Trouble OC'ing with MSI M5 + 6600K

[John_485]

NZXT S340 Case
Intel Skylake 6600K
MSI Z170A Gaming M5 Motherboard
Crucial 2400 Ballistix Sport LT 2x8 16GB
Cooler Master 212 Hyper LED CPU Cooler.
Corsair AF120 Quiet Edition front intake fans
Two 120mm back and top rear exhaust fans (both 120mm, though I just bought a Cougar CFD14HBR 140mm Ultra Silent Case fan for the top exhaust port of my case that I haven't installed yet).
EVGA 500W 80+ Bronze PSU
OCZ Trion 150 SSD; An old Western Digital Cavair Black 7200rpm 640GB HDD.
Windows 10 Home Edition.



Hello,

I've been having a damned difficult time trying to get a stable overclock with this motherboard (MSI Z170A Gaming M5) and the Intel Skylake 6600K. I know all overclocks are not the same and I understand that results may very depending on differences in hardware/cooling, etc. but I though the 6600K was easy to overclock and at relatively low voltages (I often read of people getting to 4.4Ghz at a Vcore of 1.250v). I haven't been so luck yet and if I don't figure things out by tomorrow I will not be able to replace either the motherboard or the processor (if the fault lies with either one).

My target is 4.3ghz. At first I tried the recommend Vcore of 1.250v (at optimized default in the Bios as a starting point) with XMP disabled (just in case) and all power saving features turned off. I ran Prime95 on Blend and after two runs one of my cores stops working. The best I could do with Intel Burn Test (@4.2ghz) was to pass the standard test, if I tried the next setting up [High] the program would either shut down with a warning message or the computer would freeze up. I pass AIDA64's stability test without a problem, ran a Cinebench CPU benchmark without problems, etc. I've had no luck with Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (just for stress testing, not overclocking with it) and my memory passed four hours of the UEFI MemeTest86 without any errors.

Right now I'm at a Vcore of 1.300v in the Bios. I've set an Override Offset of 0.065mv to battle the voltage droop at load. The Ring is at 3900GHz, FCLK is at 1000GHz. The offset brings the Vcore up to 1.368v (though at idle the system Vcore in CPUID is 1.384, but I believe the values are slightly different on how the motherboard steps up each offset I set).

Ideally I'd like to get a lower Vcore at idle and find some way to battle voltage droop during load. I'm already heading towards the voltage limits for this chip (1.450v) and I haven't even got 4.3ghz OC stable!

There are other settings in the Bios dealing with voltage/delivery to the CPU that I do not fully understand and won't touch until I have, at the very least, a basic understanding of their function.

This board doesn't have LLC (Load-line-calibration) which was very surprising since it isn't a budget board and it was marketed for gamers and overclockers. MSI tech support (based out of California) is horrible. The phone "techs" know virtually nothing about the board and say if I want LCC I have to buy the more expensive M7 as they have no plans on ever updating the current Bios to add LLC.

Thanks for reading, I know it was a bit long.

Please help if you can,

-laz.

 

[Tradesman1]

First thing - do you have the latest BIOS and mobo drivers?

 

[John_485]

First thing - do you have the latest BIOS and mobo drivers?

I sure do.

 

[grimsin]

No LLC? very strange its pretty much a standard option now.
try auto voltage, and the overclock you want, then monitor the voltage to see what it needs when you stress it, then apply a slightly lower voltage manually to see if it will take it.
with my board im at 4.5ghz with auto voltage as it doesnt overvolt it at all, the max volts i see with intelburn test with 4.5ghz and auto volts is 1.354v

 

[John_485]

Yeah, it is odd that a board at this price-point doesn't have LLC. I believe MSI left it out of the M5 Bios so people would upgrade to the more expensive M7 motherboard, which has load-line-calibration. Apparently though I can just use the offsets which do the same thing as LLC does, at least that is what I have been told, even that those options are actually better then traditional LLC because I can dial it in manually and be precise, while LLC setting are usually limited to three or four % options, though I could be totally wrong!

I've done that also (auto-voltage) and have monitored everything. The only thing I can come up with is I'm not using a good base-bios setting to work from (like "Optimized Default"). Maybe there is a specific setting or settings that are holding everything back?

Thanks for the response,

-laz.