What is the maximum amount of voltage I can give to my CPU

[SircarrotII]

I want to see how far I can overclock my 9600k. How much voltage can I give to my CPU without breaking something? This won't be permanent. 

[Juyeon]

As it may differ by platform, I can't give any perscise guides, but it comes down to this.

1. How much heat can your cooling system handle? Both more voltage and higher temps produce more heat.

2. What is your risk tolerance? How much would you care if you fried either the chip or the VRMs?

And if you want to push it to the max, I highly reccomend that you watch a video from a professional overclocker. They will probably have something to say about voltage.

[RONOTHAN##]

For 9th gen, you run into thermal issues before you run into issues with the chips degrading, at least for daily stable overclocks. 

 

May I ask what you're trying to benchmark? Going for frequency validations, Cinebench scores, etc.? Also, how not permanent are we talking. If it's for like 30 minutes or less and you're feeling brave, 1.8V is OK, but for everything but frequency validations you're gonna overheat when going above 1.5V (in some AVX benchmarks even this will cause the chip to overheat), and even frequency validations you might overheat when pumping that much voltage. 

[SircarrotII]

Just now, RONOTHAN## said:

For 9th gen, you run into thermal issues before you run into issues with the chips degrading, at least for daily stable overclocks. 

 

May I ask what you're trying to benchmark? Going for frequency validations, Cinebench scores, etc.? Also, how not permanent are we talking. If it's for like 30 minutes or less and you're feeling brave, 1.8V is OK, but for everything but frequency validations you're gonna overheat when going above 1.5V, and even frequency validations you might overheat when pumping that much voltage. 

cinebench, probably one run of cinebench when it comes to length

[RONOTHAN##]

2 minutes ago, SircarrotII said:

cinebench, probably one run of cinebench when it comes to length

If you're just going for HWBot types of scores, pump as much voltage as you want, you'll run into thermal issues before the voltage will kill the CPU, assuming you walk up the voltage, or you'll end up with the chip stopping to scale with voltage before something would die, and if you aren't running long term at those settings (just an hour or two of benchmarking) the amount of degradation you'll see is very minimal.