Anyone ever tried to OC an E3-1231v3 (Z97 mobo)?

[maxtch]

I am one of the weird people that paired a Xeon E3-1231v3 with a Z97 motherboard (supplier's responsibility not mine - they have no H97 to sell so gave me the Z97 instead) and I do have way more CPU cooling available. This got me thinking of slightly overclocking the E3 just to squeeze a bit more performance out of this value quad-core HT chip.

 

OC options:

 

1) pin the all-core turbo to 38x instead of 36x

2) slight BCLK OC

 

How to pull that off?

[Tagiau]

Intel messed with haswell to make locked overclocking very difficult, if not impossible. This is why we are hearing about it again on skylake, the same as we did on sandy/ivy bridge. 

I personally think it had to do with the thing the moved to the cpu on haswell, which is why motherboards didn't need to the best overclocking board to get really high overclocks. 

[Dabombinable]

BCLK is not worth it unless skylake (and this is haswell), and i don't think you can touch any of the multipliers if i remember. If you can make them all run at 3.8 do it, but that's the most you'll get from it really

36x103/=3.708GHz base 3.914GHz boost. I'd say its worth it. Also if 105 is possible......3.780/3.990GHz. Non turbo 4790K performance for less than the cost of a 4790K.

 

 

nah that was the VRM (or part of it anyway). The chip itself did it's voltage control, the mobo for haswell just needs to be able to supply clean and stable power, no need for ten thousand phases. Compare the 8 phases (way overkill) on my Z97 UD3H to the 11, possibly 12 on the Z170 UD3

A 4 phase CPU VRM is probably overkill. 4.8GHz with my 4790K on my H87M Pro (would have gone higher but my AIO was struggling to keep it from thermal throttling and cool enough to run stable at clock speeds.)

[Dabombinable]

it's just the fact that the BCLK is tied to the PCIE and DDR buses on the haswell platform that makes it not worth it for me, because unlike skylake (where you're just bumping the CPU) you're possibly causing instability elsewhere, and the fact you're bumping multiple things at once creates more troubleshooting. some bits you can adjust, like bringing the ram clocks down and bumping BCLK, but you can't (AFAIK) adjust the PCIE multiplier or clocks independently (if it has a multiplier and doesn't just run at the BCLK frequency)

103MHz is stable on all Haswell CPU. Its the higher frequencies that depend on the overall silicon lottery of the CPU-and Xeons are binned higher than their Core i equivalents.

[maxtch]

103MHz is stable on all Haswell CPU. Its the higher frequencies that depend on the overall silicon lottery of the CPU-and Xeons are binned higher than their Core i equivalents.

 

I still remembered the time my mobo somehow keeps the BCLK a bit lower than 100MHz (~99.6MHz or so) so I bumped it to 102MHz. Not liking it though.