Overclocking on asus h97-plus

Dealer of Aces

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Jun 23, 2014
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Alright, to my understanding Asus has allowed overclocking on the h97 plus motherboard. The auto overclock works fine and boosts me up to 4.5 ghz showing a core voltage of 1.276 in cpu-z.

When I attempt to manually overclock my system either won't boot up or BSOD's.

Im hoping to get a little help figuring out what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks!
 
Solution
Yeah, 1.4V is pretty aggressive. Remember, higher voltage means more heat. You've got a massive cooler, but it can only do so much. Chemist's rec of staying under 1.3V is a good one. For first-time OCing, I'd actually keep it 1.25V or less, as long as you're still learning things. Also, reaching 4.7 GHz on Haswell has a lot to do with how good your particular chip is ( known as the silicon lottery ).

The 4.5 GHz you saw on the auto OC was a modified turbo boost dependent on CPU load and how many cores are active. Basically it clocked it up to 4.5 with one core and probably something like 4.3 with two cores and 4.2 with three or more. That's the type of setup you can make on a Z board but usually not an H board.

Try 1.25V and 44...
First, realize that the H97 BIOS probably has some limitations on it. You're not going to have the fine control of a Z97 board. What settings are you using right now? VCore, CPU multiplier, CPU cache multiplier, cache voltage, BCLK, at least. Sometimes CPU cache is referred to as "ring."
 

Dealer of Aces

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Im very new to overclocking so mind my ignorance. The only things I've changed is I moved the multiplier to 47 with the bus speed stock at 99.98 mhz and incremented the voltage up from 1.25v up to 1.4v. I was able to boot in and test things at the 1.4v but I feel that is way too high.
 
Yeah, 1.4V is pretty aggressive. Remember, higher voltage means more heat. You've got a massive cooler, but it can only do so much. Chemist's rec of staying under 1.3V is a good one. For first-time OCing, I'd actually keep it 1.25V or less, as long as you're still learning things. Also, reaching 4.7 GHz on Haswell has a lot to do with how good your particular chip is ( known as the silicon lottery ).

The 4.5 GHz you saw on the auto OC was a modified turbo boost dependent on CPU load and how many cores are active. Basically it clocked it up to 4.5 with one core and probably something like 4.3 with two cores and 4.2 with three or more. That's the type of setup you can make on a Z board but usually not an H board.

Try 1.25V and 44 CPU multiple. Also, your CPU cache speed also needs to be monitored. Left to its own, your board usually tries to overclock the cache to the same speed as the CPU and that raises heat a lot. I'd lock the cache to a 40 multiple at the most, if your board supports that setting. Run the latest version of Prime95 on small FFT for about four hours to make sure it's stable.
 
Solution
I'd be careful with that board, actually. Sure it has a lot of great features, but it's also meant for advanced users. If you don't know what you're doing with it, you can severely damage your CPU. I'd look at something like a regular Asus Z97 board, an ASRock Z97 Extreme4, or MSI Z97 Gaming board. And remember, CPU OCing is more about a hobby than a need. If you're not running heavy-duty number crunching on the CPU, OCing it won't give you any notable performance improvement.
 

U6b36ef

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I have the 4790K, and the Asus H97 PLUS. ... No matter how much I look into the BIOS, I can not get it to OC though. (I have the latest BIOS, but no OC.)

I think there was an issue that the Haswell Refresh were in a may or may not OC category. Whereas the earlier Haswell's were more likely guaranteed to OC.

I actually don't mind the 4790K at stock clocks. It's the RAM that I would like to be able to clock up a bit. I bought 1866MHz Kingston Hyper X, and they say it OCs well. I'd just like to be able to run it at 1866MHz, because it's locked at 1600MHz by the board. I can't unlock XMP.

My PC would be usable for longer if I could get the RAM to 1866MHz or even faster, like 2100MHz. However right now, I think I am going to be forced to buy a Coffee Lake build. I was going to wait for Cannon Lake. However so many of my games are not running fast enough at 1440p. It's either the motherboard, or the RAM that's bottlenecking my PC. My CPU and GPU are not even maxing out, but so many games are still bottlenecking.

E.g. like in this screeny. My GPU is running at 67% (GTX 1080 Ti)
My CPU is running at 23% (4790K)
http://www.mediafire.com/view/crm45d5k5sqsfo1/PC%20gaming%20issue.png#

Yet my frame rate is bottlenecking in this capture to 81 fps. Some of my games are dipping well under 60fps though, and that's the issue. I like to run at about 100fps.