How to Overclock SB-E?

[Zarathustra[H]]

I guess I'm in over my head a bit right now. I figured everything would just come to me when looking through the BIOS options, but I guess it isn't.

All my recent overclocking experience has been on AMD systems, so I am a little lost. Last Intel CPU I overclocked was a Pentium 150Mhz to 200Mhz.

1.) Is Overclocking SB-E at all like overclocking SB? Would reading a SB article help me? If not, does anyone know of an SB-E overclocking guide? Googling has not helped me much here.

2.) Since its a K CPU, and I have been told K CPU's are multiplier unlocked, I have been searching all over how to change the multiplier, but can't find it. All I can find is Turbo ratios. Is the only way to overclock these things via Turbo mode?

My normal overclocking approach on an AMD rig is to first disable turbo, then start upping the base multiplier. I'm starting to gather this is the wrong approach for this CPU.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[tangoseal]

Here is the easiest way.

Set your Multiplier to 45, leave bsclock at 100mhz. Thats it. It should post to 4500mhz. Anything past that will have to be a detailed write up.

Or use the included motherboard software. Its usually quite good at basic easy mode, hands off, overclocking.

Also you can search "Overclock, Sandy Bridge" in the forums here and the same settings will apply to the new chips. Albeit there is now base clock as well however you may not even have to touch that. There are some hefty detailed writeup already on these forums. I made a few my self answering other people.

P.S. Welcome to club 2011. These damn things are so fast its amazing. Multithreaded of course. About the same exact IPC as regular sandy bridge.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Here is the easiest way.

Set your Multiplier to 45, leave bsclock at 100mhz. Thats it. It should post to 4500mhz. Anything past that will have to be a detailed write up.

Or use the included motherboard software. Its usually quite good at basic easy mode, hands off, overclocking.

Also you can search "Overclock, Sandy Bridge" in the forums here and the same settings will apply to the new chips. Albeit there is now base clock as well however you may not even have to touch that. There are some hefty detailed writeup already on these forums. I made a few my self answering other people.

P.S. Welcome to club 2011. These damn things are so fast its amazing. Multithreaded of course. About the same exact IPC as regular sandy bridge.

Well, this is exacty my problem. Icant find multiplier setting. I can find something called "turbo ratio" though.

When I raise this it looks like the clock goes up under load, but itnalso pulls the voltage up with it to the point where it runs WAY too hot, up to about 92c, then the clock starts to drop, presumably due to either temp or current throttling.

 

[nascasho]

Well, this is exacty my problem. Icant find multiplier setting. I can find something called "turbo ratio" though.

When I raise this it looks like the clock goes up under load, but itnalso pulls the voltage up with it to the point where it runs WAY too hot, up to about 92c, then the clock starts to drop, presumably due to either temp or current throttling.

Gotta love auto voltage. Along with adjusting your turbo ratio you should probably consider setting your voltages manually. I have no idea what is considered safe yet for SB-E but try something along the lines of 1.35Vish - 1.38ish assuming it's like SB and find what your absolute max freq at that voltage is.

Don't forget to set your dimm voltage too.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Gotta love auto voltage. Along with adjusting your turbo ratio you should probably consider setting your voltages manually. I have no idea what is considered safe yet for SB-E but try something along the lines of 1.35Vish - 1.38ish assuming it's like SB and find what your absolute max freq at that voltage is.

Don't forget to set your dimm voltage too.

Ugh. This would be so much easier if they just dropped all the auto crap and let me determine it myself.

Now I have to chase hidden auto settings somewhere buried in the bios, and there is no way to just tell them to stay at default. It's either auto or I have to enter my own value. For Vcore its fairly easy to determine. For some of the more obscure settings I'd be guessing.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Any idea what max temp is for the SB-E's? Same as the i7-920's at 100c?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Finally stable at 4.5Ghz. Had to creep all the way up to 1.38V to get there though.

Let's see how it likes 4.6

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Looks like 4.6@1.40v is as good as it's going to get for me, at least until I get some Indigo Extreme (not available for LGA2011 yet )

Load temp in Intel Burn Test (very high) runs from ~72C to 88C at peak.

Prime 95 (Large In Place FFT's) averages about 80C

Idle is disappointingly high at ~50C, probably because once you switch to manual voltage it no longer downvolts when idle, which is disappointing

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Another question...

Any attempt at setting my Corsair Dominator DDR3-2000 RAM above 1600mhz leads to instability, probably because this is outside the spec of the memory controller.

Any idea what I can do to make this stable? I doubt RAM voltage will do it as it is rated at 2000mhz at 1.65v. PLL voltage maybe?

 

[Teenyman45]

Have you tried playing with the "gear ratio" multiplier yet? As an example, Bsclk 100 x Multiplier of 40 x 1.25 ratio = 5.00GHz. Looking various test screencaps, TJMax seems to be 91C rather than 100. As for the RAM, I have a bias against Corsair products after getting six bad kits so I would not be the best person to comment.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Have you tried playing with the "gear ratio" multiplier yet? As an example, Bsclk 100 x Multiplier of 40 x 1.25 ratio = 5.00GHz.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. What is "ratio" in this sense? Raising the base clock to 125?

I tried raising the base clock to 125 manually, and the damned thing won't even post. Funnily enough if I use ASUS "Auto OC" it sets the base clock to 130 and it posts just fine...

Looking various test screencaps, TJMax seems to be 91C rather than 100.

Yeah, I've come to this conclusion too. At 90C everything runs fine.

91C causes throttling

As for the RAM, I have a bias against Corsair products after getting six bad kits so I would not be the best person to comment.

Interesting. As of late I have held Corsair as the gold standard in RAM, not trusting pretty much any other brand. I've had issues with Gskill, Mushkin, Crucial, Kingston, you name it.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Also, I'm wondering if I am tweaking the right settings.


With the multiplier I am changing the POST screen as well as the computer properties screen in Windows still stays at 3.2Ghz. it just seems to allow the turbo to go higher.

So right now - for instance - everything official (Post, Windows, CPU-Z, etc) says 3.2Ghz, but once I fie up a program, actual speed down in the lower left corner of CPU-Z is 4600Mhz.

Is this the same way you guys have been overclocking these SB-E chips, or have you found an actual base multiplier somewhere buried in the settings?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Also, I thought it would be funny to put things in perspective.

Below is the TOP500 chart listing the history of the top 500 super computers in the world as rated by Flops.

Linpack (in the form of Intel Burn Test) told me that my 3930K@4.6Ghz was pushing out 181Gflops, so I took the liberty of adding 180Gflops to the chart.

(Since it is logarithmic, I counted the number of pixels between 100GFlops and 1Tflop (32 pixels) and computed as follows [log (180/100)]*32 ~8.2. Since I can't draw partial pixels, I put the line at the 8th pixel above the 100Gflop line.)

Interpretation:

the 3930K is roughly tied with the top supercomputers in the world from 1994 through mid 1995. In 1996 the top supercomputer in the world finally was able to clearly exceed the 180Gflop level. It took until mid way through 2002 for the 500th supercomputer in the world to exceed that level...

What's even funnier is if you project the green line backwards it shows that the 3930K@4.6Ghz was faster than the top 500 super computers in the world combined in 1990.

1990 really doesn't seem that long ago to me. I was already - at age 10 - overclocking then

And that is CPU alone without even considering the GPU power I have in this thing.

It's amazing how quickly things develop.

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