 Shawn's his life Welcome to my Devil's Canyon and Pentium Anniversary Edition Overclocking Guide. Now the drawbacks of overclocking your CPU are many. Overclockable hardware is more expensive. If it's sending correctly, it can cause your computer to blue screen or otherwise be unstable. It makes your PC consume more power and output more heat. It can make your processor not last as long. It voids the warranty on many components. And finally, doing it right can be downright time consuming. So why do we do it? Because we want to go fast! Now before we get into this guide, when it comes to running things beyond their specifications, I don't think I have to spell out that nothing is guaranteed. So with that out of the way, let's get into the parts we're using for our guide today. For the CPU, we actually have two different choices. The first is a 4790K, which is a quad core with hyperthreading clocked a little faster than the older 4770K from our last overclocking guide at 4GHz base and up to 4.4GHz boost. It features an upgraded thermal solution for cooler temperatures versus its older brother, and due to refinements in Intel's chip selection process promises more consistent overclocking results. A fine choice. Oh, and like its predecessor, it's a K-Series skew, which means it's unlocked and overclocking ready. Which leads us into our second CPU, the Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition. This chip is truly remarkable. It's not the fanciest thing in the world with no hyperthreading, only two processing cores, and a mere 3.2GHz stock clock speed, but it's unlocked, which means, maybe, massive overclocking potential. For cooling, we're using a Corsair H100 liquid cooler. I recommend a good tower air cooler or a dual fan all-in-one liquid cooler for the best overclocking results. For our power supply, we've gone with the Corsair AX850. We could have gone overkill with the latest AX1500i, but getting a great overclock is not about having a high wattage power supply, as much as it's about having a good quality one with stable rails and very little ripple. So this one will be okay. The AX1500i would have been better, but this one will be fine. Speaking of overkill, we've gone slightly overkill on the motherboard with a Z97WS from ASUS. Both Luke and I are very fond of WS-series boards. They're just so dependable and easy to work with. They offer great compatibility with other components, amazing build quality, and while they lack some of the fancy extras that ROG or TUF-series boards might have, they've got it where it counts, and they'll overclock with the best of them. These days, the motherboard actually doesn't affect overclocking results much, unless you're pushing things to the limits with exotic cooling anyway. So as long as you pick an ASUS motherboard, you should be able to follow along with our guide exactly with other brand motherboards having similar options with just a little bit more digging required on your part to match up the stuff we're changing to what it looks like on the other board. Finally, for memory, we're using an 8GB kit of 2400MHz G-Skill memory. High-speed memory isn't a huge deal these days, but with how much less expensive it's gotten lately compared to standard 1600MHz stuff and how easy it is to dial in at high frequencies with XMP profiles, we figured what the heck. It's optional, but we'll show it to you anyway. Okay, Linus, enough preamble. How do I overclock? Step one, don't overclock. Start by updating your BIOS and drivers, running a stress test for an hour or two, doing at least a couple passes of Memtest 86, and playing games for a couple of hours to ensure that things are functioning correctly out of the box. After all, you wouldn't take a new car to the track and try to go 200km an hour in it until you made sure it can stay in a straight line going 60 clicks, right? Step two, gather your software toolkit. While I mentioned Memtest 86 already, you're going to want a couple of other things in your bag of tricks for stress testing. CPU-Z lets you see how your processor is running so you can verify your settings, and Core Temp lets you monitor your CPU's temperatures in real time to see if they're getting out of hand. If you want an all-in-one utility in a nice user-friendly package, AIDA64 gets a solid recommendation from us. It's what we use, and it includes monitoring, stress testing, and diagnostic stuff, but it does cost money. Everything else I mentioned is free. Step three, set aside the time to do it properly. Be prepared to have your system not be usable for a day or two if you want to correctly dial in an overclock. I'm not saying it will take that long, I'm just saying it can take that long, especially if you're a real stickler about validation. I've seen stress testing programs fail after even a full day of burn-in, and my personal standard is that if it's not 100% stable, I'd rather turn it down a little rather than risk losing valuable work and data. So I typically validate for 24 hours or more. Step four, the tour of the UEFI BIOS. On most motherboards, pressing delete will land you in the UEFI BIOS. If you're not sure about your motherboard, consult the manual. ASUS drops you into a simplified UEFI by default that gives you all the basic info you need, like temperatures, and lets you adjust your fan speeds, change boot order, and enable your memory's XMP profiles, but doesn't really allow for any serious tuning. Press F7 to get to advanced mode. Most modern motherboard BIOSes have a ton of features that we didn't have in the old days. You can navigate through the menus manually, or you can create your own favorites menu with the settings that you use most frequently. You can make quick notes as you progress through your overclock and review them later. You can save profiles for known good settings so it's easy to revert to something that works when you're done experimenting, and you can even have the motherboard take care of overclocking for you on its own. We're going to experiment with that feature later on to see how close it can get to the performance of our manual overclock. Now if you want a bit of a deeper rundown of every setting, things actually haven't changed a lot since our last Haswell overclocking guide. In this guide, we're going to leave most of the dials on auto and explain only the ones that we're changing as we go. Let's jump into the AI tweaker heading where most of this stuff is found. Now most enthusiast grade memory these days has an XMP profile, and if you set this setting to XMP, it will dial in into its optimal settings. You can push memory past its rated speeds, but because of how difficult memory instability is to diagnose, I really don't recommend doing it unless you have a lot of patience. Moving on down, the CPU core ratio is where most of the magic happens. This ratio times the base clock, locked at 100 MHz for all intents and purposes, is how the processor's final frequency is derived. As for the settings here, sync all cores is faster and easier to dial in because it runs every core at the same speed, which is easy to stress test, but setting up different maximum turbos depending on how many cores are active could yield slightly better results in dual or single threaded applications. We're going to stick with sync all cores. Next up is the CPU core voltage. Increasing core voltage improves CPU stability at higher clock speeds, but higher voltages are also the main reason that overclocking causes higher temperatures and a shorter lifespan for your processor. Now there are actually several ways to set CPU voltage. We're going to use manual voltage, the generally regarded as pretty safe voltage being 1.3 volts for Haswell based CPUs, to find our max overclock. Then to save power, we're going to switch to adaptive later on. Adaptive gives us better power consumption characteristics when the computer is not working hard and ramps up whenever the CPU needs more juice. But it's not good for stress testing when you're actually validating the overclock because certain stability testing applications can cause voltage spikes that can hurt your CPU in adaptive mode. So now that we're familiar with the settings that we'll be running, it's time to overclock. We're going to start by leaving our CPU at stock voltage, so 1.25 volts. This is different from auto, which will actually scale voltage as you increase your frequencies thanks to the same BIOS wizardry that will automatically be handling all the other settings in here that we didn't cover. Then we're going to turn all of our cores multiplier up a little bit. Let's say to 44, which would give us a speed of 4.4 gigahertz, actually equal to what turbo boost will do on its own. But let's just see if it can do it all the time. So now we press F10 to save our settings, boot into Windows and do some stability testing. If the CPU passes a short, let's say five to 10 minute stress test and temperatures are within your comfort zone, remember higher temps equals shorter CPU lifespan, then we boot back into the BIOS and push it some more. If it fails, then we add a bit more voltage and see if that makes it stable. It's important to go through this process to find out where you're needing to crank up the voltage a lot for a very small CPU frequency return. That's the way to find the balance between the longevity of your chip and the extra performance that you crave. Another thing to consider is the conditions in which you're overclocking. Is it optimal? Is it the worst case scenario? An overclock that you set up in the winter might not work correctly in the summer. So leave yourself some buffer room or save a couple of other profiles that work in case you need to grab one of them when the weather heats up. Another thing to consider if you're working on other more advanced settings within the BIOS, let's say you want to do some tuning to the RAM timings, is to throw another step into the routine. Not everything you tweak will have a positive result. So run a short benchmark rather than just a stability test to see if what you're doing is actually helping or hindering performance. Once you've dialed in your overclock using manual voltage, switch over to adaptive, then use a real world stress test like Cinebench to validate your load voltage. I found that just doing the math and keying in the same number actually didn't work. So I used AI Suite to make sure the voltages were right. And even though the software voltage readouts are typically not very accurate, the system was stable and my load temps were similar once I turned things up a little bit more so it seemed to work. A digital multimeter would actually be preferable if your board has voltage checkpoints though. That's a great feature for overclockers, unfortunately not found on WS boards. So following this methodology, we achieved a 4.8 GHz on our 4790K at 1.3 volts with a load CPU temperature of around 65 degrees and rock solid stability. And 4.7 GHz on our G3258 at 1.365 volts with a load CPU temperature of 49 degrees. I gave the Pentium about 0.065 volts more than the typical best practice setting for Haswell for a couple of reasons. Number one is that temperatures were still great since it's a dual core and doesn't output much heat. And number two is that as a $75 chip, I'm a little bit more willing to live on the wild side with it. Both of these results are going to turn into some significant real world performance improvements, but by now you might be sitting there kind of going, well Linus, this is all fine and good but ain't nobody got time for that. Is there another way? Well, actually there are two other ways that I alluded to before to overclock on an Asus motherboard. Number one is to simply navigate to the easy tuning wizard in the BIOS, answer a couple short questions about your setup, then let the board apply one of the pre-done profiles that Asus' engineers have cooked up. This resulted in lower, more conservative overclocks at higher temperatures for both of our chips. Overclocks were still reasonable at only a couple of more degrees on both CPUs, but it's just plain not as good as a manual overclock. The second alternative way is to use Asus' AI Suite software's five-way optimization feature to have the board overclock itself. It actually goes through much the same increase speed until unstable, then increase voltage until stable, rinse and repeat process that we did, except it does it completely on its own. And it actually works reasonably well. The automated system ended up 100 MHz slower on my 4790K and 100 MHz faster on my G3258, with the only issue being that in both cases it was applying more voltage than I was really comfortable with. And since I'd already tested the system and found it to be stable with less voltage, it seems like Asus was overdoing it a bit in both cases. Not a huge deal if you just want a quick and dirty overclock since it can dial it in in about 10 minutes and you don't even need to touch it and they were both stable, it's just not the proper way to do things either. And that pretty much wraps it up. Thanks for checking out this overclocking guide. If this answered your questions, then happy overclocking. If it didn't and you still want some one-on-one help, try the CPU section of the Linus TechTips forum. Our community is full of helpful individuals and I'm sure one of our knowledgeable members would be happy to help you. And I think that's pretty much it. Thanks to Intel for sponsoring this overclocking guide. Thanks to you for watching. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment with any funny overclocking stories you might have and as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus TechTips for more videos just like this one if you haven't already. Oh right, and there's a support us link in the video description. You can give us a monthly contribution, change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code and you can buy a cool t-shirt just like this one.