4.0 ghz and up i7 OC

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xCWolf

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 12, 2011
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I have an i1-920 overclocked to 4.0ghz and i'm having trouble keeping it stable above that. I really wanted to hit about 4.2-4.4 but am having trouble keeping it stable. my current voltage on it is 1.568 and I'm afraid to go higher. Any tips from any of you out there?
 
Sorry to say, but that vcore is totally ridiculous - no wonder you can't get it over 4 GHz. I am amazed your mobo hasn't kicked the bucket yet.

How come you're at 1.568V?? I wouldn't go much higher than 1.4, but that is just my personal opinion.
 
my vcore is that high because i can't even get it to boot with vcore any lower
 
It just might be the chip cant go any higher.

Is this a d0 chip or c0?...if its c0 4ghz is pretty damn good on those old bastards.
 
How would i know? also i've had it about year and a half 2 years and it was on clearence it was in our warehouse for like 6 months before that
 
1.568? That's gonna kill your system. Are you saying it doesn't boot at stock speeds and stock voltages too?
 
xCWolf said:
How would i know? also i've had it about year and a half 2 years and it was on clearence it was in our warehouse for like 6 months before that
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CPU-Z will tell you if it's a C0/C1 or a D0 stepping CPU. D0's tend to overclock a little better and require less voltage to do it. You really should check. Other than that we really need more settings information, system information, motherboard, RAM etc. to help you. You can get a C0/C1 to 4.2GHz even with air cooling, (though many need water to achieve such speeds) but that's the upper end of what I've seen that was 24/7 stable. Even then it wasn't easy to do. D0's I've seen go upwards of about 4.4GHz but rarely on air. Though I've seen the occasion Xeon W330 that could do it.
 
xCWolf said:
d0 rev. on h60 water cooler
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WOW, I would put that vcore back down to 1.35ish 1.4v....that should be stable enough for 4.0ghz indeed.

1.56v is WAYYY to much, and its probably cooking it

P.S. Also turn off Hyperthreading. you need more Vcore to get a stable overclock with HT enabled.
 
DASHlT said:
WOW, I would put that vcore back down to 1.35ish 1.4v....that should be stable enough for 4.0ghz indeed.

1.56v is WAYYY to much, and its probably cooking it

P.S. Also turn off Hyperthreading. you need more Vcore to get a stable overclock with HT enabled.
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Turning HT off kind of defeats the purpose of having a Core i7.
 
Sorry to be redundant but wow that's a lot of voltage, my 980x is only at 1.35 for 4.3 Ghz and HT on and it's completely stable. As others have said not all chips OC well.
 
heatlesssun said:
Sorry to be redundant but wow that's a lot of voltage, my 980x is only at 1.35 for 4.3 Ghz and HT on and it's completely stable. As others have said not all chips OC well.
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It's about the same for my Core i7 980X.
 
Dan_D said:
Turning HT off kind of defeats the purpose of having a Core i7.
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HT does nothing for gaming, and hampers overclocking.

For some HT is useful, others its not.

for 90% of the people HT will never be used and is a waste.

and I agree, which is why then the 1156 socket came out, there was no point in buying an 870 I7 when the 760 was just as good for gaming.

Just my 0.02c
 
DASHlT said:
HT does nothing for gaming, and hampers overclocking.

For some HT is useful, others its not.

for 90% of the people HT will never be used and is a waste.

and I agree, which is why then the 1156 socket came out, there was no point in buying an 870 I7 when the 760 was just as good for gaming.

Just my 0.02c
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That's my point. Why buy a HT enabled processor if you aren't going to use it?
 
1.56v is WAY too high. My D0 only needs 1.38v to get to 4.4GHz. I am on a 360 radiator water loop, but still.. you have something configured wrong if it needs that much voltage, OR your motherboard is not supplying voltage correctly.
 
Think it could be the PSU not supplying correct power as well? i feel like my psu is junk, corsair cx500
 
xCWolf said:
Think it could be the PSU not supplying correct power as well? i feel like my psu is junk, corsair cx500
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If it were a bad PSU, you'd likely be getting BSOD's and random restarts. Check out the readings in the bios.
 
xCWolf said:
my vcore is that high because i can't even get it to boot with vcore any lower
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With a 1.5+vcore and this response above it sounds like you don't know what you are doing!

I would drop your processor and bios settings to stock and start doing some research before you do anything else IMHO.

I'm surprised that system isn't dead yet.
 
Me too, that's way too high. I'm at 4.2ghz on my 920 at 21x200blk on 1.35vcore.
 
Overclocking an i7 isn't as simple as raising the bclk and vcore. There's also memory multipliers as well as CPU PLL voltage and QPI voltage, which can be increased leading to a lower vcore. As the above poster said, reset everything to stock and look up how to properly overclock an i7. My i7 920 D0 does 4.2ghz with a vcore of 1.275. You may have gotten unlucky with a chip that needs up to 1.4v to hit 4 ghz, but it's extremely unlikely that any D0 i7 needs more than 1.4v to hit 4 ghz.
 
How did you overclock this? Did you just add a ton of CPU voltage and run with what booted?

You could possibly get 4GHz with lower voltage if you haven't already tweaked other aspects. I would manually setup your RAM timings and voltage to its advertised specs; find that info and manually set it in the BIOS.

Then set your CPU stuff back to its defaults and make sure your system boots (it should!). After it boots to OS and runs properly, reboot to the BIOS start moving up in CPU speed (set your multiplier and bclk) but manually set vcore to its default voltage so it doesn't auto adjust upwards.

Start adjusting voltages when you get blue screens.
stop 0x00000101 = need more CPU voltage
stop 0x00000124 = need more QPI/Vtt voltage

I'd use HyperThreading and use IntelBurnTest to test and make sure IBT is maxing out the cores; if it's not then set it to 8 threads and do 5 passes. If you BSOD then bump voltage a couple notches according to the stop code.

Oh yeah, as was said above, make sure your multipliers are all set appropriately. Can't even remember all mine. If they're too high you're putting too much demand on the system.
 
Tsumi said:
Overclocking an i7 isn't as simple as raising the bclk and vcore. There's also memory multipliers as well as CPU PLL voltage and QPI voltage, which can be increased leading to a lower vcore. As the above poster said, reset everything to stock and look up how to properly overclock an i7. My i7 920 D0 does 4.2ghz with a vcore of 1.275. You may have gotten unlucky with a chip that needs up to 1.4v to hit 4 ghz, but it's extremely unlikely that any D0 i7 needs more than 1.4v to hit 4 ghz.
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Completely agreed, you reach a point that no matter how much Vcore you give it the computer is not going to be stable until you tweek some other settings.
 
djoye said:
How did you overclock this? Did you just add a ton of CPU voltage and run with what booted?

You could possibly get 4GHz with lower voltage if you haven't already tweaked other aspects. I would manually setup your RAM timings and voltage to its advertised specs; find that info and manually set it in the BIOS.

Then set your CPU stuff back to its defaults and make sure your system boots (it should!). After it boots to OS and runs properly, reboot to the BIOS start moving up in CPU speed (set your multiplier and bclk) but manually set vcore to its default voltage so it doesn't auto adjust upwards.

Start adjusting voltages when you get blue screens.
stop 0x00000101 = need more CPU voltage
stop 0x00000124 = need more QPI/Vtt voltage

I'd use HyperThreading and use IntelBurnTest to test and make sure IBT is maxing out the cores; if it's not then set it to 8 threads and do 5 passes. If you BSOD then bump voltage a couple notches according to the stop code.

Oh yeah, as was said above, make sure your multipliers are all set appropriately. Can't even remember all mine. If they're too high you're putting too much demand on the system.
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That's what I did
 
xCWolf said:
That's what I did
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Did what? That tells us absolutely nothing.

First, post exactly what your system specs are. Motherboard and RAM being the important ones (we need specific model names here).

Second, post exactly what settings you used in the bios menu. The important ones being BCLK, CPU multiplier, RAM multiplier and timings, vcore, CPU PLL voltage, and QPI voltage. It would be helpful to list whether or not you're using things like EIST and C1E, any other technologies in the bios.
 
Tsumi said:
Did what? That tells us absolutely nothing.

First, post exactly what your system specs are. Motherboard and RAM being the important ones (we need specific model names here).

Second, post exactly what settings you used in the bios menu. The important ones being BCLK, CPU multiplier, RAM multiplier and timings, vcore, CPU PLL voltage, and QPI voltage. It would be helpful to list whether or not you're using things like EIST and C1E, any other technologies in the bios.
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This. We'd love to help you, but we need all the above details to really be able to do it.
 
Ha Ha sorry guys heres all the info =P

I7-920
ASUS Rampage II Gene MOBO
Nanya 3x2 Nanya 3x1 9GB Tri Channel DDR3 8-8-8-24 10600
Corsair H60 Cooler
Corsair cx500 PSU
SLI gtx 295 one on a dedicated 600 watt PSU

CPU ratio setting 21.0
cpu turbo power limit enabled
BCLK freq 200
DRAM freq ddr3-1203 mhz
DRAM timing control manually set to 8-8-8-24
CPU voltage 1.54
CPU PLL voltage auto
QPI/DRAM core voltage 1.45 (tested at 1.3 and 1.2 as well only works around here)


everything else is stock BIOS settings
 
What's your DRAM voltage? The QPI voltage and DRAM voltage should be separate, and for your RAM, based on the timing and frequency, should run at either 1.5 or 1.65v. I would set it at 1.65v first, then after you get your CPU stable, bring it down to 1.5v if you can.

I cannot find any specific information on that RAM. I would run with only the 2gb sticks, forget using those 1gb sticks. 6gb is plenty for all gaming/regular usage scenarios currently anyways.

QPI set it to 1.3. PLL set to 1.9. Change the ratio setting to 20 (lets leave it at just a 4ghz overclock for now).

Do you have LLC or Vdroop settings? Change it to low vdroop or max LLC.
 
aha I thought I posted DRAM voltage but its at 1.65.

I have both VDroop and LLC settings, I assume i should change both?
 
actually all I can do is enable vdroop its in my llc settings all I have is enabled/disabled/auto.
 
xCWolf said:
Ha Ha sorry guys heres all the info =P

I7-920
ASUS Rampage II Gene MOBO
Nanya 3x2 Nanya 3x1 9GB Tri Channel DDR3 8-8-8-24 10600
Corsair H60 Cooler
Corsair cx500 PSU
SLI gtx 295 one on a dedicated 600 watt PSU

CPU ratio setting 21.0
cpu turbo power limit enabled
BCLK freq 200
DRAM freq ddr3-1203 mhz
DRAM timing control manually set to 8-8-8-24
CPU voltage 1.54
CPU PLL voltage auto
QPI/DRAM core voltage 1.45 (tested at 1.3 and 1.2 as well only works around here)


everything else is stock BIOS settings
Click to expand...

you're not doing your IMC any favors with this.
 
xCWolf said:
Interesting, I've since removed it so now down to 3x2.
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People talk about voltage loading on the IMC. I don't know if that's true because the damned thing is spec'ed to do it. (At least at DDR3 1066MHz speeds.) So I question the validity of those statements. However, the motherboard on the other hand does get stressed electrically speaking when you add more DIMMs to the thing. Motherboards have power phases of their own on the DIMM slots for a reason. And not all boards use the same amount of them, or do the same job with them from a quality / engineering perspective.
 
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