How to Overclock?

[Guest]

I'm gonna start this out honestly, I've never overclocked anything. My system has an i5 4690K with a 212 Evo cooling it  and an MSI SLI Z97S Krait Edition motherboard. I have no idea how to overclock at all. What are some safe speeds and voltages? Also, how should I go about overclocking my EVGA GTX 970? All answers are appropriated. Thanks!

[Godlygamer23]

There is no "safe speed." The overclock you achieve will be based around the "silicon lottery," and as such, no one can give you a definitive answer as to what overclock you'll achieve and at what voltage. 1.4V is the general limit, but you'll want to aim for lower if possible. The more voltage that gets applied, the more degradation occurs, particularly on chips using smaller transistors.

[Hunched]

For your CPU keep it under 1.3v and aim for 4.5ghz, use your BIOS to overclock, run a stress test overnight when you think you've gotten the most you can out of it. 

Also try to keep your temps under 72c for the 4690k

 

Overclocking your 970, use MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X16 and run benchmarks as well. 

I honestly believe overclocking the GPU is more difficult, it's harder to find the limit because you can run into lots of other issues before it's actually unstable enough for the driver to outright crash. 

CPU overclocking is very black and white, you either have no issues, or you BSOD. 

 

Tools that you should get:

- x264 Stability Test V2 or Aida64 for CPU stability testing

- CineBench for CPU performance scores

- Unigine Valley and 3DMark for GPU testing and scores

- MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision X16 for overclocking your GPU

- GPU-Z and HWinfo64 if you want more monitoring tools

 

All that stuff is free

Other than that, Austin Evans has a pretty good and quick video on GPU overclocking, and there is a huge Haswell overclocking guide on Overclock.net where you can find the x264 Stability Test V2 download

[ANewFace]

There is no "safe speed." The overclock you achieve will be based around the "silicon lottery," and as such, no one can give you a definitive answer as to what overclock you'll achieve and at what voltage. 1.4V is the general limit, but you'll want to aim for lower if possible. The more voltage that gets applied, the more degradation occurs, particularly on chips using smaller transistors.

NO 1.4V is for custom water cooling. 1.3V is MAX

[Guest]

NO 1.4V is for custom water cooling. 1.3V is MAX

I'm running my 4790k @ 1.350 for 4.7GHz and for 4.9 I can get it to 1.365 or so and it will be stable on my h100i. My CPU ran 1.4 on the default overclock for my motherboard and that was at 4.7, and it ran fine, so don't really say 1.4 is for custom water cooling.