Overclocking with ROG Strix Z370-E

[thebagsman]

After being far too lazy and allowing AI Suite to do my overclock for me (stupid I know) I've been really wanting to manually overclock my 8700K. After digging through the BIOS myself and both reading and watching a few tutorials on overclocking with this board I feel I have more questions than answers. The first obnoxious thing is this board doesn't simply to allow an XMP profile and a manual CPU overclock. When going into AI Tweaker, I have to disable XMP and switch to manual. From what I have seen this means I have to manually overclock the RAM as well which seems stupid. From there I have just seen different ideas on AVX offsets, load line levels, and the usual suspects of tweaks for optimal overclocks. Every time I think I understand what to do and then once I enter the BIOS myself I feel lost again. 

 

Has anybody had much experience overclocking with this board? Thanks in advance.

[Zando_]

Manually OCing the RAM (if you just want XMP speeds) is easy since they print the XMP specs on the side of the DIMMs. Just slap the voltage, speed, and main timings from there in and leave all the other timings on auto. 

An AVX offset applies a negative multiplier offset when running AVX workloads. So say you ran 5GHz with an offset  of 2, your chip actually runs 4.8GHz under AVX workloads. I'd skip using an AVX offset, just find the speed your chip will pass any test you throw at it with, and leave it at that. 

 

Load Line Calibration is a vDroop counter. vDroop = voltage drop when under load (say you set 1.3v but it actually pulls 1.24v under load). LLC will counteract this by running a higher voltage than you set, so when vDroop happens it doesn't drop so low that your chip becomes unstable. It can be a bit of a balancing act to make sure it doesn't push too much voltage, but once you figure out what your motherboard does, it's pretty easy to work around. 

 

As far as tweaks for optimal OCs, on an 8700K that's just remembering to OC the cache too, it can lead to an improvement in 1% lows and overall snappiness of the chip. 

[thebagsman]

1 minute ago, Zando Bob said:

Manually OCing the RAM (if you just want XMP speeds) is easy since they print the XMP specs on the side of the DIMMs. Just slap the voltage, speed, and main timings from there in and leave all the other timings on auto. 

That is good to know I will have to take a lock at my DIMMs for that.

 

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

As far as tweaks for optimal OCs, on an 8700K that's just remembering to OC the cache too, it can lead to an improvement in 1% lows and overall snappiness of the chip. 

That is interesting, nothing I had read or watched even mentioned cache.

 

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that everybody has slightly different methods for handling overclocking but I guess now I just don't know what I want to do lol.

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, thebagsman said:

That is good to know I will have to take a lock at my DIMMs for that.

 

That is interesting, nothing I had read or watched even mentioned cache.

 

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that everybody has slightly different methods for handling overclocking but I guess now I just don't know what I want to do lol.

People have always said cache OCing doesn't matter, and have usually been wrong. "Cache" as it's labeled on current mobos, is just RING/Uncore on older stuff. Uncore being everything not the cores themselves, including the ringbus and such. On old chips it makes a very noticeable difference (they often run 1.8Ghz stock, but can easily do 3-3.6GHz when OCed), on newer chips it's less noticeable, but still can effect 1% lows and a little bit on the highs as well. It makes the chip overall snappier, reducing some latencies inside the CPU itself I assume. 

Here's a fellow LTTer's thread on how it affected their 9900K, which is a much more recent chip than the stuff I run: 

Higher scores at 4.9 core/4.7 uncore than at 5.0 core/4.3 uncore (which was the stock uncore I believe), so core speed isn't the only thing that matters.