 Intro Welcome to the Intel 4th generation core series processor aka code name Haswell Overclocking guide we're going to show you how to get the most out of your new CPU in only a few simple steps Let's start with the basic benefits of overclocking. I actually had someone ask me about this the other day You know what is computer overclocking? And I was trying to explain well you take the parts that you would normally buy and then you turn them up in speed And you can increase the voltage to make sure the stability stays right and basically you're getting more performance than what you actually paid for And this individual said to me. Oh, so it's kind of like overclocking your phone, and I said yes Overclocking is overclocking whether it's a PC or a phone the idea is you want more Performance, and you don't necessarily want to pay anymore for the actual processor But of course I have to tell you guys the dangers of overclocking Overclocking can result or will result in higher heat output more power consumption it can result in instability or shorter lifetime for your components and very very rarely it can result in Outright death of components, but as long as you're using high quality stuff and going about it in a safe and responsible manner You likely won't run into this kind of trouble now the good news is that for CPUs in particular? Intel has an overclocking extended warranty that you can actually buy for it And they'll replace it for you just like that even if you kill it during overclocking Now it would be irresponsible of me also to not give you guys the luck of the draw disclaimer Overclocking is running things outside of their specifications. They are not guaranteed to do these things so if you happen to get CPU that runs at exactly stock speed and only stock speed That's life. You can't return it because it's a bad overclocker. It doesn't work that way Do overclock sorry doesn't and that's great if it does so whatever we do today You might get the same results as us better results than us or much worse results than us and that'll be just kind of luck of the draw without further ado Let's get into it Now planning out an overclocking capable build does take a little bit more work than just your average PC You can't cobble together whatever you want and expect to get great overclocking performance And it starts with the CPU You're going to choose either an extreme edition if you're on the very high end or a k-series Processor because those are the ones that have what are called unlocked multipliers Allowing you to turn the CPU frequency up and down at will and test them and actually run them at those speeds now We're using a 4770 K This is a Haswell fourth generation CPU And you can expect somewhere in the range of 4.4 to 4.5 gigahertz for most 4770 K's and then if you're lucky and you're in the top 30% you might get around 4.6 in the top 20% You might get around 4.7 gigahertz and in the top 10% of CPUs you will be able to get 4.8 gigahertz or more if you also build a system around it that is capable of taking advantage of that Now that bit I mentioned before about how it'll increase the thermal output you need better cooling to get the most out of an overclock So in our case, we're going to be using a Corsair H100i This is a dual 120 millimeter radiator liquid cooling system However, it should be noted that you can still get very good overclocking out of something like a dual tower heat sink Such as this thermal right silver arrow extreme or something like a Noctua NHD 14 For our motherboard we've gone with the Maximus 6 extreme from Asus and as the name suggests, this is a bit of an Extreme option and you don't really need that for a mainstream overclock pretty much any Asus Z87 board has the same digital power delivery as well as UEFI BIOS optimizations that up to multipliers Such as 48 or 4.8 gigahertz They are pretty much all going to be able to achieve those results Now the key difference with high-end boards such as the deluxe WS series, TUF series or ROG series is going to be in things like the overall build quality the extras that are included Things like the OC panel that I have in front of me as well as their beefy VRM solutions both in terms of the design and the cooling that allow them to stay stable at even much higher frequencies Than your typical motherboard Particularly with the ROG series you also get a degree of tweaking and tinkering that is not available with other motherboards For our memory we've gone with Corsair Dominator Platinums. These are 2400 megahertz modules. They're 8 gig DIMMs meaning we've got 32 gigs of RAM in this system But this was mostly for stress testing It should be noted that while most Haswell CPUs are capable of running at 2.8 gigahertz to 3 gigahertz on the memory Remember the integrated memory controller affects this It tends to be reduced a lot as you increase the CPU speed So once you get up to around 4.6 gigahertz 1600 megahertz is pretty much a guarantee with anything above that being gravy and most of them can't do more than around 2133 megahertz on RAM once you ramp up the CPU clock speed this becomes especially true with high density kits and When you populate all the DIMMs in your motherboard so we use this kit mostly to push the platform to its absolute limit and because Dominator Platinums are so sexy a Good quality power supply such as the AX1200i although calling it good quality is a bit of an understatement Allows the power that's delivered to your system to be cleaner and more consistent Meaning it can be more stable in addition to being able to power more Components such if you wanted to add more graphics cards or whatever else later this particular one is also extremely efficient rated at 80 Plus platinum and is validated for the lower C states that Haswell is capable of Going into C states allow you to save power But they require your power supply to be stable not only at very high wattages, but also Incredibly low wattages, so make sure that your power supply whether you're overclocking or not for a Haswell system is Validated for C6 and C7 states now the rest of these components don't really affect overclocking performance directly But our Intel 335 series SSD enables us to boot up more quickly after failed overclocking attempts our Noctua 120mm fans allow us to have the radiator still perform very well But also not be loud and our GTX 780 is a great match for a 4770k once It's overclocked allowing us to have beastly system performance now It should also be noted that VGA hotwire is a feature supported by certain Asus motherboards and graphics cards that allows you to directly Overvolt your graphics card using the motherboard so check that out if you're looking for a great motherboard graphics card pairing as well And here we go step one of overclocking is to not overclock I recommend updating your motherboard to the latest BIOS setting those settings all to default Make sure all your fans are spinning make sure your CPU is stable run the AIDA 64 built-in CPU testing tool as well as a couple passes of memtest 86 plus at bone stock settings because if you have Problems before you even start overclocking you're gonna have a bad time as soon as you do start overclocking Next up is your software toolkit So you'll need some kind of application for monitoring the status of your CPU such as CPU Zed or in this case We're using the built-in one in AIDA 64 you will need something for stress testing and normally we were using Prime95 in the past but what prime 95 does do well is it tests maximum heat output of the CPU and there are similar tools Such as Linux or Intel burn test, but what the AIDA 64 system stability test does Well is it allows the CPU to not only Run really hot But it also tests other components such as the new instruction sets that are built into Haswell giving us a more complete Picture of the overall system stability last but not least we're going to need some kind of temperature monitoring program Typically in the past I've used real temp GT But what you might notice about Haswell is that the CPU temperatures under load are gonna be very bouncy They're gonna move around a lot It's gonna give you peaks but not necessarily an average so ASUS has actually built a thermal probe into their motherboards themselves now That you can read using AI suite or in our case We're using the OC panel right here to read it that'll give you a more realistic view of how the CPU is running under load I Always recommend keeping some other device next to you while you're overclocking such as a notebook or a tablet So that you can look things up and reference them while you're working not every board has Downloadable profiles like the ROG series boards and it can be a godsend if you can go on a forum such as linustechtips.com Find other people who have similar hardware configurations who are able to help you And if you can do that at the same time as working on the machine then so much the better The last thing you need before you get started is this Set aside some time for the overclock budget yourself some time where you assume that your system is not going to be fully functional Because a rushed sloppy overclock is a bad overclock that can cause instability instability crashes or even operating system corruption you don't want to rush it because At the end of the day if your system crashes and takes with it a bunch of your work or whatever else it could cost You more time and headache and frustration than if you've just done it right in the first place Now I know this makes me a little old-school Because there are lots of software utilities that allow you to do this kind of stuff within windows and the extreme motherboard We have here has the OC panel that allows you to change most of these parameters But not everyone's going to be working with that so I'm mashing delete or F2 or some other boards have different buttons to get Into the UEFI or BIOS that allows us to change all the settings that we need to change The first setting we'll be having a look at is the CPU core ratio also known as the CPU Multiplier it's called that because you've got your base clock Which is a hundred megahertz by default and a multiplier that gives you your final CPU clock speed So if you had a setting of 44 you'd be at 4400 megahertz or 4.4 Gigahertz and at a setting of 48 you'd be at 4800 megahertz or 4.8 gigahertz now there's more to it than just that and you've got a couple of different options So you press enter to go into those options and you've got auto which is your stock speed including Intel's turbo boost technology which allows you to go to higher speeds when fewer cores are under load your next setting is Sync all cores this allows you to change that multiplier And it'll change all the cores at the same time and lock them there So they'll all move together regardless of what kind of load is on the CPU Finally you've got the per core option this allows you to build kind of like your own turbo boost technology But an overclocked one so you could set a multiplier of maybe 50x when you're only using one core or 48 when you're using two cores or whatever the case may be you can play around with It a fair bit the next setting we need is one of the most important ones So we're gonna scroll down down down down down down an extreme tweaker here, and we're gonna get to CPU voltage now we can turn up the frequency all you want But at the end of the day if you don't increase the voltage you're not going to increase your stability and the amount of power You can deliver to the CPU, and you're not gonna be stable It's not gonna work so CPU voltage allows us to compensate for the increases in frequency and make the system stable The problem is that the more voltage you add to your CPU the more heat output will come out of your CPU So you need to add more cooling and it will also decrease the overall lifespan of your CPU going past a certain point Now there are actually a number of different ways that you can change CPU voltage on this platform So you can see we're in full manual mode right now, but I'm gonna change that so now I've got auto which is self-explanatory manual mode which allows me to key in a voltage and have it stay there the advantage of this is that Random applications like stress tests can't ask for too much voltage and overpower my cooling solution more on that a little bit later And the disadvantage is that when the CPU is in a low power state idling at the desktop I can't take advantage of any of the power savings that Haswell brings to me next up We've got offset mode so this allows me to take my stock CPU voltage remember that voltage bounces around a lot depending What's going on to give you that balance between power and power savings offset voltage takes? Whatever your stock ones are and bumps them up a notch So this gives you the power you need when you're running at an overclocked setting But it doesn't scale all the way back down when you're idling and not doing anything That's where adaptive comes in so adaptive is the one I'd recommend using as your daily driver setting when you're not Actually tuning in an overclock because what adaptive does is it gives you the power you need at full load and scales all the way Back down to stock Default voltages when you're not really doing anything the only drawback of adaptive is that certain? Stress tests such as prime 95 can actually override your maximum adaptive voltage that you set and draw too much power Like if you set a voltage of one point two five for your CPU that that application could cause up to one point Three seven volts to be drawn through your CPU causing instability or overwhelming your cooling so guys Manual mode for dialing in the overclock then when you're completely done switch over to adaptive to get that power savings benefit Now on some older platforms It was really recommended to disable a lot of the power management features such as Intel's lower C states as well as things like speed step that turns the frequency of the CPU down when it's not really doing anything On has well that hasn't really been found to affect overclocking in any way So it's great because you get to leave all that stuff enabled while enjoying better performance under load Our next setting is DRAM frequency one two three four five six seven eight yes In there now if we were gonna leave our CPU at default and just set our RAM to 2.4 gigahertz We could do that, but I recommend like I said before Finding your CPU overclock before trying to turn your RAM up So we're gonna dial our RAM into 1600 megahertz and leave it there until we're done testing the CPU For our next trick RAM voltage now RAM voltage is helpful when overclocking RAM in much the same way that you add more CPU voltage to overclock your CPU most kits these days with the exception of low power ones run at around 1.65 volts, but if you're ever not sure look at the side of your memory to find out and I really Don't recommend changing it much beyond that stock voltage because honestly Increasing RAM speeds doesn't affect many applications that much things like games don't get much benefit from additional RAM speed on the Haswell platform however there are exceptions to these rules such as if you run a lot of virtual machines You'll get a big benefit out of additional RAM speed And you might want to spend more time with that RAM frequency and that RAM voltage setting pair Speaking of virtual machines there have been previous platforms where it was recommended to turn off things like virtualization Or execute disable bit not so we go into CPU configuration where you can see all these settings with Haswell Because it doesn't seem to be affecting overclocking at all which is great because it means you can have all these features Enabled and get more performance Changing memory subtimings can have an effect on overall system stability as well as helping attain higher RAM Over clocks, but honestly that's a little bit outside the scope of this guide one setting in here that you might find really useful Though is this fastboot setting right here? Disabling fastboot can improve memory compatibility by giving the computer more time to detect and diagnose Any kinds of issues as it's booting up, but it will slow down your boot time now Asus has this setting on some auto rules in fact a lot of this stuff is on auto rules So you shouldn't need to touch most of it, but the CPU cache ratio is something that Once you've dialed in an overclock, and it's stable you might want to try turning up because by default as you increase the CPU The CPU cache ratio might lag a little bit behind and for optimal performance you want them to be one-to-one So you might actually go in and turn this up or turn it down to get it as close to your CPU frequency as possible Keeping it 200 to 300 megahertz below your CPU frequency however can improve stability Getting near the end here guys now within the overclocking tuner manual mode You can see we unlock a few extra settings here CPU strap allows you to manually set the strap that the base clock runs at so changing this to for example 125 would allow your CPU's base clock to become 125 while leaving the base clock to be 125 While leaving all the other devices that rely on the base clock such as the PCI Express frequency To stay at their nominal values this allows you to make changes to base clock Which mostly you don't really need to do the only time I'd really recommend changing base clock would be to leave this guy at a hundred and then make slight changes to the base clock frequency like maybe on the order of Of 0.3 or 0.5 when you're at a setting where you kind of look at your overclock and you go Oh, I'm almost stable here Maybe I want to turn it down a little bit under a hundred so that I can get instead of 4.4 gigahertz or 4.5 gigahertz I can run at 4.43 gigahertz to see if I can get that little bit of extra frequency That's how I'd really recommend using these settings because other than that you don't really need them The last things I'm going to show you guys are the CPU analog and digital I o voltages So these are these guys right here now these can improve stability, but The challenge is that they doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean you increase them to get more stability It's a matter of fine-tuning So if you're looking for that extra little bit you might try turning them a little bit up or a little bit down To see if you can squeeze a few more megahertz out of your CPU now on to the black magic of overclocking itself I always recommend a quick and dirty overclock to give you some idea of what you're working with before you start to dial things down So for Haswell, I'd recommend a multiplier of 46 on all cores So we're gonna go ahead and change that value there press enter to dial it in and I would recommend a CPU voltage of 1.2 volts Press F10 to save the settings press enter and this will give you some idea So if it boots up and runs all the benchmarks you need it to and all the stability tests Then you got a pretty good CPU Congratulations, if it boots up and Doesn't run the stability tests Then you've probably got something in the middle of the road and if it doesn't post at all doesn't get into the operating system Doesn't do anything then that's unfortunate. You've probably got a below average overclocker So this is great. Our CPU is running our stability tests No problems at 4.6 that gives us two options now Number one is we can be happy with 4.6 gigahertz and we can try turning the voltage down to get better power Consumption and less heat output this will make the CPU last for longer even though we're running a pretty significant overclock Option number two is keep pushing so increase the multiplier and see if she runs at 4.7 Gigahertz with 1.2 volts so that would mean we'd have a pretty awesome Overclocking chip now don't worry if your system isn't stable at these settings there are other things you can try you can see we're well Within our thermal threshold our target of about 85 degrees that keeps us below where the CPU will throttle But is you know warm enough that you know we're not super thrilled with it good thing We're only going to be running synthetics for a little while remember real-world applications Won't have the same heat effect on the CPU as these synthetic benchmarks do so if it doesn't run You can try increasing your voltage in steps until it becomes stable check that out We're stable at 4.7 Gigahertz that means our CPU is probably somewhere in the top 20% of Haswell 4770 K's and we're feeling pretty good about ourselves now We can keep pushing But we know already having tried this before we started filming that we're not going to get 4.8 Gigahertz without pushing the voltage up further and we're already sitting at about 80 degrees under load on the CPU So that's the comfort zone we set for ourselves if we got more exotic cooling Maybe we could go a little bit further But we're probably going to stay there what we can do is we can try to Optimize our settings at this particular speed or push for a little bit more But not quite 4.8 Gigahertz now there are a few more things to do now that you're pretty much finished number one is turn up your RAM Frequency to the rated speed of your memory or go up in increments until you reach a point where it's not stable anymore We were able to achieve 1866 even at 4.7 gigahertz number two is turn up your cache ratio So what Asus will automatically do is turn it down a little bit as you reach those higher over clocks Try bringing it up to one to one you can eke out a little bit more performance that way and last but not least Now that you've got everything dialed in you're going to want to change to that adaptive V core setting which is going to give you that best balance between performance and power consumption So you're pretty happy with the overclock you've got there's still a few more things you can do Number one is try playing around with per core overclocking so while with all four cores running at 4.7 gigahertz This is the best we can do What if it'll do one core at 4.8 or 4.9 or even 5 gigahertz you can try tuning some of those ones a little bit Further to see how they go next you can try increasing the frequency of your memory so go up to the rated speed of your memory and Or maybe not the rated speed of your memory go up one at a time until it gets unstable And then back it back off, and that's pretty much where you're good to go We got 1866 megahertz on our platform even at 4.7 gigahertz Next you can try turning up your cache ratio to be equal to your CPU multiplier This will achieve a little bit better performance, but not that much the only thing the only reason we're doing this is we're compensating for Asus's automatic rules that turn it down a little bit when you get to higher CPU frequencies in order to improve stability It is optimal to have them running one-to-one and the last thing you do once you have everything dialed in and you've run your very last stability test is change that voltage setting from manual to Adaptive mode that way you get the benefit of the performance and the benefit We ran a few different games and didn't see huge differences going from our stock performance CPU to our overclocked CPU at 4.7 gigahertz However we saw massive differences in our benchmarks that really made use of all of the cores of our CPU So the examples were Cinebench and 7-zip where our overclocked CPU performed up to 20 to 25 percent better Than our stock CPU giving you some idea of what kind of tangible gains can be had in the right applications with Overclocking now if all of that looked like way too much work Asus has easy profiles in the bios where you can just go CPU level up 4.2 4.4 or 4.6 gigahertz and make it that simple on yourself and Within AI suite there is an auto tuner that will not just set a static profile But will actually run through tests with your computer and determine good settings for your Individual components and that one takes anywhere from around half an hour to an hour to run Depending on how long it needs to find that optimal spot So thank you so much for checking out our overclocking guide on Intel's fourth generation core series Haswell CPUs on the Z87 platform Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos