Intel Core i7-2700K won't go past 4.50 GHz

[Razzee]

Hello.

 

I currently use an Intel Core i7-2700K paired with a Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 since 2015. Recently, I bought a new case, fans and cooler to exploit this processor for overclocking. You can check the rest on my profile.

 

Daily, I use with at 4.50 GHz with everything on BIOS set to "Auto". I can play any games, run Prime95 (Small FFT) with no issues. The default vCore set by the motherboard on "Auto" is around 1.350v.

 

 

I'm very satisfied with my motherboard: it has plenty of USB ports, PCI-E and PCI slots, SATA ports. It even supports SLI. Basically, it's great.

 

However, I'm not satisfied with the processor. It's very old and it won't get any younger, so I'm trying to overclock it to 5.00 GHz.

 

I read on a forum that if I manage to boot at 5.00 GHz with a vCore of 1.450v, I'm good. However, I can barely make it go past 4.60 GHz.

 

If I set it to 4.60 GHz with everything on "Auto", the system hangs in a few seconds of Prime95 (Small FFT).

 

I came across this video, which is very popular and uses the same processor and a similar motherboard. I tried mimicking the settings posted on his thread.

 

With these settings, I'm able to boot at 4.60 GHz:

 

 

 

It does not BSOD on Prime95, but the temperature goes up by 10ºC:

 

 

If I try to boot at 4.70 GHz with these settings, the system hangs almost instantly on Prime95, and this is the result:

 

 

I have read on many threads that my motherboard does not pack a lot of power phases or something in this sense. Is it the reason I'm experiencing BSOD?

 

Any help on overclocking my i7-2700K to 5.00 GHz (or the closest possible) is appreciated. Going from 3.90 GHz to 4.50 GHz already made some difference, but I don't want to stop here.

 

Thank you for the attention.

[emosun]

12 minutes ago, Razzee said:

However, I'm not satisfied with the processor. It's very old and it won't get any younger, so I'm trying to overclock it to 5.00 GHz.

you do understand that this cpu at 5ghz isn't going to show any form of noticeable improvement in terms of performance yes?

do you need/care about the hardware or is this a fryable machine

[ApolloX75]

Every CPU is different, and none will ever use the same settings. Also your board is not well equipped to take you much further than 4.5ish anyways. I haven't been able to find much info beyond a few scattered threadbare reviews, but most show a 2600K and similar capping out around 4.49-4.5 stable, meaning it's likely power delivery is an issue with that board. Which makes sense, it looks like it's maybe a 6 phase design.... if you're lucky.

 

5GHz won't net you much more than what you have anyways, probably less as you'll likely just end up killing the chip. What kind of RAM are you using with this? Is it good, low latency, high frequency stuff like Mushkin Redline or Trident Z? Or is it generic junk? Have you tweaked timings?

 

Overclocking with these older platforms is not plug 'n play, it takes a lot more tuning and fiddling to get it right. Can't just set everything to Auto and expect it to do it all for you.

[RONOTHAN##]

Just saying, this was back when the silicon lottery was very much a thing, so while you might have seen some people get these chips up to 5GHz, not a lot can, you usually need a ton of cooling to do so, and you might not be able to get much above 4.5GHz. Given you're already at ~75C on the CPU with the stock 1.35V and are hitting ~85C with 1.45V, I'd hazard a guess that you're probably nearing the limit of cooling on that chips (they don't really scale once temps are above ~70-80 depending on the CPU). 

 

25 minutes ago, Razzee said:

I have read on many threads that my motherboard does not pack a lot of power phases or something in this sense. Is it the reason I'm experiencing BSOD?

What they're probably referring to is the actual voltage regulation of the board itself. Usually, lower phase count boards have worse voltage regulation and therefore worse overclocking capability. That board looks like a 5/6 phase (can't really tell, can't find any reference to the VRM components on the product page), which is below the target 8 phase. This usually only limits your OC headroom by 100MHz, 200MHz at the absolute worst, so a different board isn't going to cause you to get noticeably better or worse performance. That said, low phase count doesn't mean bad voltage regulation, it is very possible to design 4 phase boards with great regulation, but it was pretty uncommon back then to do that. 

[Gat Pelsinger]

First of all, I am totally surprised that there is this talk about 5GHz on a freaking 2nd Gen Core processor. The fact that it can do 4.6 is actually pretty good. People who have hit 5 GHz on your CPU model have the most cooling, best motherboard, and most importantly, a "golden chip" with the best silicon lottery. Heck, people have even hit 7 GHz on a first gen i7 extreme processor. It's all about the lottery dude, the lottery. Silicon lottery.

[ApolloX75]

3 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

That said, low phase count doesn't mean bad voltage regulation, it is very possible to design 4 phase boards with great regulation, but it was pretty uncommon back then to do that. 

Yeah I wasn't able to find much either, however what I did notice was if you go through Gigabyte's marketing for the UD3 board, there is no mention of power anywhere. If you then find the marketing on the UD3H-B3 board the OP is comparing it against, there is mention of high quality power delivery being a "feature."

 

Kind of says a lot with a little.

[Razzee]

32 minutes ago, emosun said:

you do understand that this cpu at 5ghz isn't going to show any form of noticeable improvement in terms of performance yes?

do you need/care about the hardware or is this a fryable machine

 

Sorry, but why do you say that? I honestly don't understand.

 

i7 2600k stock vs Overclock 5,0 GHz in 15 Games or i7 2600 non K vs i7 2600k OC 5 GHz

 

5 GHz sound like a lot, but is it really? Today we have better CPU coolers, better PSUs and better cases than 10 years ago.

 

Seeing all those videos with an i7-2700K @ 5 GHz is like I'm the only one missing on the fun. lol

 

 

26 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

Every CPU is different, and none will ever use the same settings. Also your board is not well equipped to take you much further than 4.5ish anyways. I haven't been able to find much info beyond a few scattered threadbare reviews, but most show a 2600K and similar capping out around 4.49-4.5 stable, meaning it's likely power delivery is an issue with that board. Which makes sense, it looks like it's maybe a 6 phase design.... if you're lucky.

 

5GHz won't net you much more than what you have anyways, probably less as you'll likely just end up killing the chip. What kind of RAM are you using with this? Is it good, low latency, high frequency stuff like Mushkin Redline or Trident Z? Or is it generic junk? Have you tweaked timings?

 

Overclocking with these older platforms is not plug 'n play, it takes a lot more tuning and fiddling to get it right. Can't just set everything to Auto and expect it to do it all for you.

 

I have suspected that the motherboard is not good enough. It seems to be an "entry" Z68 model of sorts.

 

I have my eyes set on an ASUS P8P67 LE or similar. Is it greatly superior to my current motherboard?

 

Regarding RAM, you can check out all the other stuff on my profile. Everything is listed there. By the way, I didn't mess with any RAM setting.

 

I kinda expected that "Auto" wouldn't get me very far, but even "Manual" is not working either.

 

 

24 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Just saying, this was back when the silicon lottery was very much a thing, so while you might have seen some people get these chips up to 5GHz, not a lot can, you usually need a ton of cooling to do so, and you might not be able to get much above 4.5GHz. Given you're already at ~75C on the CPU with the stock 1.35V and are hitting ~85C with 1.45V, I'd hazard a guess that you're probably nearing the limit of cooling on that chips (they don't really scale once temps are above ~70-80 depending on the CPU). 

 

What they're probably referring to is the actual voltage regulation of the board itself. Usually, lower phase count boards have worse voltage regulation and therefore worse overclocking capability. That board looks like a 5/6 phase (can't really tell, can't find any reference to the VRM components on the product page), which is below the target 8 phase. This usually only limits your OC headroom by 100MHz, 200MHz at the absolute worst, so a different board isn't going to cause you to get noticeably better or worse performance. That said, low phase count doesn't mean bad voltage regulation, it is very possible to design 4 phase boards with great regulation, but it was pretty uncommon back then to do that. 

 

The temps seem high, but I don't think that Prime95 Small FFT emulates "ordinary" usage. I just use it so I can see the BSOD sooner rather than later.

 

Regarding voltage regulation, I noticed that despite setting the vCore to 1.450v, it never achieved that, either on BIOS or CPU-Z. It's usually lower.

 

Can you provide me with an example of a LGA1155 motherboard with 8 phases, so I can discern between both?

 

 

19 minutes ago, Hensen Juang said:

First of all, I am totally surprised that there is this talk about 5GHz on a freaking 2nd Gen Core processor. The fact that it can do 4.6 is actually pretty good. People who have hit 5 GHz on your CPU model have the most cooling, best motherboard, and most importantly, a "golden chip" with the best silicon lottery. Heck, people have even hit 7 GHz on a first gen i7 extreme processor. It's all about the lottery dude, the lottery. Silicon lottery.

 

Is that so? I read some posts stating that they couldn't get beyond 4.2 GHz or similar. This is a very light overclock, given that Turbo Boost is set at 3.90 GHz.

 

I just assumed that they had a motherboard worse than mine.

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, emosun said:

you do understand that this cpu at 5ghz isn't going to show any form of noticeable improvement in terms of performance yes?

do you need/care about the hardware or is this a fryable machine

Well thats not true, its 11% faster. So anything that is 100% CPU bottleneck should see a 10% boost in performance

 

  

1 hour ago, Hensen Juang said:

First of all, I am totally surprised that there is this talk about 5GHz on a freaking 2nd Gen Core processor. The fact that it can do 4.6 is actually pretty good. People who have hit 5 GHz on your CPU model have the most cooling, best motherboard, and most importantly, a "golden chip" with the best silicon lottery. Heck, people have even hit 7 GHz on a first gen i7 extreme processor. It's all about the lottery dude, the lottery. Silicon lottery.

I mean, I didnt have a golden sample 2nd gen, it wasnt hard to get those 2nd gen chips to 5ghz, it was just hard to do it at 24/7 settings. I got my 2600k up to 4.9ghz for the fun of it on a noctua nhd14. but backed off cause I was already at uncomfortable voltages and just ran 24/7 a nice chill 4.4ghz.

I was using a asus p8p67, but I wouldnt put that much stock on it being the mobo.  

[YoungBlade]

21 minutes ago, Razzee said:

Sorry, but why do you say that? I honestly don't understand.

 

i7 2600k stock vs Overclock 5,0 GHz in 15 Games or i7 2600 non K vs i7 2600k OC 5 GHz

 

5 GHz sound like a lot, but is it really? Today we have better CPU coolers, better PSUs and better cases than 10 years ago.

 

Seeing all those videos with an i7-2700K @ 5 GHz is like I'm the only one missing on the fun. lol

Did you look at the specs in that video? This is with custom water cooling and pushing the chip to 1.53v to get that result.

 

Do you have custom water cooling and are you willing to push your chip to over 1.5v? If not, then I don't see why you would expect the same results.

 

Note: if you want your chip to last, I wouldn't suggest going over 1.5v as a daily-driver OC. It will burn out the chip over time. But if you want to reach 5GHz, it might be necessary.

 

And for a 2600K/2700K, yes, 5GHz is a lot. Most daily driver OC results from that era topped out around 4.4-4.6GHz. Some people who won the silicon lottery, or didn't care about pushing too much voltage into their chips, did get higher, but they were the exception, not the rule. If you are finding old reddit posts from that era showing off 5GHz results, it's because that's a silicon lottery winner or a reckless overclocker showing off for updoots. They were not the norm.

[RONOTHAN##]

38 minutes ago, Razzee said:

The temps seem high, but I don't think that Prime95 Small FFT emulates "ordinary" usage. I just use it so I can see the BSOD sooner rather than later.

It doesn't, but if you want it stable in Prime95 it doesn't scale past ~80C on the vast majority of chips. 

 

38 minutes ago, Razzee said:

Regarding voltage regulation, I noticed that despite setting the vCore to 1.450v, it never achieved that, either on BIOS or CPU-Z. It's usually lower.

That's normal. Load Line Calibration (LLC) has the voltage droop under load to help improve voltage regulation for reasons I don't want to get into. Changing the LLC will change the difference between the reported value and the set value, though do note that just because the reported value is higher doesn't mean that it would be any more stable (1.3V reported at Level 1 LLC will be less stable than 1.3V reported Level 5 LLC, assuming Gigabyte's older boards follow the same naming convention as ASRock and MSI, it might be the opposite as I haven't used a Gigabyte board from that era and they have changed it to words for their modern boards). 

 

38 minutes ago, Razzee said:

Can you provide me with an example of a LGA1155 motherboard with 8 phases, so I can discern between both?

Look up any of the high end boards and you'll find at least 8 phases. The Maximus series is always 8 phases before ~2017, the Z77 OC Formula is a 12 phase, Z68 FTW is another 12 phase, the ASRock Z68 Extreme7 is an 8 phase, the Z68X-UD7 is a 24 phase for some reason, the MSI Big Bang P67 is another 24 phase, and there are a ton of others. Usual rule of thumb is if the VRM is good, it will be advertised on the product page. If it isn't, it's probably about as bottom of the barrel as you can get.

 

Not that this actually matters, swapping your board in this scenario doesn't make any sense as you should put that money into saving for a better platform, all the "good" boards from that era are being sold for way more than what makes sense for non-collectors (usually between $100 and $200, sometimes more than that). Especially since if you actually compare the performance between 4.5GHz and 4.7GHz (the biggest difference you're going to get), it's at best ~4.5%, and that's if you don't become QPI or memory limited first. It's an unnoticeable amount more performance for amounts that could get put half way towards saving for say a 12100F, B760M PG Riptide, and a 32GB kit of DDR5 for $300 and getting significantly better performance for not much more than just getting one of those good 1155 boards. 

[emosun]

56 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Well thats not true, its 11% faster. So anything that is 100% CPU bottleneck should see a 10% boost in performance

i wouldn't consider 11% a significant amount.

Even if it resulted in a direct cpu related fps boost that would be like going from 60fps to 66.6fps. but we both know that kinda result is going to be few and far between

[ApolloX75]

2 hours ago, Razzee said:

I have my eyes set on an ASUS P8P67 LE or similar. Is it greatly superior to my current motherboard?

No. LE boards are base base base model boards. You want a Pro minimum or a Deluxe if you go with P67 boards. You can always try to shoot for a Z77, you can find some for decent prices, sometimes cheaper than Z68. Z77 boards are typically a little more refined.

[Turtlesaurusrex25]

I think you'll need to go with subambient cooling to push it further and I doubt you'll be able to reach 5GHz. You'd spend more on cooling than you would just upgrading to something modern.

[Needfuldoer]

You've wrung all the performance you can out of your specific CPU in your specific motherboard. It's time for a full platform upgrade. (It's not worth buying more Sandy Bridge parts. Get something modern.)

  

Ya cnannae change the laws of physics, cap'n!

 

[jaslion]

12 hours ago, Razzee said:

Sorry, but why do you say that? I honestly don't understand.

 

i7 2600k stock vs Overclock 5,0 GHz in 15 Games or i7 2600 non K vs i7 2600k OC 5 GHz

Because an overclock does not always mean performance vs non oc or non high oc.

 

Overclocking is pushing a cpu beyond spec and can very often have unexpected results. It's why a cinebench run for each oc vs previous clock should always be done.

 

I had a i7 2600k that did 5.2 on a 360 alphacool but it performed worse than at 4.4ghz because of it actually being a bad oc.

 

It would do 5.2 all day but simply be slower than if I used a lower voltage oc at 4.7 and the performance difference was a good bit.

 

12 hours ago, Razzee said:

Seeing all those videos with an i7-2700K @ 5 GHz is like I'm the only one missing on the fun. lol

All the people that got super lucky to have one will obviously post it and be shown when you google it.

 

You won't see failiures because people don't like that and it doesnt generate clicks :P.

 

Most 2600k's I've had pass through over the years did 4.4ghz average max. The VERY lucky ones went closer to 5. The 2700k was the exact same story they weren't a better binned cpu for overclocking. Just better binned as in by default could run 100mhz faster.

 

12 hours ago, Razzee said:

I have suspected that the motherboard is not good enough. It seems to be an "entry" Z68 model of sorts.

Nah that board is totally fine. It's legit what the 5.2 i7 I have is on.

 

It's just a normal i7 2700k you have not a legendary lucky drop one.