The Core i7-3770K overclockedrigsandgeeks.com /the-core- i7-3770k-overclocked/

Overclocking is a type of rite of passage f or Computer enthusiasts. You’re not really hardcore until you’vepushed your equipment beyond the share speeds described by the manuf acturer. Back in the entire day,that intended f iddling with DIP switches, navigating arcane BIOS interf aces, or even making hardwareadjustments with a #2 pencil. Also, we’d to walk baref oot through several f eet of snowf all to get ourpractical the hardware just; Newegg wasn’t around, and Amazon only sold textbooks.

Nowadays, clock boosting couldn’t end up being easier. AMD and Intel both present CPUs with unlockedmultipliers completely, the ult imate goal of overclocking. Pressing one’s CPU past its def ault accelerationrequires bit more than arriving the multiplier. That you can do through user- f riendly f irmware interf aces andWindows sof tware program increasingly. Some boards will overclock themselves-with and without yourauthorization even.

The obvious question, needless to say, is how Ivy Bridge f its in to the overclocking picture. Intel’s SandyBridge CPUs possess of f ered a respectable amount of clock acceleration headroom since their debutearlier last year, and all optical eye are on Ivy to notice if she can replicate that f eat. To discover what thebrand new platf orm provides overclockers, we’ve invest some high quality t ime pushing the brand new Corei7-3770K on Z77 motherboards f rom Asus, Gigabyte, Intel, and MSI. Continue reading to discover whatwe’ve learned.

As in headroom f reeThere are all sorts of overclockers within the enthusiast community. Some invest ridiculous levels of t ime-and money-on elaborate contraptions that chill CPUs making use of liquid nitrogen. Others plumb their PCs

with elaborate networks of water-cooling tubing. Those camps have a tendency to look f or the absolutelimitations of these CPUs. However, most f ans seem articles to tap the “f ree of charge” clock speedheadroom which can be exploited with af f ordable atmosphere cooling. Than probing the extremes rather,we’re going to observe how f ar the Primary i7-3770K complements the sort of atmosphere tower one mightbe prepared to f ind in the average enthusiast’s Computer.

Right af ter rummaging through the assortment of heatsinks which has accumulated in the BenchmarkingSweatshop, we settled on a Thermaltake Frio. This is actually the exact same cooler we make use of onour storage check systems, and at $48 online, it ’s eminently inexpensive. The radiator will be lined with anincrease of f ins than we’d treatment to count, plus f ive heatpipes and dual 120-mm f ans.

Where’s the next spinner? It interf ered with the taller heatspreaders on our Corsair Vengeance DIMMs,theref ore the Frio had to create do with an individual f an f or a lot of our testing just. The clearance issueimpacted all of the Z77 boards inside our labs. We f urthermore had trouble obtaining a couple of biggerNoctua coolers to match, theref ore the problem isn’t special to the Frio. Many motherboards place theirDIMM slot machine games too near to the socket to permit massive atmosphere coolers to coexistpeacef ully with taller storage modules.

As it works out, the next f an didn’t f ind yourself making much of an improvement. Whenever we switched toa dual- f an set up with a set of low-user prof ile Kingston DIMMs, we didn’t notice a considerable reductionin CPU temperatures. The next enthusiast didn’t assist the CPU hit increased speeds, either.

That’s not to state our overclocking endeavors weren’t t ied to our system’s cooling set up. Although wegot around 5GHz on several the boards, the CPU temperatures climbed high more than enough to boildrinking water. Thermal throttling had been rampant, f orcing us to cool of f to 4.9GHz, the best speed ourCore we7-3770K would sustain under load.Going to 4.9GHz, we used a new 49Xmultiplier with Ivy’s share 100MHz baseclock. You can also raise the CPUregularity by turning up the bottom clockrate, but since that clock impactsadditional system components, youneed to adhere to multiplier tweaking.

We had been never in a posit ion tosqueeze lots of MHz out of SandyBridge’s bottom clock, and Intel statesIvy includes a similar range.

Our Core i7-3770K needed 1.35V (whichCPU-Z detected as 1.368V) to staystable in 4.9GHz. The machine had beenstressed with AIDA64′s built- in torturecheck working alongside the rthdriblHDR light demo. That tandem designedf or an excellent quick test, but 7-Z ipbecame the f inal arbiter. When it hadbeen run by us to assemble f inalperf ormance numbers f or everymotherboard, the app spit out errorswith conf igurations which were regarded as stable previously.

I was just a litt le surprised going to obvious thermal limitations with the chip jogging at this type of relativelylow primary voltage. I viewed the energy consumption then. Here are a f ew wattage quantit ies f or the wholesystem, sans monitor, extracted f rom the walls socket. A multi-primary Cinebench render had been used tocreate the load.

Yeah, that is clearly a pretty big dif f erence in load. 4.4GHz represents the best speed we achieved in thedef ault voltage, which CPU-Z reported as 1.128V. That 500MHz leap over the Core i actually7-3770K’s3.9GHz peak Turbo f requency consumed yet another 17W at the walls socket. Going another 400MHz withthe voltage bump of 0 up. 24V sent the reading through on our watt meter by nearly 100W up.

Processor power intake is proportional to the merchandise of regularity and the square of the voltage,theref ore increasing the latter could cause the wattage to go up really. We crunched the real numbers, andour outcomes nicely f it the f ormula. Serious cooling will be necessary to push Ivy to its limits.Simultaneously, taking Ivy around around 4.4GHz should require only modest cooling, provided the CPUvoltage is untouched.

Distinctly dif f erent experiences

Given that we’ve established the Primary i7-3770K’s limitations with this cooling setup, it is t ime to get mosttouchy f eely with a collection of Z77 motherboards: Asus’ P8Z77-V, Gigabyte’s Z77X-UD3H, Intel’sDZ77GA-70K, and MSI’s Z68A-GD65. We’ll be f ocusing on CPU overclocking, since we’ve currentlypublished an in-depth evaluation of the Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI boards and a glance at the Intel one.

Let’s f ocus on the Asus plank, because it is the only one that has been stable in 4.9GHz. We didn’t godirect there, though. Very f irst, we tapped in to the board’s auto-overclocking system, that is activated viathe OC Tuner f irmware choice. The board overclocked itself to 4.2GHz utilizing a 41X multiplier and a new103MHz bottom clock. OC Tuner didn’t raise the core voltage, and the machine was stable perf ectly.

Up coming, we tried our hands at manual tuning. You can f ind two choices: f irmware and sof tware program.The P8Z77-V’s f irmware user interf ace is among the greatest around, and it ’s f ast to navigate f or thosewho are f amiliar with conventional BIOS layouts. The f irmware automatically escalates the CPU voltagebecause the regularity rises, a f unction that’s not matched by Asus’ Home windows tweaking sof tware.

Since we’ve already spent a great deal of period poking around Asus’ f irmware, we chosen the programroute. Asus’ Home windows utilit ies attended a long way within the last couple of years, and the TurboVEVO app is great. The interf ace is simple to utilize and nicely f its Asus’ other apps. Choices abound, like anauto-overclocking system f or Ivy’s incorporated GPU. Gleam separate program with f ine-grained control onthe power circuitry, also it proved invaluable in obtaining our CPU steady at 4.9GHz.

Ivy overclocking is most benef icial conf ined to the CPU multiplier, so that is the technique we took insideour manual periods. The P8Z77-V ran our Primary i7-3770K around 4.4GHz bef ore additional voltage wasnecessary to maintain balance under load. Hitt ing 4.8GHz needed 1.3V, and 1.35V was had a need to keepcaref ully the BSODs away in 4.9GHz. At that speed, we’d to create the load-series calibration to “higher” toavoid Z-Zip f rom generating mistakes.

The P8Z77-V booted into Home windows with the CPU running at 5GHz actually, nonetheless it crashedunder load instantly, and applying extra voltage didn’t help. Currently, the CPU had been riding theadvantage of the throttling threshold. We tried tweaking a f ew of the other program voltages even, to noavail.

Next up: the Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H. Once again, we began with the board’s auto-tuning mechanism. Thatone is obtainable through Gigabyte’s EasyTune sof tware program, which includes a handf ul of pre-bakedsettings along with an auto choice that cranks the regularity and runs its stability test on the way.

Af ter jogging and rebooting its Windows-based stability test many times, the UD3H settled on 4.7GHzutilizing a 45X multiplier paired with a new 104MHz base clock. CPU-Z reported a new CPU voltage of justone 1 just.248V. The operational program almost managed to get through our stress check, however whenthe rthdribl screen was closed f ollowing a f ive-minute load, the system crashed. Upon rebooting, the devicescaled itself back again to 4.4GHz (43x103MHz) at exactly the same voltage. This construction survived ourtorture check without f ussing.

Gigabyte evidently requires a better stress check f or its auto-tuning system. Falling back again to a slowerswif tness is really a nice recovery, however the auto-tune scheme should create a stable result to beginwith. Auto-tuning mechanisms are greatest f or newbies searching f or a trouble-f ree of charge overclockand seasoned af icionados seeking a well balanced starting point because of their own manual tuning.

Speaking of guide tuning, we bounced in between Gigabyte’s sof tware program and f irmware bef oref avoring the latter. The EasyTune sof tware program messed with the heat range readings we wereconsistently getting f rom AIDA64, and the app f eels as though it was not updated in age range. Gigabytedoes have a f resh strength tuning utility f or Home windows, but it ’s a dif f erent app that’s very muchclumsier than EasyTune. Thankf ully, the motherboard’s brand-new f irmware interf ace is really a real treat toutilize.

Mouse-helpf ul sliders permeate the “3D” interf ace, and there’s an “innovative” layout if you like the comf ortof an old-school BIOS. Just like the Asus plank, the Gigabyte automatically escalates the CPU voltage aslong as the multiplier will be tweaked via the f irmware. You will have to include voltage manually whenoverclocking with EasyTune.

4.4GHz once more became the CPU’s limitation at stock voltage. Nevertheless, we couldn’t get 4.9GHzstable regardless of how much f ruit juice was pumped through the processor chip. Windows wouldn’t loadbef ore CPU was presented with 1.35V, but that wasn’t enough to push away the BSODs under load. Addingvoltage only resulted in throttling and program mistakes. Adjusting the load-collection calibration didn’tmake the machine more stable, and neither did tweaking other energy settings and system voltages.

In the f inal end, the f astest steady conf iguration was 4.8GHz on 1.35V. The board was delighted bootingHome windows and running our tension check on 1.325V, but 7-Z ip mistakes persisted until we appliedmore voltage.

Intel’s DZ77GA new-70K may be the only table of the bunch it doesn’t have a computerized overclockingsystem. We’ve really seen auto-tuners on Intel boards bef ore the Sandy Bridge era, however the company’srecent attempts seem f ocused on sort of auto/guide hybrid available via the f irmware. The primary interf acesupplies a CPU clock velocity slider that customers are absolve to drag around 4.5GHz. The sliderescalates the multiplier without touching the bottom clock or the voltage. It can, nevertheless, ramp up theexisting limit theref ore the CPU isn’t starved f or amperage.

For the pseudo-auto overclock, we dragged the slider completely to the proper and rebooted. Theoperational system returned at 4.5GHz, also it remained BSOD-f ree of charge f or the degree of our stresscheck. Hitt ing larger speeds would require obtaining our hands just a litt le dirt ier.

I like Intel’s f resh motherboard f irmware, and its own advanced overclocking options of f er you a lot ofmultiplier headroom going to higher speeds. The drop-down menus f or the voltage conf igurations are asmall cumbersome because of the sheer number of choices, though. Intel would prosper to permit users tokey- in voltages straight. It would be good to see an “car” setting that escalates the CPU voltage instantlybecause the f requency rises, as well.

Ultimately, the majority of our period has been spent overclocking the Intel table which consists of Windowssof tware. The Great Tuning Utility is quite slick, of f ering just enough options along with a nice monitoringpanel. There’s also a stress check, although we elected to utilize our own.

Pushing greater than 4.5GHz in stock voltage proved dif f icult, but a supplementary 100 millivolts got theCPU to 4.7GHz without problem. 4.8GHz required another 100mV, which produced a new 1.336 CPU voltagein accordance with CPU-Z. That has been enough juice to obtain the CPU to load Home windows at around5GHz. However, the operational system crashed under load. Applying more voltage led to throttling, whichstruck again when we ran our 7-Z ip and x264 tests at 4.9GHz. We’d to sacrif ice another 100MHz to obtaina rock-solid system.

Finally, we arrived at the MSI Z68A-GD65, which includes easy and simple auto-overclocking mechanism ofthe bunch. All of the user must do is strike the OC Genie switch in the part of the board. Once the switch isdepressed, the table boots utilizing an MSI-optimized overclocking user prof ile. Customers can tweak thisuser prof ile themselves, but we went with MSI’s def aults because of this leg of the overclocking trip.

OC Genie proved really conservative, taking the Primary i7-3770K around 4.2GHz by adjusting only itsmultiplier. The machine endured our stress check without breaking a sweat, so we manually began tweakingsettings.

MSI’s ClickBIOS II f irmware is really a big improvement on the company’s init ial init iatives, and I love theknown proven f act that it comes with an accompanying Windows application having an identical interf ace.There’s something to end up being said f or maintaining regularity between your f irmware interf ace andHome windows utilit ies. Unf ortunately, the Home windows app takes to bunch and apply changes f orever.Modif ying a reboot is necessary by the multiplier, which isn’t the situation f or other Home windows tuningapps, like MSI’s own Control Middle sof tware.

Control Center uses longer than it will to load still, but changes immediately are applied almost. Multipliertweaking had been all it had taken to get the Primary i7-3770K up to stable 4.5GHz. Increased f requenciesrequired even more voltage, exposing a good presssing issue with Manage Center. Setting 1.2V inside theapp produced 1.192V in CPU-Z, but bumping around 1.3V led to a new reported voltage of only one 1.208V.Assigning a 1.3V CPU voltage in the f irmware produced 1.304V inside CPU-Z, thus we dropped ControlMiddle f or the rest of our testing.

The operational system was stable around 4.7GHz on 1.2V, also it strike 4.8GHz on 1.3V. Incorporatinganother 100MHz needed 1.35V and appeared to be throttle- f ree. Nevertheless, 7-Z ip wouldn’t operate f orgreater than a moment without producing one. Upping the CPU voltage didn’t help, and did f iddling withanother system voltages and strength settings neither. In the end, we’d to drop to 4.8GHz to banish the 7-Zip errors.

An instant look at perf ormance

If you’ve study our overview of the Core i7-3770K, you understand how its f unctionality stacks up at sharespeeds. You’ve f urthermore seen just how much additional f unctionality could be gained by switching theregularity around 4.9GHz. At that speed, Ivy Bridge f its the f unctionality of the Core we7-3960X nearly,which is predicated on Sandy Bridge-E silicon that provides two more memory stations and CPU cores.

So, think about the conf igurations we’ve discussed in this post? 7-Z ip and the x264 encoding benchmarkwere operate on all of the boards at their highest steady conf igurations. The Asus was examined with theCPU at 4.9GHz, although it was had by others clocked at 4.8GHz.

100MHz amounts to around 2% if you are jogging at speeds this higher, so it ’s no real surprise to see allof the scores so near. The Asus P8Z77-V happens on top because of its clock speed advantage generally.However, it gets the lowest f rame price in the second move of the x264 test.

Overclocking upon the sly For a relatively good right t ime, we’ve complained that Asus’ motherboardf irmware partcipates in overclocking behind the user ’s back. In case a manual memory space multiplier isdef ined, the CPU’s single-primary Turbo multiplier is put on all-core loads. The Primary i7-3770K operatesat 3.9GHz when all its cores are occupied of the def ault 3 instead.7GHz. This constitutes overclocking, inaccordance with Intel, and it must not be done minus the user ’s consent. Worse even, it violates goodmethods f or enthusiast f irmware: modif ying one establishing shouldn’t change another, and specif ically notone that’s totally unrelated.

Asus doesn’t ask authorization when applying this “multicore improvement.” The f irmware’s all-primaryTurbo f requency screen is transf ormed to ref lect the overclocked rate, however the consumer isn’tprovided an explicit inf ormation about what’s happening. At the very least this f eature could be disabled inthe f irmware; we simply wish it weren’t allowed by def ault.

When def ending this behavior, Asus has insisted that other motherboard manuf acturers take part in similardirty methods. We didn’t notice any evidence of that whenever screening Z77 boards with a Sandy BridgeCPU. Nevertheless, we did catch yet another of f ender whenever we switched to Ivy Bridge. Gigabyte’sZ77X-UD3H plays exactly the same sport with Turbo multipliers if the memory space speed is def inedmanually. Our Primary i7-3770K operates at 3.9GHz having an all-core load once the memory is collection toperf orm at 1600MHz. Once the memory space divider is remaining at “auto,” the CPU rate tops out at3.7GHz when all cores are dynamic.

Will the Gigabyte f irmware ask authorization? Nope. Indeed, nothing in the f irmware even inf orms the userthat the CPU has been overclocked. Even though status window shows a 39X multiplier f or all-core loads, itcan so whatever the memory conf iguration- including once the board is utilizing the proper 37X multiplier.

We haven’t had time and energy to grill Gigabyte concerning this behavior, which can just be corrected byenvironment the CPU’s per-primary multipliers manually. Ugh. It ’s hard to see this tendency as anythingapart f rom an underhanded try to inf late benchmark ratings. There’s more proof that Asus and Gigabyteare usually pushing boundaries, as well. In accordance with CPU-Z, the Z77X-UD3H’s def ault f oundationclock speed is 100.88MHz, as the P8Z77-V is clocked in 100.52MHz. I’m not really likely to get too upsetover sub-MHz raises to clock rate, but it ’s well worth noting that MSI f ingernails the 100MHz def ault exactly.A smidgen is operate by the Intel table slower, at 99.78MHz.

Conclusions

Intel’s 22-nm process enables Ivy Bridge to take much less energy than its predecessor when operating inexactly the same speed. The 3D transistors of f er better overall perf ormance at low voltages purportedly,which is great f or mobile applications but perhaps not ideal f or overclocked desktop rigs. Having said that,I’m reasonably amazed with how nicely Ivy overclocks. The Primary i7-3770K was steady at 4.4-4.5GHzwithout so much being an extra millivolt put on the CPU. Those speeds just increased system power usage

by way of a modest amount, theref ore there is no need to spend money on an aggressive cooling answer.With this single-f an Frio conf ig, CPU temps were in the 50-60°C variety under load.

Moving past 4.5GHz requires additional voltage, and that is when Ivy really begins to heat up. With the CPUvoltage increased to a seemingly conservative 1.35V, system power usage soared, and thermal throttlingreared its ugly mind. We’d recommend liquid cooling to help keep high temps (and the connected throttling)away when approaching 5GHz. At 4 even.8-4.9GHz, with both of the Frio’s f ollowers installed, our CPUeclipsed 90°C with regularity. Although we’ve just overclocked one Ivy Bridge CPU, our results jibe with whatwe have been listening to f rom the motherboard manuf acturers.

Our Core i7-3770K hit similar limitations on all boards. The Asus has been the only person steady at4.9GHz, however the others were just 100MHz behind. At share voltage, the Intel and MSI boards bothmanaged 4.5GHz, while the some other two topped out in 4.4GHz. You need to be able to get yourself agreat overclock out of the boards we’ve examined. The experience may be the only thing that may dif f ersubstantially.

Of all boards, the Asus P8Z77-V supplies the most enjoyable overclocking go through the f irmware is quickto use, and the accompanying Windows sof tware is the best in the business by f ar. Only if Asus didn’tinsist upon an unseemly “multicore improvement” that overclocks the CPU minus the user ’s permission.

Gigabyte plays an identical technique with the Z77X-UD3H, and its own implementation is even sneakier.The auto-overclocking sof tware program is too aggressive, aswell, and the EasyTune Home windows utilitywill be overdue f or an up-date. That said, Gigabyte’s f resh f irmware makes guide overclocking easy. I’d wantto see the user interf ace ported to Windows, where it would be a step up f rom EasyTune and theaccompanying 3D Power app.

Again then, MSI’s Windows-based ClickBIOS implementation is painf ully slower on the Z77A-GD65. TheHandle Middle app is snappier, however the voltage modif ications didn’t work correctly f or us. Luckily, thef irmware user interf ace is solid. The opportunity to def ine a custom made user prof ile f or the OC Genieswitch is really a particularly nice contact.

OC Genie may be the least dif f icult auto-overclocking scheme around, but there’s merit to Intel’s hybridstrategy, which why don’t we take the CPU around 4.5GHz by dragging an individual slider on the primaryf irmware display. The DZ77GA-70K are designed f or manual overclocking, as well, and Intel’s f irmware andHome windows utility both provide a good user encounter without the niggling issues. They’re just a litt lebrief on options when compared to comparative Asus of f erings, though.

Since all of the boards reached similar clock speeds, I’d be hesitant to choose between them in line with theoverclocking encounter alone. Ideally, you’re just going to become overclocking the CPU as soon as. And I’dsuggest it. Ivy Bridge seems to have a respectable amount of “f ree of charge” clock speed headroom-and alot more if your cooler will be around the challenge.

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