Do I have a golden 4790k?

I had been running my delidded 4790k on a gigabyte z97n-wifi for years in a SFF system for a while at 4.4ghz all core @ 1.14v. Stayed below 75C and that's all that mattered in a sff system.

Out of boredom and my incessant need to tinker, I recently got a Noctua NH-C14S cooler to push my 4790k to the limit. Would have gone NH-D15 but I wanted downdraft to cool vrm. Worst case scenario I destroy it and upgrade to something new (what a problem, I'd be forced to upgrade haha).

I reset all voltages to stock and started raising the clocks. Once it crashed started raising the voltage, and so on. Well I settled in at 4.7ghz all core at 1.25v. That seems impossibly low for vcore. But it's been stable for weeks now.

I suppose I could push it further. At this point it still games really well and it's stable so I'm happy. Is this particularly good for a 4790k? I'm pretty sure I'll hit a voltage wall at 4.8ghz though, I've never heard of haswell going much further.

I know I can go higher on vcore though my bios is weird, when I push it further other random voltages start getting offset even though I left them set to normal. From what I've seen, compared to other haswell Era boards this generation of gigabyte bios is really junk for OCing.

Just curious about anyone else's experience with Haswell and what stable OCs you guys have run and for how long?

I ran mine at 4.4 with 1.23 vcore for almost 5 years

Not sure why vcore is shown as 1.23v, it was definitely set to 1.25. Seemed to be pretty stable, ran cinebench and 3Dmark a bunch of times. The only issue was the system would only boot every other attempt. I think one of the BIOS on my dual bios board is corrupted. Reflashing fixed it. Strange.

Ej24 said:

Not sure why vcore is shown as 1.23v, it was definitely set to 1.25. Seemed to be pretty stable, ran cinebench and 3Dmark a bunch of times. The only issue was the system would only boot every other attempt. I think one of the BIOS on my dual bios board is corrupted. Reflashing fixed it. Strange.
View attachment 188724

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Won't boot?

Doesn't sound particularly stable.

Kwaz said:

Won't boot?

Doesn't sound particularly stable.

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Haha true but i seems its not so much the CPU isn't stable, it just doesn't even power on at all. I think its definitely something with the bios. Gigabyte included a dual bios but absolutely no way to choose which one to use. Kinda pointless. Supposedly it uses one BIOS all the time until it detects a failure. But if it doesn't detect a failure it'll never switch so you're at the mercy of Gigabyte's failure detection. I reflashed which forces it to overwrite both bios chips and its fine. This happened to me twice before even without overclocking, another indication it's probably just a bad bios chip and no damn way to forcefully switch it.