5820K Unstable OC Problems - Need help!

[ValkyrieStar]

Recently upgraded to:

i7-5820K,

EVGA X99 Micro2,

16GB DDR4-2400 ram (4x4GB) - Vengeance LPX.

 

At stock CPU with the RAM at 2133 CL15 1.20v its perfectly stable.

At stock CPU with the RAM at 2400 CL14 1.35v its perfectly stable.

At 4GHz CPU 1.05v (tested 8 hours perfectly stable in P95) with the RAM at 2400 CL14 1.35v its perfectly stable. USING XTU.

 

So, having achieved a satisfactory overclock of 4GHz (i could easily push further, but happy with the boost in Cinebench R15, and the improvement in games pulled it up to my old 4790K)

 

I dialed it into the BIOS, and disabled XTU (so everythings controlled by the bios only)

1.05v Manual Vcore, 1.9v Input Vcin, (tried higher and lower) and 40x 100.00 for 4GHz. ALWAYS hangs, no matter what.

 

I shove it up to 1.20v on the VCore just for testing it out. Hangs.

 

Later noticed that on my motherboard, theres an array of LEDs that indicate faults with the cpu when the board hangs.

Occasionally when i had too low VCin it would light up the FIVR_LED to show the FIVR had encountered a fault.

All other hangs lit up the CATERR_LED.

 

A quick bit of Googling led me to "Catastrophic Error". Not a good thing to hear when it's a brand new £190 motherboard and £320 CPU!

 

I even set the ram back to default 2133 non xmp all default timings, still has the same errors.

[DominicNikon]

try upping the voltage? your be safe around 1.3V if your liquid cooled

[ValkyrieStar]

Thing is, its perfectly stable at 1.05v 4GHz when ive set it via Intel XTU.

 

Either way, it should not require 1.2v, never mind 1.3v for only 4GHz.

 

Using XTU i can get it stable at 4.5GHz with around 1.325v.

 

I have noticed temps are higher than i think they should be, i'm going to re-apply paste when i get some more, but still, 61c on hottest core at 4ghz 1.05v using XTU to set clocks and Prime95 to stress is plenty cool enough for heat to not be a worry.

 

It's the fact that an OC stable when set via XTU becomes unstable when set in via the BIOS, even when increasing voltages well above what is needed, thats what im concerned about, is it possible something is wrong with my board or CPU?

[ValkyrieStar]

Noone?

 

I seem to have sort-of fixed it by disabling C-States, however my 4790K was happy at 4.7GHz with all C states enabled.

Gonna stick with it for now and i'll see how it goes. Idle temps are 15-20c higher than they were before, kinda irritating.

[runit3]

13 minutes ago, ValkyrieStar said:

Noone?

 

I seem to have sort-of fixed it by disabling C-States, however my 4790K was happy at 4.7GHz with all C states enabled.

Gonna stick with it for now and i'll see how it goes. Idle temps are 15-20c higher than they were before, kinda irritating.

What's LLC at? It's strange to be hanging during training/POST, especially for those values. If EVGA has released a BIOS update noting anything in regards to stability may be worth a go.

[ValkyrieStar]

I left LLC at Auto, that being said, there's only 3 options, Auto / Enabled / Disabled so I'm not too sure of the implications of each.

I'll give it a try using different LLC options, i'm guessing Auto will probably do the same as one of the two.

[ValkyrieStar]

Just tried with C states enabled, all 3 LLC options gave the same crashes. Turned C states off, all 3 options worked fine, left it at auto for now.

Seems like something is wrong with C states when overclocking. Even so... 4GHz isnt exactly extreme, must've just got a shit cpu, it does manage 4.5GHz at 1.275v and 4.6 at 1.325v but they get rather hot, so i just left it at 4GHz 1.05v till i get some more paste

 

Edit: Oh and my bios is up to date, it came on latest bios out of the box, and i have tried reflashing to no avail.

[runit3]

3 minutes ago, ValkyrieStar said:

Just tried with C states enabled, all 3 LLC options gave the same crashes. Turned C states off, all 3 options worked fine, left it at auto for now.

Seems like something is wrong with C states when overclocking. Even so... 4GHz isnt exactly extreme, must've just got a shit cpu, it does manage 4.5GHz at 1.275v and 4.6 at 1.325v but they get rather hot, so i just left it at 4GHz 1.05v till i get some more paste

 

Edit: Oh and my bios is up to date, it came on latest bios out of the box, and i have tried reflashing to no avail.

Is your voltage on manual? and are you manually turning on/off C-states, or just leaving them on auto?

[TriBeard]

Try and check your cache frequency/voltage. I couldn't figure out for the life of my why mine wouldn't get stable at anything over 4Ghz, no matter what I set the voltage to. I set the cache voltage to something like 1.25, and it was rock solid since. Something to look at anyway. Don't just leave it on auto.

[ValkyrieStar]

52 minutes ago, TriBeard said:

Try and check your cache frequency/voltage. I couldn't figure out for the life of my why mine wouldn't get stable at anything over 4Ghz, no matter what I set the voltage to. I set the cache voltage to something like 1.25, and it was rock solid since. Something to look at anyway. Don't just leave it on auto.

Oh wow, i thought cache voltage could be left on auto since cache was just left at stock 3.3... just changed it to 1.25v now, it's annoying theres no proper voltage monitoring to check what it is by default on this board

 

..

 

Wait, literally just noticed something now... by default cache is 3.3, just looked in the memory tab of CPU-Z, it says cache at 3.6 after i overclocked to 4ghz, so im assuming it was that causing the problem... unless C-states enabled still crashes... hmm

 

Will update shortly.

[ValkyrieStar]

Yup, since upping the cache voltage to 1.25v, it's been solid, tested in the game that usually caused it to insta-crash and its been stable for ~10 mins.

 

Thanks for that suggestion! Now for PCIe Issues when I get round to sorting out my Samsung 950 Pro SSD... I'll leave that for another time, already got a huge enough headache from 2 days of messing with bios settings and the stupidly slow 15s post time since DDR4 n its training stuff takes forever lol

[ValkyrieStar]

Gah, had another hang, c-states enabled and cache set to 1.25v did help though. No clue whats wrong at all. I just disabled C-states and its stable for now.

 

Slightly (very) dissapointed with X99, i mean it came out after Z97, only major difference is DDR4, thats not that much off a difference.

 

-Boot times are slow (10-15s vs 3s)

-Power consumption at idle is high, 25w+ usually around 35w, compared to my 4790K idling at ~7w

-Only DMI v2... cmon the cpus got 40 pcie 3.0 lanes, why no dmi v3

-Lack of M.2 32gbits due to chipset only having few pcie2.0 lanes

-Lack of decent quality mATX boards. (my Z97 board has all 4 fan headers PWM controllable via CPU or SYS temp, while most ive seen have only 1 or 2 pwm headers)

-High expense for whats pretty much the same board but just fits a bigger cpu and ddr4.

-Where the 'eck is Broadwell-e??

 

X99 Needs a huge make-over.

X109/X190 and Skylake-e better be damn good ;-;

What's worse is that the pc feels somewhat sluggish compared to my Z97 and its giving me huge headaches.

 

[TriBeard]

The boot times are because of all the extra lanes and peripherals on the x99 chipset. That's just kinda the nature of the beast. More stuff to initialize.

 

Power consumption could be related to your CPU issues and disabling C-states, but you are also driving a couple extra cores and those don't come free.

 

M.2 is just motherboard dependent. Some have more, some have less

 

mATX isn't as big on x99 because most people buy it for the expansion slots/ability and removing PCI-E slots compromises that.

 

The DMI interface isn't as big of a deal on X99 IMO, because the PCI-E 3.0 lanes are directly connected to the CPU. The only stuff coming through the DMI is sata, lan, usb, and PCI-e 2.0.

 

 

[ValkyrieStar]

I understand about the Boot times, its just slightly a shame that it still takes so long to initialise stuff, surely theres faster ways.

 

Power consumption at stock with all c-states enabled, averaged about 25w, occasionally dipping to 23w. I did notice that package C state never went below PC0 while the cores did drop down to CC6 (Core C6), whereas my 4790K drops down to CC7 and PC3 (Pcie card prevents it dropping below PC3) and idles around 7w-8w.

 

M.2 Support via Chipset is still only PCIe 2.0 x2. With the 28/40 lanes motherboards are using CPU lanes for M.2 instead, but this varies greatly by the boards. Z97 is also normally 2.0 x2 from chipset, with some boards dropping certain peripherals for 2.0 x4, and some asrock boards taking some lanes from the CPU.

 

Theres still the lack of C-States full support. Desktop Haswell Supports Core and Package C7, which drops power consumption considerably, where Haswell-E only supports C6? For a platform that came out later id expect it to have better power saving features. Imagine servers with multi socket boards and that, idling at 15w vs perhaps 35-40w for a larger Xeon chip can save a huge amount of money.

 

It's just a dissapointment to come from Z97 and have pretty much no gain in useful/important features. With the exception of DDR4 and the extra cores - which is nice.

I read somewhere recently Broadwell-E is potentially being dropped or limited only to the server market. If that's true i'll most likely sell on my X99 kit and stick with Z97 until Skylake-E evntually comes round, hopefully with the better chipset features that Z170 etc have.

[runit3]

5 hours ago, ValkyrieStar said:

It's just a dissapointment to come from Z97 and have pretty much no gain in useful/important features. With the exception of DDR4 and the extra cores - which is nice.

I read somewhere recently Broadwell-E is potentially being dropped or limited only to the server market. If that's true i'll most likely sell on my X99 kit and stick with Z97 until Skylake-E evntually comes round, hopefully with the better chipset features that Z170 etc have.

Part of the problem is the choice in board. mATX's are going to have less of the features that make X99 worth it, there just isn't enough physical space to give utility to the 28/40 CPU lanes available. X99 was the first with NVMe support, many of the ATX boards come with segregated SATA controllers (run RAID on one, AHCI/NVMe on the other), C-states are fairly inconsequential to the majority of X99 owners out there as they will be overclocking. If they needed a low power solution a Xeon and server grade board would have been the choice to make.

 

Running SLI/Xfire in 2 x16 operation + x4 PCIe SSD + M.2 utility (WiFi/BT, SSD add-in, etc) + PCIe add-in cards (sound, capture, etc.) was simply an impossible configuration on anything other than X99. Now that Skylake is out there is some marginal improvement w/DMI 3.0 and the extra chipset lanes, but really you'll still be heavily restricted by the 16 CPU lanes if you're maxing out lane saturation, and it will likely come at a bandwidth/configuration layout cost, even more so on anything smaller than ATX. 

 

Like you, I also had a nightmare of a time dialing in my X99 build, I was early adopter in Sept. 14'. The first DDR4 kit I bought was an insane $330 (now sub $150) and it was RMA'd. I spent 2 months talking with G.Skill and ASUS, G.Skill told me to RMA after they couldn't figure it out and I was fed up with failing pre-tests every other boot. Overclocking was fairly easy but my first 5960X chip struggled to make 4.375, this one is better.

 

For the C-State problems you are having I'm going to have to assume it's the board. In terms of boot times if you do not have a UEFI GPT OS installed it will never make a fast boot possible. When I built mine I made the mistake of using a legacy BIOS (MBR) install, coupled with my 2 RAID arrays boots take ~50 seconds and were over a minute before I cloned over to the 750SSD and NVMe as primary boot device. You can check your BIOS interface by running msinfo32.

[ValkyrieStar]

I've finally got round all the little issues and problems i was having. Originally i bought DDR4 2400 ram but its got just average timings, gonna get some 2666 CL13 and when my 950 pro arrives, I should have a nice snappy system. Stuck on a ball-achingly slow 128gb sandisk ssd from when ssds first came out, 400 read 150 write but very low io performance.

 

Hopefully ill upgrade to an 8 core eventually, or ill stick with this 6 core for a few years (most likely) and pick up a cheap 10-20 core cpu and use the board in a home server, or even for gaming if DirectX 12 scales well with 20-40 threads.