Overclocking Locked Intel CPU

[jonathanrhthong]

I have an i5-8400 and I am wondering whether I am able to overclock it on an Gigabyte Aorus Gaming Z370 Wifi. It says on the monitor 3900 mhz, but I've heard that it's fully locked, so that might do nothing. I basically turned on the speed shift thing or something. Is it OC'ed, or is there a way to do that?

 

[Scottray]

No - it's locked. You can't overclock it.

 

[10tacle]

The above is not entirely true. You can overclock the BCLK speed (used to be called the Front Side Bus or FSB in the old days) past the stock/default 100MHz. So for example your chip has a 28x multiplier running on a 100MHz BLCK. That means 2.8GHz base speed (not including boost). You can try overclocking the BCLK to 105MHz but that might cause instability problems.

Not only that, but even if it was successful, you'd only be looking at a chip running an effective 2.94GHz base and 4.095GHz boost. Not really worth it and you wouldn't see the results real world. So many people, myself included, in builds in the past wished they had just spent the extra money on a K-series chip and Z-series motherboard. Also that 3.9GHz speed means you are running it on boost using 2-5 of the six cores. The six core boost speed under load is 3.8GHz.

I'm also curious why you chose a Z-series motherboard with a non-K series chip pairing.