BCLK overclocking the good ol' i7-4790 (non-K)

[J.Silence]

[Context: skip if you don't care]
Back in 2015 I built my first PC, at the time intended mostly for amateur music production (Cubase), rocking an i7-4790 in an Asus Z97-A motherboard, as I had no interest in overclocking but the Z97 board had good features and I/O for the price. I recently upgraded from a heavily overclocked Asus GT 1030 (story for another time... if anybody is interested) to an Nvidia T600 (basically a cut-down 40 W version of the GTX 1650). I had been feeling the CPU's age for a while now, but lifting that very hard GPU bottleneck made me really want to squeeze a bit more performance.

 

I've been running the 4790 for as long as I can remember with 103 BCLK with a 0,025 V offset, as suggested by the "Optimization" tool in AI Suite 3. This has been perfectly stable for 6 years with stock cooling, and I recently upgraded to a Noctua NH-U12A (silent operation is pretty important when recording stuff). So after some days of reading about BCLK overclocking, I decided to see how far it would go:

 

"Look, mom, I'm topping the charts for i7-4790 performance! You must be so proud of me!"

 

I tested up to 107 BCLK with no change in voltage, and according to 3DMark CPU Profile (perhaps not a "real" benchmark, but certainly an indication) I saw pretty sizeable gains with still very reasonable temps. At 107.5 my computer froze up shortly after boot when trying to start a bunch of applications, so I got somewhat scared and left it there for the moment. I've been running at 105 (4.2 GHz) with perfect stability, so... I kinda upgraded to a 4790K for free . I want to keep trying to get higher OCs, but I got a bit scared from all the horror stories about broken SDDs and fried boot sectors...

 

So, here come some newbie questions:

• I've read people talk of how dangerous BCLK OC is, how it can corrupt/brick your drives and thus you should stick to multiplier OC. But of course, that's not an option for me, it's either BCLK or nothing (boring!). My question is: does anybody have any evidence of BCLK overclock actually breaking things, without applying excessive voltages or heat? In all things OC it's sometimes hard to tell what's concern from fabricated scaremongering... I know Haswell BCLK will overclock also the PCIe lanes and that can make devices stop appearing or refuse to boot, but that's easily fixed by pulling back the OC: my concern is actual permanent damage to hardware or data.
• Would it be reasonable to, if 107.5 BCLK is indeed unstable, ramp up the voltage offset by 0.0125 V? (e.g. see if it's stable at +0.037)
• I haven't touched DRAM frequency yet (I know lowering it would improve the chances for a stable OC) or cache ratio or anything else, so any suggestions are welcome!

 

That's all... If I see interest from y'all, I'll keep you updated!

[SkilledRebuilds]

I managed 106.7BCLK on a i5 4690
Here is my old post about it.

Ring/Cache I had at 4.4Ghz for quite a while (most of its life), 4.5+ Ringbus proved to hurt my 1% lows or 0.1% lows, but if you weren't looking you might not see it as unstable.

 

I lost a few USB ports after a while though, can't confirm or deny if it was BCLK related, but I'd hazard a guess of maybe so..

[DoctorNick]

20 minutes ago, J.Silence said:

[Context: skip if you don't care]
Back in 2015 I built my first PC, at the time intended mostly for amateur music production (Cubase), rocking an i7-4790 in an Asus Z97-A motherboard, as I had no interest in overclocking but the Z97 board had good features and I/O for the price. I recently upgraded from a heavily overclocked Asus GT 1030 (story for another time... if anybody is interested) to an Nvidia T600 (basically a cut-down 40 W version of the GTX 1650). I had been feeling the CPU's age for a while now, but lifting that very hard GPU bottleneck made me really want to squeeze a bit more performance.

 

I've been running the 4790 for as long as I can remember with 103 BCLK with a 0,025 V offset, as suggested by the "Optimization" tool in AI Suite 3. This has been perfectly stable for 6 years with stock cooling, and I recently upgraded to a Noctua NH-U12A (silent operation is pretty important when recording stuff). So after some days of reading about BCLK overclocking, I decided to see how far it would go:

 

"Look, mom, I'm topping the charts for i7-4790 performance! You must be so proud of me!"

 

I tested up to 107 BCLK with no change in voltage, and according to 3DMark CPU Profile (perhaps not a "real" benchmark, but certainly an indication) I saw pretty sizeable gains with still very reasonable temps. At 107.5 my computer froze up shortly after boot when trying to start a bunch of applications, so I got somewhat scared and left it there for the moment. I've been running at 105 (4.2 GHz) with perfect stability, so... I kinda upgraded to a 4790K for free . I want to keep trying to get higher OCs, but I got a bit scared from all the horror stories about broken SDDs and fried boot sectors...

 

So, here come some newbie questions:

• I've read people talk of how dangerous BCLK OC is, how it can corrupt/brick your drives and thus you should stick to multiplier OC. But of course, that's not an option for me, it's either BCLK or nothing (boring!). My question is: does anybody have any evidence of BCLK overclock actually breaking things, without applying excessive voltages or heat? In all things OC it's sometimes hard to tell what's concern from fabricated scaremongering... I know Haswell BCLK will overclock also the PCIe lanes and that can make devices stop appearing or refuse to boot, but that's easily fixed by pulling back the OC: my concern is actual permanent damage to hardware or data.
• Would it be reasonable to, if 107.5 BCLK is indeed unstable, ramp up the voltage offset by 0.0125 V? (e.g. see if it's stable at +0.037)
• I haven't touched DRAM frequency yet (I know lowering it would improve the chances for a stable OC) or cache ratio or anything else, so any suggestions are welcome!

 

That's all... If I see interest from y'all, I'll keep you updated!

I cant remember if non K models of haswell support straps. But you might be able to set the BCLK strap to something like 1.25/1.67/2.0/2.33 

See this post for more info: https://www.overclock.net/threads/reaching-higher-oc-with-bclk-straps-haswell.1412668/post-20481791

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

22 minutes ago, J.Silence said:

I haven't touched DRAM frequency yet (I know lowering it would improve the chances for a stable OC) or cache ratio or anything else, so any suggestions are welcome!

Don't lower it. Faster RAM will contribute to better CPU performance.

 

Instead, you should temporarily remove your BCLK OC and see what the RAM can do in terms of frequency and timings. Then you'll have an idea for how much you can push it when also using the BCLK OC.

[Uveyss]

Hi guys I need help with overclock non k 4790
I was using a different system but I needed money and sold everything except my graphics card. Now I am using the MSI Z97 PC Mate and i7 4790 from my father's old computer. It goes up to 4ghz with turbo, but I want more performance to get more stable fps in new games.
I looked at BCLK overclocks in a few forums and tried them, but none of them worked on my system.
For example, one of the things I don't understand is that my BCLK values are not the same as the friend who opened this topic. While J.Silence sees 4.2 GHz with 107 BCLK, my 107 BCLK values are 3.8 GHz, but despite this, when I save the settings and reset them, the computer enters the setup screen, saying that the settings I made are not working.
I know this thread is quite old but I hope u guys see my message and helped me.

 

On 5/17/2022 at 3:00 PM, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

Don't lower it. Faster RAM will contribute to better CPU performance.

 

Instead, you should temporarily remove your BCLK OC and see what the RAM can do in terms of frequency and timings. Then you'll have an idea for how much you can push it when also using the BCLK OC.

 

On 5/17/2022 at 2:58 PM, DoctorNick said:

I cant remember if non K models of haswell support straps. But you might be able to set the BCLK strap to something like 1.25/1.67/2.0/2.33 

See this post for more info: https://www.overclock.net/threads/reaching-higher-oc-with-bclk-straps-haswell.1412668/post-20481791

 

On 5/17/2022 at 2:45 PM, SkilledRebuilds said:

I managed 106.7BCLK on a i5 4690
Here is my old post about it.

Ring/Cache I had at 4.4Ghz for quite a while (most of its life), 4.5+ Ringbus proved to hurt my 1% lows or 0.1% lows, but if you weren't looking you might not see it as unstable.

 

I lost a few USB ports after a while though, can't confirm or deny if it was BCLK related, but I'd hazard a guess of maybe so..

 

On 5/17/2022 at 2:35 PM, J.Silence said:

[Context: skip if you don't care]
Back in 2015 I built my first PC, at the time intended mostly for amateur music production (Cubase), rocking an i7-4790 in an Asus Z97-A motherboard, as I had no interest in overclocking but the Z97 board had good features and I/O for the price. I recently upgraded from a heavily overclocked Asus GT 1030 (story for another time... if anybody is interested) to an Nvidia T600 (basically a cut-down 40 W version of the GTX 1650). I had been feeling the CPU's age for a while now, but lifting that very hard GPU bottleneck made me really want to squeeze a bit more performance.

 

I've been running the 4790 for as long as I can remember with 103 BCLK with a 0,025 V offset, as suggested by the "Optimization" tool in AI Suite 3. This has been perfectly stable for 6 years with stock cooling, and I recently upgraded to a Noctua NH-U12A (silent operation is pretty important when recording stuff). So after some days of reading about BCLK overclocking, I decided to see how far it would go:

 

"Look, mom, I'm topping the charts for i7-4790 performance! You must be so proud of me!"

 

I tested up to 107 BCLK with no change in voltage, and according to 3DMark CPU Profile (perhaps not a "real" benchmark, but certainly an indication) I saw pretty sizeable gains with still very reasonable temps. At 107.5 my computer froze up shortly after boot when trying to start a bunch of applications, so I got somewhat scared and left it there for the moment. I've been running at 105 (4.2 GHz) with perfect stability, so... I kinda upgraded to a 4790K for free . I want to keep trying to get higher OCs, but I got a bit scared from all the horror stories about broken SDDs and fried boot sectors...

 

So, here come some newbie questions:

• I've read people talk of how dangerous BCLK OC is, how it can corrupt/brick your drives and thus you should stick to multiplier OC. But of course, that's not an option for me, it's either BCLK or nothing (boring!). My question is: does anybody have any evidence of BCLK overclock actually breaking things, without applying excessive voltages or heat? In all things OC it's sometimes hard to tell what's concern from fabricated scaremongering... I know Haswell BCLK will overclock also the PCIe lanes and that can make devices stop appearing or refuse to boot, but that's easily fixed by pulling back the OC: my concern is actual permanent damage to hardware or data.
• Would it be reasonable to, if 107.5 BCLK is indeed unstable, ramp up the voltage offset by 0.0125 V? (e.g. see if it's stable at +0.037)
• I haven't touched DRAM frequency yet (I know lowering it would improve the chances for a stable OC) or cache ratio or anything else, so any suggestions are welcome!

 

That's all... If I see interest from y'all, I'll keep you updated!

 

Edited January 4 by Uveyss
tag

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

1 hour ago, Uveyss said:

While J.Silence sees 4.2 GHz with 107 BCLK, my 107 BCLK values are 3.8 GHz, but despite this, when I save the settings and reset them, the computer enters the setup screen, saying that the settings I made are not working.

Did you jump straight to 107? Did you try 101?

 

The base clock is 3.6GHz meaning a default multiplier of 36 and 107 * 36 = 3852 ~3.8GHz, so I assume that's what is happening there.

[Uveyss]

oh, I see thanks for reply.
yes I tried 101 too its not working.
how can i make my base clock is 4.0 ghz?
 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

37 minutes ago, Uveyss said:

how can i make my base clock is 4.0 ghz?

4.0Ghz/36 = 111Mhz

 

37 minutes ago, Uveyss said:

yes I tried 101 too its not working.

If 101 doesn't work then nothing else will. So try to get that working before trying anything else.

[Uveyss]

Okay I'll search about this thanks for help bud.
Do u have any idea why my BCLK setting is not working?