 Ever since our Core i9 review, we've been planning to do an X299 overclocking guide. But at that time, the whole lineup hadn't even been launched yet. So, fast forward to today, we finally got our 18 core chips and... Get this, Intel wanted to sponsor an overclocking guide. So we were like, heck yeah, let's do it. Okay, so if you're in a hurry to squeeze a little more performance out of your system, you could just run Asus' easy tuning wizard or the equivalent from your motherboard manufacturer. But, you're here watching, so my guess is you want more. So then, first order of business is component selection. You're gonna wanna choose a motherboard that can handle the juice that your high core count CPU will need. Pick one with two EPS 12-volt connectors to spread the current out over more wires, like the Asus Prime X299 Deluxe or even a Rampage series board, and a high quality power delivery system with good cooling. Without robust VRMs and adequate ventilation, you should not attempt X299 overclocking. And this is especially true for the power hungry Extreme Edition. Which brings us to the next item on our shopping list, the power supply. You won't need to harness the power of the atom, but Core i9 HTC chips alone can pull as much power as an entire mainstream gaming system when overclocked. Up to 500 watts off the 12-volt rail. So most 850 watt, 80 plus gold and higher units will do you nicely, but double check with a power supply calculator for your setup and the continuous load table before you buy. I would actually even start at a thousand rather than 850 watts for a 14 core or higher. Next up then is cooling. You'll want a lot of it. From our review, the Core i9 series gets pretty toasty under load even at stock speed. So whether you choose to get adventurous and replace the thermal compound under the heat spreader via the method that we showed off here, or decide to keep your warranty more intact, we recommend at least a 280 millimeter AIO like the Corsair H115i or a large air cooler like Noctua's NH-D15. And for the first time in years actually, a custom water cooling loop is actually highly recommended for the best results. As for the rest of the components, higher spec RAM wouldn't be a terrible idea, but it should be noted that in most cases it doesn't affect performance too much beyond 3000 megahertz, and the rest pretty much comes down to personal taste and the goal of your build. Your SSD or your graphics card won't affect your ability to overclock. Unless they get lodged in your cooling fan. Okay then, so you've got your build put together and a fresh install of the OS of your choice. Time to get down to business. We still prefer using the BIOS over tools like Intel's surprisingly versatile extreme tuning utility in Windows, because we're old school like that. So first off, XMP. If you spent a few bucks on fancy RAM, you'll probably want this on. But if you run into stability issues, turn it off. Then let us know in the comments if you'd like a separate video down the line discussing tuning RAM frequency and timings manually. Next, whether XMP is off or on, you'll need to disable CPU SVID support and SpeedStep, which prevents the CPU from communicating with the external voltage regulator and from downclocking to save power while idle. Once you've finished with that, find where your UEFI BIOS keeps its power control options. Listed on our ASUS board as external DigiPlus power control. We're interested in a few items in here. For load line calibration, start out with a lower value like 2 or 3. This provides extra voltage so that as the CPU goes from 0 to 100 when you fire up a demanding load, it doesn't wind up starved for power momentarily causing an error. It should be noted though that this setting can exacerbate the thermal issue. There is a reason why it's off by default. CPU current capability should then be set to 140%, which will allow more power to be supplied to the CPU. This prevents a difficult to diagnose condition known as VRM throttling. Then spread spectrum should be disabled for stability and CPU power phase control should be set first to extreme and then dialed back if possible once you've found a stable clock speed that you like. Your final stop, sort of, overclocking can be a bit of a rabbit hole, is CPU core ratio, which we recommend changing to bi-specific core, which allows you to specify ratios and voltages for each individual core along with an asterisk here that denotes the higher tolerance turbo boost max cores. So 4.2 GHz is the non-max single core turbo speed for the 7900X. So we'll use this as a starting point. Tweak the multiplier higher, rebooting in between each step until you reach an unstable level where the system won't boot. Then you've got a couple of choices. You can either bump the voltage up and see if you get stability. We chatted with our friends over at Gamers Nexus. They figure about 1.25 volts on decent water cooling is about as high as you want to go, or you can drop back to the last stable setting, or to be safe, one increment lower, and try it again. Now those asterisked cores, those can clock higher with lower voltage, so be sure to take this into consideration while you're tuning. The more you can control the heat output of your chip, the better your results, and the lower the voltage, the less heat. Speaking of, you may actually not need or want to add much voltage if you can help it, unless you've got a custom loop. In some cases, like our Asus board, using offsets will actually offset from the auto voltage, meaning that you might even want to push them negative depending on the readings that you get. Remember guys, even small incremental bumps in voltage count for a lot when we're talking about up to 18 cores. Though, this can be alleviated somewhat by using what's called an AVX offset, which down clocks the CPU by a set amount when running complex AVX enabled workloads. So Asus's BIOS shows the AVX frequencies separately so you can actually see the offset's results. Alright then, so if all goes well, you've got some settings dialed in that will work for your CPU. Here's what we're using. If not, clear the CMOS and try again until you do. Now it's time for burn-in testing. Now the traditional wisdom says to run a full system load like Prime95 for 24 hours to validate your overclock. Make sure your CPU is not going to spit out any calculations that aren't correct. But, while that's a good idea and we would still recommend it, we've seen a lot of situations where even a 24-hour pass doesn't mean it's fully stable. The real test for us lately has been in heavy start-stop loads. We've actually caught more stability failures using the 3D modeling software Blender, which hits the CPU hard across all cores. So there are free scenes that can be used to benchmark and passing longer ones like the classroom, Barcelona Pavilion, or the Gooseberry production benchmark tends to be the final pass for us. Now, if you're working on this and you feel like you're close, but you're not quite stable, you can maybe try increasing your CPU input voltage, starting at about 450 millivolts above your core voltages. It can help. You can also try boosting the system agent voltage and bringing VCCIO up to within 50 millivolts of it to account for variance in CPU memory controllers, especially if you're using XMP or overclocking your RAM. Once everything's stable and you're comfortable with your thermals, which you can monitor using a free tool like HardwareInfo64, you've got a few options. You can increase the clocks and rinse and repeat, go through this whole process again. You can just stick with what you have, or for the adventurous, you can actually start trying to reduce CPU core voltages, re-enable power saving features, and reduce voltages for the Uncore, PLL, and VCCIO to help tame the heat output. Then, validate it all over again. It is a long process if you really want to get it dialed in perfectly, but once you've done so, you'll be left with a nice performance bump over the stock configuration. In our case, we managed some good gains in clock-hungry gaming and our already good productivity performances, unsurprisingly, even better, which means you can get your work done faster and get back to pwning noobs, all without ever leaving the comfort of the glow of your battle station. 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