Is overclock stable/Safe?

[PizzaTacoCat]

Today I replaced my 2 8GB sticks of 3000 mhz ram with 2 8GB sticks of ram at 3200mhz (RGB related). In the bios I set the ram as 3200mhz and enabled the XMP profile for it. I also changed my i7 8700K from sync all cores to sync all cores at 4.7 MHz (which is the boost clock). I'm cooling my CPU with a 360 radiator and in ASUS AI Suite 3 it shows an average CPU temp of 40 C with a CPU Core Voltage of around 1.40. CPU system agent is 1.144 and DRAM voltage is 1.344. I don't really know anything about overclocking but was hoping I could easily boost my CPU to run at 4.7 all the time. Is it safe to run my computer the way it is now or at this voltage? Should I be using something different to monitor this information? Is there a free software I can use to stress test my CPU so I can make sure its stable?

[Airdragonz]

Running voltages as they are currently won't kill your cpu by any means, but it's definitely on the higher side. Try going into bios and dropping the voltage down manually. Once you find a stable voltage, go ahead and change the setting to adaptive so you're not constantly at a high voltage. For stress testing, prime95 is a very extreme and unrealistic test that I personally don't recommend. There's also aida64 and asus realbench for stress testing. 

[GhostRoadieBL]

https://www.funkykit.com/articles/overclocking-core-i7-8700k-coffee-lake-5ghz-on-all-6-cores/

 

this may get you a little more out of the CPU, 1.4v is higher than most for only 4.7ghz but also tracks with "AI overclocking" software which tend to go higher on the voltage and never get you as high as you can doing it yourself. 

 

there's always arguments on how overclocking will destroy your hardware, with the modern generations of chips there are so many protections from thermal to voltage to boost amperage and time limiters it's less likely to fry your components if you don't push the voltage to silly amounts. If you stay within the average voltage other users have been using you should be just fine, 1.4v should be your high point with 1.35v or 1.37v being all you should need to push up to 4.9 or 5.0ghz manually keeping everything else auto/stock settings. then run prime95 or the IntelBurnTest for 30min or so and you should see how high the temps get. if you crash the system just reboot into the bios and tweak the voltage up a touch to 1.4v or lower the multiplier to 49 and try again. 

[PizzaTacoCat]

16 hours ago, Airdragonz said:

Running voltages as they are currently won't kill your cpu by any means, but it's definitely on the higher side. Try going into bios and dropping the voltage down manually. Once you find a stable voltage, go ahead and change the setting to adaptive so you're not constantly at a high voltage. For stress testing, prime95 is a very extreme and unrealistic test that I personally don't recommend. There's also aida64 and asus realbench for stress testing. 

What setting should I change to adaptive?

[PizzaTacoCat]

16 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

https://www.funkykit.com/articles/overclocking-core-i7-8700k-coffee-lake-5ghz-on-all-6-cores/

 

this may get you a little more out of the CPU, 1.4v is higher than most for only 4.7ghz but also tracks with "AI overclocking" software which tend to go higher on the voltage and never get you as high as you can doing it yourself. 

 

there's always arguments on how overclocking will destroy your hardware, with the modern generations of chips there are so many protections from thermal to voltage to boost amperage and time limiters it's less likely to fry your components if you don't push the voltage to silly amounts. If you stay within the average voltage other users have been using you should be just fine, 1.4v should be your high point with 1.35v or 1.37v being all you should need to push up to 4.9 or 5.0ghz manually keeping everything else auto/stock settings. then run prime95 or the IntelBurnTest for 30min or so and you should see how high the temps get. if you crash the system just reboot into the bios and tweak the voltage up a touch to 1.4v or lower the multiplier to 49 and try again. 

I really appreciate that link it makes things really easy. The main reason I was thinking 4.7 was that I want my computer to stay quiet at idle and decently quiet when gaming. To be honest other than gaming I don't really do anything that would stress the CPU much. Do you think pushing the CPU to 5GHz increase the noise by much when compared to 4.7? And if you had to guess what core voltage would you think I should try to keep it at 4.7 versus 5.0?

[GhostRoadieBL]

that all depends on the cooling. most motherboards will have fan curves based on temps, so the hotter the CPU gets (from more voltage) the louder your fans will get until they hit the high point set on the curve (normally 90-100%) you can change this curve in the Bios or just set your fans to "quiet" or "silent" or something similar in the bios settings for the fans.

more frequency can increase temps but that is a byproduct of more voltage to get to those frequencies, the lower you can get the voltage while remaining stable the less heat you'll need to get rid of with the fans. normally called "undervolting" you'll see this in a ton of laptop forums trying to reduce the amount of heat the tiny cooling systems need to get rid of while keeping the frequency(GHz) of the processor the same