Z87-Overclocking for Dummies

1sascha · August 18, 2013

In this case, the dummy in question is me.

I just fiddled around with my new system (see sig for details) after having found a pretty good 20 min instructional video from Asus USA on youtube.

It seems to be running stable now, but I could really use some hints/comments, since I don't know if I did everything as I should have and/or if I have overlooked anything important due to my personal ignorance.

Pretty much restricted myself to what the guy in the video did and left all the other parameters as they were.

I had previously used AI Suite and the BIOS' auto-tuners to get a bit more speed out of my board. They both went for around 4.1 GHz, but I decided to go a little farther than that in my manual attempt.

First off, I removed the dreaded AI Suite, which, I think, was giving me black screens instead of POST before. It seemed to override the settings I changed in the BIOS and pretty much ruined my morning.. Even had to clear CMOS via jumper cause the system wouldn't even start anymore after I reset the BIOS to default. It'd give me a black screen instead of POST, then I had to power down, restart to find myself greeted by the "overclocking failed!"-message.

Too bad about losing Fan Xpert, but such is life I guess and now I'm using Q-Fan from the BIOS.

Rebooted in safe mode and ran CCleaner to erase any leftovers from the AI Suite.

Then, I set AI Tuner to "Manual", then OC Tuner to "as is" to prevent any automatic interference from the board.

Set BCLK to 100.0, CPU Core ratio to "sync" and set the multiplier to 43.

Next I set VCore to "adaptive" (that's what the Asus-guy recommended) and "additional Turbo mode VCore" to 1.25. Didn't play with the offset, since I don't know what it does.

Left XMP off for the time being, since that's what the guy also said (to first check your OC without XMP and only enable it if everything seems stable).

Next I upped the multiplier to 44 and was greeted by a blue screen of death. So I increased VCore to 1.3 and started to work my way down. I finally managed to get it stable (I think) at 4.4 with XMP on (RAM runs at its claimed 1600 speed) and Vcore is now at 1.28. Anything below that would crash either on Win bootup or when I tried to run Passmark's performance test to check stability.

Temperatures (according to HWMonitor) look ok to me. Got a max of 67/74/71/67 on cores 0 - 3, overall CPU temp high was 74 ("package") 71 for the "CPU"-sensor and case and MB-temps are totally stable at 30 (case) and 40°C (MB).

Are these values common/halfway healthy for a 24/7 OC? How much stress testing is really necessary? I usually do one or two bench-runs in Passmark.. is that enough? Any other benchmarks I should try as stability testers?

Like I said: I'm pretty much a noob when it comes to OCing, so I really could use some input here..

Thx!

Oh, and yes: Here's the PM-result after OCing:

With the CPU at stock speeds I got something in the low 4700s, so I'm not too unhappy about the result.

S.