Hi guys

I bought a new rig a few months back and I got one that could be overclocked to increase performance. I have never overclocked before so as you can imagine I wish some advice before touching anything.

I got a Gigabyte Z390 motherboard which has an Intel i5 9600KF processor. 16GB RAM and an Nvidia Geforce RTX2070 graphics card. Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks

 

Best you will find is/are on the respective manufacturers forum(s). Especially with the OC software for their product(s).

On 8/19/2020 at 2:28 AM, jordanf93 said:

Hi guys

I bought a new rig a few months back and I got one that could be overclocked to increase performance. I have never overclocked before so as you can imagine I wish some advice before touching anything.

I got a Gigabyte Z390 motherboard which has an Intel i5 9600KF processor. 16GB RAM and an Nvidia Geforce RTX2070 graphics card. Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks

 

Sure, I'll give you my 2 cents, since I have basically the same setup (MSI instead of Gigabyte and 32GB instead of 16GB). You'll get as many opinions about overclocking as you'll get posting about which flight sim addon is the best... But the bottom line is that you want to push speeds up as much as you can without losing stability, and to do this you need to incrementally increase speed until you lose stability in performance or temps.

1) Not all Silicon is created equal. Each example of a processor is different, so there's no one answer for everyone. But, the 9600K is a great OC chip. I run mine at 5ghz without any stability trouble.

2) Cooling. You didn't mention what cooling solution you use. Again, lots of opinions here, but my personal rule is not to go above the 80s in the worst case scenario. Some will say 90s are fine, some will say don't bust 79C...it's really a personal choice - thermal throttling happens at 100C (or thereabouts), so that's the technical upper limit Intel has set before it takes over to protect the processor.  90s make me uncomfortable, but that's arbitrary and not based in science or experience. I've never 'burned out' or overheated any components in 20+ years. I use the Noctua NH-D15. It is big and requires a case that has enough space (they provide a list of compatible cases on their website). But it is easier and cheaper than going with a liquid cooled solution, which I have no patience for even if there are some pretty easy options out there these days. You will get better cooling and probably slightly better performance with a liquid cooler, but...in my experience to date, it hasn't been worth it.

3) Settings. You can almost certainly find guides for your motherboard that walk you through the settings for getting your overclock going... For my Z390 and 9600K, I used this as a guide https://www.msi.com/blog/intel-9th-cpu-overclocking-5ghz-with-z390-motherboards.  It frankly suggests a pretty high voltage for the i5 of 1.43v. The relationship between temperature and voltage is pretty direct - the higher the voltage, the hotter the processor will get, so many/most try to keep the voltage below 1.4v. Again, you'll get lots of opinions here. I settled on 1.40v, which was a middle ground between the "don't go above 1.35v" crowd and the "1.43v is just fine" crowd.  Basically there are just a handful of settings you need to set, and this guide speaks to them, though they may be slightly different for the Gigabyte.

A couple things to note...ring ratio and AVX offset. For flightsim, you want to use an AVX offset of 0. I think all three sims (XP, P3D and MSFS) in their latest iterations use AVX instruction sets, so an AVX offset just undoes your overclock for those, so you need an AVX offset of 0. You will be able to achieve a higher overclock with an AVX offset, but while that may help in some applications, it will not help with flight sim.  So settle for a lower overall overclock with AVX offset at 0.  Ring ratio is typically set 1-3 below the overall cpu ratio. So, if you wanted to try out 4.8ghz to start, you'd want to start a cpu ratio fixed at 48, with an AVX offset of 0 and a ring ratio of 46 and probably a voltage of 1.40. Then you boot up your system, run stress tests and see if you're stable and what your temps are.

4) Testing. I know lots of people use lots of different tools to test, but again, I'm a simpleton, and just a little bit lazy... so I use this tool https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/29183/Intel-Extreme-Tuning-Utility-Intel-XTU- from Intel to run my testing. It has a stability testing mode and a benchmark. I've found that the benchmark is harder on the system, so I just go right to that. If my settings don't cause a crash in the benchmark, then I move on to running the simulator. Go straight to the most CPU intensive place, spend 10 minutes there with the Intel tool running in the background or another monitoring overlay of your choice. You want to watch overall, but also individual core temps. And make sure you're happy with where they are. There's a graph in the intel tool, and you can tell it how much history you want. I keep 5 minutes I think - and that let's me sim for 5 mins, then go look at the graph and see if I was high, low, or what. Of course, if you crash, you need to back down settings, if you don't, you can increase them one notch at a time... So if 48/46/0/1.4 worked for you, then try 49/46/0/1.4. If that works, go to 49/47/0/1.4. Rinse and repeat until you can't go any higher.  I landed at 50/48/0/1.4, which is a cool 5Ghz. But each chip is different. You might get to 5.1, or more likely, you might only get to 4.9Ghz.

5) XMP. Make sure you enable XMP in your motherboard to run your memory at its actual speed. By default, if you bought 3200 or 3400 mhz (or whatever) memory, with XMP disabled, it will run at a reduced speed. No point in overclocking if you're memory is slow, so make sure XMP is enabled and it shows you're getting the published speed for the memory.

6) GPU overclocking. I'm not an expert here, I don't do it, but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't.

7) Stability. Remember that overclocking can create instability and if you find that you're getting crashes in any game or simulator, the very first troubleshooting step you should take is to disable your overclock. This gets so easily and often overlooked to the determent of the user. I've watched people complain and thrash and fight about software instability for weeks before they realized that random faulting DLL was actually a symptom of their overclock. So, remember, if you're crashing, go to the bios, deactivate your overclock and then test.

😎 Profiles. In my bios, and yours as well I'm sure, you can save your bios overclock profile - so save one with NO overclock and one with overclock. That way you can easily turn it off to test and then turn it back on without having to reconfigure everything.

Have fun. Don't start a fire. (I kid)...

 

 

Edited August 21, 20205 yr by cwburnett

What cwburnett said.

For GPU you can do an easy initial overclock with MSI Afterburner. For the 2070 you can probably just add e.g. +125 to core and +500 to memory in the Afterburner main dashboard and get an easy overclock that doesn't require you to mess about with adding any voltage. Use the Unigine Superposition benchmark tool to see what sort of % difference it makes.

You can experiment with various numbers added to core and memory. Probably best to start off low and work up incrementally. If you add a little too much worst that'll happen is it'll crash Unigine and you can lower it back a notch to the stable number. For my 2070 super I found that I couldn't push the core past +125 unless I wanted to add more voltage which I didn't want to do right now. But +125 core and +500 memory gave me +6% increase in Unigine benchmark and GPU temps were unaffected. 

Edited August 22, 20205 yr by Tektolnes

One thing I have changed my mind on in the last year or so is CPU testing utilities...I used to run all-out with Prime95 for 12 hours to stress test my overclocks, but I've started using utilities that are more representative of the load the sim will put on the system.  Currently my go-to test is RealBench.  I think that Intel XTU and Prime95 (especially with AVX turned on) are overkill.  I built a portable system in a LAN Box case with a 9900K and a NH-D15, and it would not pass a run of P95 without busting my personal temp limit of 80 deg C...but with RealBench it passed OK and has never had an issue with P3D running at that overclock (5.0 on 8 cores, no HT).

 

Hi guys

 

Thanks very much for all your comments and input. Especially the detailed st explains exactly what to do. I’ll sit down and read through all the posts and try out what you have all suggested and see how I get on. I’ll definitely start with 4.8 and see how I get on from there.

Many thanks 😊