relevant to your platform.

As a further measure of assurance that your WHOLE configuration is stable, you can download and run Realbench for 8 hours. If the system freezes or fails when running Realbench with your full memory amount set, try running it again but select only half your amount of installed memory.

Yes, that test configuration is mainly intended for memory testing, but if there is an instability due to the CPU configuration, it's probably going to show up there as well.