What is your Haswell Processor Cache Ratio? - and do you use speedstep?

Archaea

Archaea

[H]F Junkie
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I have my Haswell running all four cores locked at stable at 4.5GHz at 1.185 volts (adaptive) on my MSI Z87-GD65. It is stable according to 30 minute stress tests with the Intel Extreme Tuning utility and caps out at about 79* C on my Corsair H70 closed water cooling loop. (Case is Cooler Master Cosmos 1010 - rad is rear 120mm fan mounted).

I noticed my Processor Cache Ratio is only 39x (instead of 40x) I tried to raise it to 45x and it immediately locked up the system. I did some googling and found out that Cache Ratio doesn't seem to matter much - but I'm curious what the rest of you have found with Cache ratio overclocking?
http://www.overclock.net/t/1398975/official-haswell-owners-thread/1260


I also wanted to discuss speedstep. I turned mine off. On Haswell it doesn't seem to matter much. Even with the speedstep disabled I still draw very little power. I felt like speedstep was making my Path of Exile game hiccup a bit. I played quite a bit without speedstep - then I engaged it and felt the occasional very brief hiccups - I disabled it again and the hiccups were gone. I also felt like the loading screens were significantly longer with speedstep engaged. When I setup the Intel monitoring program to log 30 minutes of playtime I noticed the speedstep was constantly switching processor speeds - anywhere from 800MHz to 4.5GHz --- all the time. It may be placebo, but at this point I'm leaving speedstep off. My CPU is back at 4.5GHz all the time and according to the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and the CPUID hardware monitor - I'm still just sipping power if the CPU is not busy and still drinking less power at loads because of adaptive voltage functionality on this chipset/MB. Actually even at 4.5GHz - - - I'm only using between 1-2 watts as I type this according to CPUID's HWMonitor. It's even less than one watt with speedstep enabled - but who really cares between less than a watt and less than two watts. Now when I stress test the wattage jumps to 75-81 range with my current overclock. Contrast this number with my previous I7-920 (idle'd at 44 and drew over 100 watts at load) and this thing just sips power - especially at idle! What is your opinion of speedstep?

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My cache is at 45x when my core is at 46x. In order to get to 47x, I have to add 0.05v to core and drop cache to <40x and even at that level, I'm not 100% stable. From what I read, you generally want to stay within 500mhz of core but at even larger deltas, its still a net benefit to have core as high as you can get it.There is a bit of differing opinions on this though.

I've also disabled all power saving options in the bios. I feel having the cpu ramp up and down is a detriment to o/c stability even though I've read otherwise.

What are your temps? Did you delid? You seem to have a decent cpu with those volts at that speed.
 
my cpu is at 47, cache at 43. cpu voltage at 1.375, cache at 1.2. I have speedstep on, voltages are adaptive with offsets. I wouldnt trust intel xtu, i ran it for 4 hours last night no problem, bf3 crashed within 10 minutes...
 
I leave speedstep on in the bios. I change power settings in windows from balanced to performance if I want to turn it off, but I haven't had any problems with it activating during games so I have just been keeping it on balanced.
 
inglewood78 said:
What are your temps? Did you delid? You seem to have a decent cpu with those volts at that speed.
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I did the 1.2 volt trick that all the haswell overclocking guides talk about.

I tried 4.8 and 4.6GHz,and both BSOD when I did the stress test. I dropped it to 4.5 and it did fine. Then I started dropping the voltage since I only have an H70 and with the 4.6GHz and 1.2 volt combo would hit high 80's in temps with the stress testing before it would crash --- so I don't have a lot of CPU cooler left to work with if I tried to raise the voltage -- so instead I went the opposite direction. So yeah I went to 4.5 and tried 1.75 volts - BSOD about 10 minutes in. I then tried 1.95 - success, 1.90 success, 1.85 success. I've not tried lower yet, but I know 1.75 doesn't work so I should be about getting to the sweet spot.

At 4.5GHz with the my cache ratio at 3.9GHz and1.185 volts I'm stable in the Intel extreme tuning utility for 30 minute runs (longest I've tried - as one review said 10 minutes should be sufficient). With this setup, my temps hit high 70's and maybe tap 80 on the Corsair H70. In hours long gaming sessions my temps max about mid 60's - so like 15* lower. It is stable in games. I may try lowering to 1.18 volts, but I'll probably use it for a while at 1.185 first and make sure all is well. If the consensus is that I need to try to get the cache ratio higher, then I'll have to revisit the voltages I'll bet since 1.185 crashed immediately upon raising the cache ratio multiplier to x45. If it doesn't really matter (doesn't seem to from the benchies, maybe I'll just not worry about it.)

I'll give up a couple GHz on the absolute max to control temps with lower voltage. Reason - - I have a super sexy case in the Cooler Master Cosmos 1010, but it's not the most efficient in cooling - why? because it isn't a frame with metal screen all around it like some of the modern cases that have the best cooling. Extra CPU temp makes the hard-drives and video noticeably hotter in my experience in my case. Dropping my old I7-920 from 4.0Ghz with no power management settings to 3.8Ghz with power management settings dropped my HD and vid card temps by over 10*.
 
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I benchmarked 3dmark Firestrike on my 4770k at 4.8GHz on all cores with 39x, 45x, and 46x cache speeds. The physics score (and overall score) did not change a measurable amount between any of these runs (all physics scores consistently landed between 13700 and 13735) . With this sort of thing, you'll only notice a difference on specific workloads.

Currently I'm using a 4.7GHz core speed (47x) with a 4.6GHz (46x) cache. I use a core offset voltage of +0.160v and a cache offset of +0.3v. All power saving states are enabled. Note that at the 4.8GHz core speed, a 39x cache will not work with the Auto voltage rule; I had to bump up the cache voltage a little myself.

I find that there is about a 0.030v difference between "bootable" and stable offset voltage at 4.7GHz. I can boot and even complete a SuperPI 32M run at 4.7GHz with only +0.120v offset (translates to 1.220v peak voltage in SuperPI). Various stress tests and games will become stable as I increase the offset, until +0.160v where I have yet to see a crash.
 
Womper - that's good information thank you - I'll give that a try tonight. Since I'm running a more conservative 4.5GHz maybe I can get my cache ratio to 45x just for the sake of symmetry.
 
hey guys i have a question i have my cpu multi and voltage at 4.5 and 1.9v it is stable but whatever stress test i run on it the processor frequency wont go past 4.1GHZ if i set the offset to -10mv it bumps to 4.2 but thats about it am i doing something wrong or did i fry my cpu?
 
asharifk said:
hey guys i have a question i have my cpu multi and voltage at 4.5 and 1.9v it is stable but whatever stress test i run on it the processor frequency wont go past 4.1GHZ if i set the offset to -10mv it bumps to 4.2 but thats about it am i doing something wrong or did i fry my cpu?
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Dafuq?.. With 1.9v?? You lucky that you still hace CPU running... Still 1.45 its insane high to haswell..
 
I dont have any trottling and temp ranges between 50 to 60 my worry is that to get here my unit crashed alot im just worried i might have fried it
 
That is the risk you take with overclocking anything. If you are worried then don't do it. Main thing I would worry about would be heat and voltage though. You have to find a happy medium and run it cool.


asharifk said:
I dont have any trottling and temp ranges between 50 to 60 my worry is that to get here my unit crashed alot im just worried i might have fried it
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I know if i fried it then so be it but what if im doing something wrong thats what im trying to find out. So far i only tweaked multiplier and voltage is there anything else that i should be changing that im not or are they enough?
 
You didn't "fry" it because it's still running. You could probably heat throttle the chip for 3 days straight and it would be fine. It might run a little hotter after but they make these chips pretty hard to "fry" with voltage. There are some other settings that might help but an OC guide is gonna be more helpful than random peoples' advice via this thread.
 
There is no law against poking a dead horse that has been dead for over year, but it's kinda pointless and weird.
 
Bump to add my AIDA64 memory benchmark skyrockets with higher cache multiplier (write speed in particular went from 47GB/s to 67.5GB/s with a 3Ghz -> 4.25Ghz cache frequency bump). So at least on X99 with DDR4 it's a big deal. Across the board my 2666Mhz @ 43x multiplier ram outbenches even 3200Mhz ram @ stock cache multiplier.
 
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