Windows 10 + OC: Old Hardware with New Results

[genghisquan]

This experiment started two days ago when I got curious as to what the new Win10 BSOD screen looks like. After putting in an OC that I knew was unstable, I got the BSOD and was in the OC mindset at this point. As a background/history of my system specs/issues, I'm running a Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P (rev. 1.3; UEFI U1G), 2600K, NH-D14, with 8GB G.Skill Sniper (1600MHz, XMP), and Win7-SP1-X64; Gigabyte boards have had a really bad boot loop issue in Z68 platform, and it was present throughout the legacy BIOS & UEFI beta releases as well. My previous max OC with this setup was 4.5 GHz because I couldn't enable Internal CPU PLL Overvoltage. Enabling this option resulted in cold boot loops where the PC would seem to fail POST 3-4 times before booting into Windows. I even tried my luck to get 4.6 GHz without it enabled but was faced with BSODs at idle and light loads yet stable under 100% load (another infamous, well-documented issue). Discussions of idle BSOD pinpointed the culprit to be C-states settings. I'm not sure if it's because of how the BIOS/motherboard handles it or the OS (or the combo of the two).

 

Now back to OCing with Win10. I got curious to see if the OS somehow made any difference with boot issues that I've had in the past. I went ahead and input my previously tested 4.6 GHz but with Internal CPU PLL OV enabled this time around. Surely enough, I passed 10 rounds of IBT on Max; to my surprise, I even passed Prime Blend (90% RAM) for 12 hours. I even shut down the system multiple times and manually powered it on to see if it would loop. No cold boot loops yet. The final test was to shut down the system, wait overnight, and see if it'll gimme a cold boot loop in the morning. Well, good morning! NO COLD BOOT LOOPS. After a full day of various load scenarios (light web browsing, video streaming, gaming, and benchmarks), I've had no BSODs at idle or load—and no cold boot loops at all. Today I got brave, so I started squeezing out a 4.7 GHz OC and after a few rounds of crashes/adjustments it miraculously passed 10 rounds of IBT Max and Prime under high RAM usage as well! This is after being able to undervolt my CPU PLL voltage lower than I ever could. I used to crash one minute after booting into the OS on 4.7 GHz, so today I was literally asking myself, "How the hell is this happening right now?!"

 

I know that this system has ancient hardware, but all of this is incredibly surprising to me, since the boot loop issue for high OCs was never fully resolved. Win10 may be handling C-states and/or CPU PLL voltages a lot better than Win7, but I'm just taking a wild guess. I'm hoping that anyone with a Sandy Bridge Z68 Gigabyte system will find this a bit helpful and possibly try out Win10 for OC purposes.

[FaZe Booce]

This is how I overclock: not too much, not too little  all i know how to do

[shypin]

yeah i have an i7 860 and i had windows 7 before joining the windows insider program

 

i wasnt able to get anything over 4GHz to pass stress tests but i was able to get to about 4.3GHz on windows 10

 

weird nice little surprises

[arvark]

This experiment started two days ago when I got curious as to what the new Win10 BSOD screen looks like. After putting in an OC that I knew was unstable, I got the BSOD and was in the OC mindset at this point. As a background/history of my system specs/issues, I'm running a Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P (rev. 1.3; UEFI U1G), 2600K, NH-D14, with 8GB G.Skill Sniper (1600MHz, XMP), and Win7-SP1-X64; Gigabyte boards have had a really bad boot loop issue in Z68 platform, and it was present throughout the legacy BIOS & UEFI beta releases as well. My previous max OC with this setup was 4.5 GHz because I couldn't enable Internal CPU PLL Overvoltage. Enabling this option resulted in cold boot loops where the PC would seem to fail POST 3-4 times before booting into Windows. I even tried my luck to get 4.6 GHz without it enabled but was faced with BSODs at idle and light loads yet stable under 100% load (another infamous, well-documented issue). Discussions of idle BSOD pinpointed the culprit to be C-states settings. I'm not sure if it's because of how the BIOS/motherboard handles it or the OS (or the combo of the two).

 

Now back to OCing with Win10. I got curious to see if the OS somehow made any difference with boot issues that I've had in the past. I went ahead and input my previously tested 4.6 GHz but with Internal CPU PLL OV enabled this time around. Surely enough, I passed 10 rounds of IBT on Max; to my surprise, I even passed Prime Blend (90% RAM) for 12 hours. I even shut down the system multiple times and manually powered it on to see if it would loop. No cold boot loops yet. The final test was to shut down the system, wait overnight, and see if it'll gimme a cold boot loop in the morning. Well, good morning! NO COLD BOOT LOOPS. After a full day of various load scenarios (light web browsing, video streaming, gaming, and benchmarks), I've had no BSODs at idle or load—and no cold boot loops at all. Today I got brave, so I started squeezing out a 4.7 GHz OC and after a few rounds of crashes/adjustments it miraculously passed 10 rounds of IBT Max and Prime under high RAM usage as well! This is after being able to undervolt my CPU PLL voltage lower than I ever could. I used to crash one minute after booting into the OS on 4.7 GHz, so today I was literally asking myself, "How the hell is this happening right now?!"

 

I know that this system has ancient hardware, but all of this is incredibly surprising to me, since the boot loop issue for high OCs was never fully resolved. Win10 may be handling C-states and/or CPU PLL voltages a lot better than Win7, but I'm just taking a wild guess. I'm hoping that anyone with a Sandy Bridge Z68 Gigabyte system will find this a bit helpful and possibly try out Win10 for OC purposes.

Ancient? i7 2600k still rocks as a CPU and OC'd can be on pair with Haswell.

[genghisquan]

Ancient? i7 2600k still rocks as a CPU and OC'd can be on pair with Haswell.

You know what I mean—ancient in tech years! Haha. And yeah, I agree, it still rocks! I wont' give it up until it burns on me.

[genghisquan]

yeah i have an i7 860 and i had windows 7 before joining the windows insider program

 

i wasnt able to get anything over 4GHz to pass stress tests but i was able to get to about 4.3GHz on windows 10

 

weird nice little surprises

DAMN! That's beast for first gen. Core CPU! And that's a very nice bump after going Win10! What MoBo are you using?

[shypin]

DAMN! That's beast for first gen. Core CPU! And that's a very nice bump after going Win10! What MoBo are you using?

ASUS P7P55D-E

a friend gave it to me