What factors into overclock stability?

[Ganz]

I am fairly new to overclocking, but the other night I had my i5 4690k up at 4.4GHz playing Guild Wars 2 for over 5 hours.  I had no issues whatsoever.  However last night was unstable giving me BSODs (or windows 8 equivalent with stupid ascii frowny face.)  After reduced my OC to 4.3GHz it worked perfectly.  Is that just instability coming later or is there something else that could be factoring into it?  (Running it with a gtx 970 on a 850w psu and H100i cooler.)  Average temps while under heavy load of my system hover around 50 on my cpu, and 65 on gpu.

[79wjd]

Try increasing the voltage. 

 

Instabilities occur when the cpu can't run at a certain frequency (and is limited by the silicon or the voltage -- the silicon limit is usually above the voltage limit though -- at least without a custom loop)

[Aniallation]

What voltage are you running?

[SkilledRebuilds]

Voltage no doubt,.. or V-droop (V-drops) causing it.

[Ganz]

Try increasing the voltage. 

 

Instabilities occur when the cpu can't run at a certain frequency (and is limited by the silicon or the voltage -- the silicon limit is usually above the voltage limit though -- at least without a custom loop)

 

 

What voltage are you running?

 

 

Voltage no doubt,.. or V-droop (V-drops) causing it.

Sounds like a voltage issue.  My MSI motherboard BIOS has an auto voltage setting with OC genie enabled, but it looks like I'll have to manage it manually.  Thanks guys!

[Aniallation]

Sounds like a voltage issue.  My MSI motherboard BIOS has an auto voltage setting with OC genie enabled, but it looks like I'll have to manage it manually.  Thanks guys!

Auto voltage generally doesn't work that well. Set it yourself. Go straight to 1.3V and give it a try, it's the best voltage for a balance between overclockability and long-term reliability. 

[79wjd]

Sounds like a voltage issue.  My MSI motherboard BIOS has an auto voltage setting with OC genie enabled, but it looks like I'll have to manage it manually.  Thanks guys!

Yes, you should definitely manually overclock as auto-overclocking software doesn't always achieve the best overclock at the lowest voltage, or complete stability. 

[cesrai]

Sometimes the powerphase and vrams get hot and these cause some problems when that happens.

[Ganz]

Auto voltage generally doesn't work that well. Set it yourself. Go straight to 1.3V and give it a try, it's the best voltage for a balance between overclockability and long-term reliability. 

Thanks! I'll give it a try when I get home from work.

[spartaman64]

a little warning increasing voltage also increases the heat a lot

[Leonard]

@Ganz

 

This could be a number of issues but suspect in your case, it is just the TIM in between the die and the IHS drying up, yes this happens. When the CPU that uses these new TIMs in between the die and IHS you can get an OC of X but after running that OC for a while the TIM's quality degrades and what ever it degrades to is now your starting point for your real OC.

 

Just reconfigure your OC.

 

It would be nice to get the BSOD's code.

 

OCing and general windows debugging codes

[Ganz]

a little warning increasing voltage also increases the heat a lot

An h100i should be able to keep up with two corsair sp120s in pull.  I could put the stock bck on for push pull, but I am currently not too concerned with heat.