 Welcome to the no messing around LGA 2011 3 overclocking guide. We'll be covering the benefits of overclocking, the risks of overclocking, and running you guys through how exactly to do it with your shiny new Haswell E6 core or 8 core processor. Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB keyswitches for 16.8 million color per key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. Click now to learn more. It always starts with this, but it's super important so we shouldn't skip it. What is overclocking? What can we overclock and why do we do it? The short answers are, for the first one, basically it's turning the speed up so that your PC components run faster than the manufacturer intended, and you can find more information about it here. For number two, we'll turn up pretty much anything with a dial on it that makes it go faster. The CPU, the RAM, the graphics card are prime candidates. And number three, we do it because we are driven to. We have no self-control. We know about the drawbacks like higher heat output, higher power consumption, and even the potential for hardware degradation, but we just have to have the speed. Now no overclocking guide is complete without the latest and sexiest hardware. As interesting as me pulling out a Northwood 2.4c and cranking that baby up might be to some people, most of you are probably watching this today because you want to actually do some performance tuning on hardware that you're actually using. So as always, it starts with the focus of today's video, the CPU. Normally for these guides, we use an Extreme Edition because the procedure is actually the same for an Extreme Edition or for a K-series processor anyway, but today is a little different. Today we're going to tune the Core i7-5820K because I think it's the best bang for the buck processor on the market for enthusiasts and prosumers with workloads that can benefit from its six processing cores. But don't have the budget for its eight core monster of a big brother, the Core i7-5960X. To go along with its six cores at 3.3 to 3.6 GHz, the 5820K has 15 MB of cache, support for up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory running in quad-channel mode, and 28 PCI Express 3.0 lanes for multiple graphics cards or other expansion cards. This is less than the 5930K and the 5960X, which each have 40 lanes, but as we demonstrated here, this will only matter in certain fairly unusual situations. Let's move on to our next EXTREME hardware selection. If you've been watching this channel for any amount of time, you'll probably already know what Corsair dominators are. Here's a clip of an old kit we painted to take advantage of their built-in custom lighting effects. In nutshell, they were Corsair's biggest, baddest, sexiest DDR3 memory modules, and now they're back for more with DDR4 flavors available in capacities from 16 to 64 GB, and speeds up to a blistering 3,300 MHz, although the 32 GB kit here we've got today runs at a mirror 2660 MHz CL15 out of the box with its XMP 2.0 profile, which of course will only work with proper support from the motherboard, which leads us to the finest motherboard I've ever had the pleasure of using, the Republic of Gamers Rampage 5 Extreme from ASUS. Now, ASUS has done no compromises rampage-grade boards before, but while they always had the performance features for extreme overclockers, they'd always be lacking the latest high-end onboard sound designs from the formula-grade ROG boards, or the premium onboard Wi-Fi from Deluxe-grade boards. Not this time! If you can afford one, you can buy a Rampage 5 Extreme knowing that you've got it all. ASUS' OC socket with extra pins for improved power delivery and RAM overclocking, their fourth-generation digital power delivery, their OC zone with some features that are actually amazingly useful even for beginners, like the safe boot button that lets you boot to default settings without losing the changes you just made when your overclock fails, and some stuff that's more for the hard cores, like the onboard voltage probe contact points. You get top-of-the-line storage with eight SATA 3 ports, two SATA Express ports, and an M.2 slot, the latest Supreme FX 2014 onboard audio, and finally, three spatial stream AC wireless, with which I achieved sustained transfer speeds of over 40 megabytes per second during testing. Whaaaaaa? Oh, and I guess you also get support for three-way SLI and Crossfire with this CPU, and four-way support with the 40 PCI Express lane ones. No big whoop, though. For cooling, I went with a Corsair H100i dual 120mm fan, all in one water cooling system, which is basically where I would suggest starting for 6-core or 8-core overclocking, with dual 140mm fan designs like the Corsair H110 or Cooler Master Neptune 280L being solid step-ups. Power was taken care of by a Corsair HX1000i. Yes, it's overkill, but I guess this is more of a because-we-can hardware choice, 80-plus platinum efficiency, dead silent operation at light and medium loads, a fully modular design, and Corsair Link integration for all the real-time monitoring goodness you could want from a power supply, and that pretty much does it for the components that affect overclocking, but it should be noted that for before and after benchmarks, a GTX 780 Ti graphics card running at stock speeds was used. Alright, Linus, so I got all my gear in front of me, now what? Well, start by mashing delete while booting to enter the UEFI BIOS, and press F7 to get into advanced mode right away. None of that easy mode stuff for us, no sir. Head over to boot, and under setup mode, select advanced, so you won't have to switch manually every time you start up the system. Then, it's time to head over to the extreme tweaker heading where we'll be spending most of our time. You can save yourself a lot of effort by starting from a probably safe overclock, rather than beginning the tuning process from stock speed and testing at every stage. For Haswell e-processors, I'd recommend the multiplier of 45, a CPU voltage of around 1.3 volts, and, this is very important, everything else in the system at default settings. Then, press F10 to apply your settings and restart into Windows. Use CPU-Z to verify that the settings were applied correctly, and run the stress testing application of your choice. Dialing in one component at a time will take some of the guesswork out later, when you're trying to balance how hard you're pushing each component to achieve the best overall results. Just make sure that your benchmark, by the way, is a safe one. Recent versions of Prime95, for example, can cause your CPU to pull so much power in an overclocked, overvolted environment, that you're sure to do long-term damage if you use it extensively. I'm partial to Ida64, but Asus' own ROG RealBench is a solid choice as well, and it's free. If the test fails in the first 10 minutes or so, then it's time to go back to the UEFI BIOS, and try a lower multiplier, or, as long as your CPU load temperatures are within your comfort zone, we're going to use 80 degrees as a max for this guide, you can try slowly turning up the CPU voltage to see if that helps, and then boot back into Windows and rerun your test. If the test passes, then it's time to restart and go back to the UEFI BIOS anyway, because it's time to turn up your memory speed. Most performance kits these days will have XMP profiles for easy RAM tuning, and our Corsair Dominator Platinum kit here is no exception with two separate profiles, a more conservative one and a more aggressive one with higher voltages. But what you need to watch out for is the changes in other system settings when you switch your OC tuner mode from manual to XMP. For RAM speeds below 2400 MHz and including 2400 MHz, you can skip this next part, but for speeds above 2400 MHz, like our RAM, it's very likely that your CPU strap will change to 125 MHz. This is okay, but it means that your CPU clock speed will now be calculated by multiplying the core ratio by 125, rather than by 100, so you will want to keep XMP off for now and re-verify that 4.5 GHz stability test by setting your multiplier to 36. With that verified, it's time to go back into the UEFI BIOS and turn XMP back on, and this now applies to all RAM speeds again, and then rerun the stability test. If it fails or the system refuses to power on consistently with error code BD, then you might be tempted to crank RAM voltage, but I'd probably keep that around 1.4 volts max and suggest that you may want to consider fine-tuning the system agent voltage instead. I found I got dramatically better stability with around 1.02 volts, but your mileage may vary, and bear in mind that more is not necessarily better here, it's more of a tuning process. If after tuning SA, it passes, then great, back to the BIOS ye go. Now to see if the CPU has a little bit more headroom left in her, you can raise the multiplier until your stress tests are no longer able to pass. Now, in doing that, you might notice at this stage that the CPU ratios don't give you very granular control. So if your chip handles, for example, 4.7 GHz fine, but 4.8 GHz crashes after a few minutes, and you want to reach your optimal setting, probably somewhere in between those two values, then this is a great time to play around with base clock a little bit. And I really do mean a little bit. My chip handled 4.75 GHz with rock-solid stability when I reached a base clock of 101, which is as high as I really want, okay, you can go higher than that, but you don't want to play around with it too much, because tinkering with base clock outside of using standard dividers is not recommended, because it affects many other buses, some of which, like storage, for example, don't take kindly to being overclocked. Once you've got your CPU dialed in, it's time to play around with memory now, if you want. I personally found ASUS' Auto Profiles did a great job, and between that and XMP, it was running fast enough, but if you want, you can try different RAM dividers and try further tuning RAM voltage and system agent voltage, again, to overclock your memory frequency. Honestly, though, you might find your time better spent trying to push for tighter RAM timings. It usually results in very similar performance gains, which you can measure by lowering the timings, preferably one at a time, and observing performance and stability in memory-dependent benchmarks, and is less likely to debalance your overclock that you just tuned on your CPU, because some RAM dividers are inherently more stable than others. 2400 is a good one, as are 2666, 2933, and 3200, if your memory can handle it, but 2800 has trouble with some CPUs, including ours, even with kits that support that speed. Something very important to note here, talking about memory dividers, is that increasing the CPU strap to 125 with the memory at 2400 does not change your memory divider. So even though this RAM speed increases to 3000 MHz, this is still a good, stable divider. The ratio is as important to stability as the actual speed it's running at. But at the end of the day, memory fine-tuning is not something I personally do a lot of. You can refer back to my DDR3 versus DDR4 apples-to-apples comparison, but for a daily driver system, it just doesn't matter much. And the kind of instability it causes, situations where you can run a stress test for 12 hours perfectly fine, only to have it fail at 12 hours and 5 minutes, is just not worth the time it takes to verify that the system is actually running correctly, IMO. Usually CPU tuning, aside from being the part where you get the real, tangible performance gains, is also much easier to verify through stress testing, so sticking with that is not a bad bet. Speaking of the CPU, one other thing you can fine-tune at this stage is the CPU cache ratio, or uncore. Again, it frankly matters very little as far as performance compared to, you know, if you just increase the CPU's raw frequency, but if you can bring your cache speed up closer to your CPU speed, it can help a little bit with some performance metrics. Once you change this, though, you may find that you need to fine-tune CPU voltage and system agent voltage again. So now, it's time to have a look at some performance numbers. I'm not going to be doing a huge test suite here or anything, but I'd like to give you guys a look at the benefits of overclocking if you're willing to put a little bit of time into it. I also included numbers for Asus' auto-overclocking TPU thing that my WS and Deluxe boards have, but take them with a gigantic grain of salt. The performance numbers look good, but that system wasn't stable at all at these settings, a departure from my normally positive experience with Asus' auto-tuning. So, there you have it. Enabling XMP on your memory doesn't do a whole lot compared to just running JDX speeds. This platform is really not memory bandwidth limited, even with six or eight cores to feed, thanks to its quad-channel memory capability. Tuning CPU speed up makes a huge difference, except for gaming, where we really aren't CPU bottlenecked in the first place anyway. And further tuning RAM makes very little difference, with conservative, easily stabilized RAM settings, with more emphasis on the impactful and easier-to-tune CPU frequency being the way to go as usual. So I think that pretty much wraps it up. If you followed along with this guide, good job! Enjoy your freshly overclocked CPU. I hope your results were awesome, and if they weren't, then don't worry, there's a good chance it wasn't your fault anyway, since the Silicon Lottery dictates that the odds of getting a CPU with more or less overclockability was probably just, you know, predetermined by the overclocking gods anyway, and probably wasn't your fault. So don't stop tuning though, and better luck next time. Thank you guys for watching our X99 overclocking guide. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, and leave a comment letting me know your overclocking adventures, your results on some of the late nights that you've spent tuning that. One, like, three more megahertz, man, I just want three more megahertz. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe. Oh, right, and if you want to support us, we've got links in the video description where you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, give us a monthly contribution to help us make more videos like this, and change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so whenever you buy a new CPU or graphics card or whatever else, we get a kickback, that kind of thing helps us out a lot. I think this is the third time I thank you for watching, but that's how thankful I am.