Help with XMP Profile

[padokas]

I'm new into overclocking, but I watch a lot of content about it and felt somewhat confident into taking a look into it now.

 

Was gonna activate XMP Profile for my memory cause I noticed it was off, but I noticed that the profile bumps up my memory speed but bumps down my CPU by a tiny bit, but bumps up my BCLK Speed (?). Would that mean my CPU would be really slightly slower but I'd have a somewhat faster memory? And does it do that in order to be more stable? These are the photos from the BIOS.

[OddOod]

What resources have you used to try an figure this out?

[padokas]

Just now, OddOod said:

What resources have you used to try an figure this out?

In which way? I read some stuff about OC for my platform in specific and watched Linus' video on OC X99 platform. So I just went into my BIOS and took a look at what the XMP profiles would change. Just confused at how it changes my CPU frequency, as I don't remember seeing anything about that.

[OddOod]

Noted. I was just confirming that you didn't google it. 
The BCLK or base clock speed is how fast your your CPU clock will tick. Elsewhere you will find the base clock multiplier that will tell you how much that speed is multiplied by to get your CPU speed. In this case that will be 26

[padokas]

1 minute ago, OddOod said:

Noted. I was just confirming that you didn't google it. 
The BCLK or base clock speed is how fast your your CPU clock will tick. Elsewhere you will find the base clock multiplier that will tell you how much that speed is multiplied by to get your CPU speed. In this case that will be 26

oh okay okay, but how come when I turn XMP profile on my base clock goes up and my "CPU target" goes down? shouldn't it go up as well? that's what I'm trying to understand.

[OddOod]

XMP is weird, but it's mostly just to keep the temps down. That's your target clock, not your boost clock. It should still boost to whatever it can. Have you tested it?

[padokas]

1 minute ago, OddOod said:

XMP is weird, but it's mostly just to keep the temps down. That's your target clock, not your boost clock. It should still boost to whatever it can. Have you tested it?

that makes sense then. Not yet, since I wanted to be sure about what it did and how it worked first. Would you reccomend any benchmarks to do before and after to compare the results?

[OddOod]

*shrug* I mostly don't mess with real OCing and just concentrate on giving my rigs sufficient cooling to let them do their thing, then enable XMP. I'd say that the standard for a long time has been Cinebench just to ensure that everything is working fine, ideally set to infinite loop. Of course be sure to monitor temps. If you wanna be reasonably sure of a solid OC I'd also run furmark or something to slam the GPU as well so you will know your PSU is up to the task of full load. IIRC Prime95 is also a classic

[padokas]

Thank you very much for the help. I'll do these and post the results here if they are anything interesting, like a massive gain in performance or something like that.

[padokas]

Update: it all went south.

So, I wanted to change the direction of my fans on my case in a long time, from a negative pressure setting to a positive one, so I used this as an opportunity for it. It went great and immensely helpful with thermals. About 14°C cooler when under stress, from 95°C to 81°C.No OC done at this point.

 

Seing how great the results were, I decided to load a preset on my bios that would both turn XMP on and set the CPU to 4GHz, seeing how much of a temperature headroom I gain I thought this would be fine. I was wrong. Thermal throttled during the first Cinebench run. Stopped the run and went back to the bios.

 

This time I turned the preset off and only let XMP on. Went back to Cinebench and ran another test. This time, my CPU was clocking higher than 3250MHz, where before the changes it was boosting up to 3600MHz, and temperatures were around 85°C. Waited for the Cinebench run to end and went back to the bios.

 

Since I just wanted to go back to how it was before, and did not know exactly how, since turning XMP off was now setting my CPU down to 2600MHz, I pressed F9, which turns the bios back to default, thinking that it would go back to how it was before, but it didn't.

 

So now I'm here, looking at my bios, trying to set my CPU to what it was before with no idea of how :,) any one can help?

[padokas]

Update 2:

I managed to set the clock back to 3300MHz, temperatures are fin when benchmarking, it's just not boosting up to 3600MHz now anymore tho.

 

"Intel SpeedStep Technology" and "Intel Turbo Boost Technology" are both on in the bios.

 

[-rascal-]

Yes, XMP on the X99 / LGA 2011-3 platform was a little weird.

 

Anything DDR4-3000 (some say 2666+)  and above will change the BCLK Strap to 125 MHz -- this is normal.

Something about the Haswell-E CPU architecture, and the Memory architecture / multiplier works ... or something along those lines.

Even my i7-6800K + ASUS X99 Deluxe II did that when using DDR4-3000 XMP.

 

Digging through some of the old ASUS ROG forums...

When higher frequency XMP is enabled, it is actually difficult to get the memory to run stable with 100 MHz BCLK.

A lot of X99 boards cannot run DDR4-2666+ with BCLK = 100 MHz.

 

The 125 BLK is not set by the XMP profile, but it is something programmed into the motherboard BIOS.

[padokas]

6 minutes ago, -rascal- said:

Yes, XMP on the X99 / LGA 2011-3 platform was a little weird.

 

Anything DDR4-3000 (some say 2666+)  and above will change the BCLK Strap to 125 MHz -- this is normal.

Something about the Haswell-E CPU architecture, and the Memory architecture / multiplier works ... or something along those lines.

Even my i7-6800K + ASUS X99 Deluxe II did that when using DDR4-3000 XMP.

 

Digging through some of the old ASUS ROG forums...

When higher frequency XMP is enabled, it is actually difficult to get the memory to run stable with 100 MHz BCLK.

A lot of X99 boards cannot run DDR4-2666+ with BCLK = 100 MHz.

That's interesting to know, should I stick to keeping my memory at 2666 and the default BCLK then?

[-rascal-]

Just now, padokas said:

That's interesting to know, should I stick to keeping my memory at 2666 and the default BCLK then?

 

Run it with XMP and BCLK = 125 MHz.

X99 performance benefits with higher memory frequency.

Just do your CPU overclocks using the BCLK = 125 MHz, and just tweak the CPU Ratio + voltages.

[padokas]

I'll give that a try now. I'm just not too sure about changing the voltage values, would leave it on "auto" not help me at all?

[padokas]

25 minutes ago, -rascal- said:

 

Run it with XMP and BCLK = 125 MHz.

X99 performance benefits with higher memory frequency.

Just do your CPU overclocks using the BCLK = 125 MHz, and just tweak the CPU Ratio + voltages.

At default with BCLK and no XMP, I managed to set my cores up to 3600MHz and survive a 10 minutes run of Cinebench with thermal throttling, although reaching high 90s.

 

With BCLK at 125MHz and XMP, I set the CPU to 3500MHz amd within the first Cinebench run the CPU already thermal throttles.

 

Quite confused about how this is happening.

[-rascal-]

Just now, padokas said:

At default with BCLK and no XMP, I managed to set my cores up to 3600MHz and survive a 10 minutes run of Cinebench with thermal throttling, although reaching high 90s.

 

With BCLK at 125MHz and XMP, I set the CPU to 3500MHz amd within the first Cinebench run the CPU already thermal throttles.

 

Quite confused about how this is happening.

 

The BCLK gets set to 125 MHz, but I think also the CPU Core Voltage gets bumped up too.

What is the Core Voltage while running Cinebench?

 

I was able to do an all-core 4.0 GHz OC on my i7-6800K with ~1.30V (?)

Of course, your i7-5820K will require different voltage settings.

[padokas]

13 minutes ago, -rascal- said:

 

The BCLK gets set to 125 MHz, but I think also the CPU Core Voltage gets bumped up too.

What is the Core Voltage while running Cinebench?

 

I was able to do an all-core 4.0 GHz OC on my i7-6800K with ~1.30V (?)

Of course, your i7-5820K will require different voltage settings.

Tbh I forgot to monitor the core voltage throughout the runs. But a big issue that I got is how small both my case and cpu cooler is, so I'm quite thermally constraint as well unfortunately.