Is my CPU alright?

[callmeoldsport]

Okay so I got a skylake CPU (i5 6600k) for Christmas, and I'd say I'm pretty seasoned on the know how of PC's but I can't really find anything on this topic. I overclocked it fairly easily to 4.5ghz 1.25v on an Asus Aura Z170 motherboard. After running Aida64 for an hour or so, I decided it was okay. Temps were fine, looked very stable. However, in games I'd get a huge stutter from time to time and I'd think it was a bottleneck. I turned the default settings back on and my games ran Butter smooth. No issues or crashing anymore. My question is now: is my CPU okay? Would a small undervoltage hurt it? I believe it wouldn't even start up if that's the case, but I'm a bit worried. I was always kind of used to stutter on my FX processor, though I know that's not normal on Intel chips.

[Droidbot]

Bump up your voltage and see if it's still there. I'd suggest trying 1.27 or 1.3v.

[Verrierr]

Everything will stutter if the performance is too low. As far as overclocking goes, you're not the first person to run into such issues.

I'm assuming you used multiplier to overclock? Giving it a little more voltage wouldn't hurt but I don't think it's likely to solve your issue (although it's not impossible). Easiest solution would be to simply forget about overclocking for now I suppose. Did you also overclock RAM by the way?

[callmeoldsport]

 

2 hours ago, Verrierr said:

Everything will stutter if the performance is too low. As far as overclocking goes, you're not the first person to run into such issues.

I'm assuming you used multiplier to overclock? Giving it a little more voltage wouldn't hurt but I don't think it's likely to solve your issue (although it's not impossible). Easiest solution would be to simply forget about overclocking for now I suppose. Did you also overclock RAM by the way?

No I didn't overclock my ram. It's already 3000mhz as it is. I was just wondering if my CPU is okay after having it like that for a month or so? The stutter was clearly a drop in frequency, however. So a bump in voltage would help. 

[Crossbred]

3 hours ago, callmeoldsport said:

 

No I didn't overclock my ram. It's already 3000mhz as it is. I was just wondering if my CPU is okay after having it like that for a month or so? The stutter was clearly a drop in frequency, however. So a bump in voltage would help. 

The ram is not overclocked out of the factory, it is rather rated to be overclocked up to a speed, in your case 3000 MHz. You still need to manually change the clock speed of the ram in bios.

[callmeoldsport]

10 minutes ago, Crossbred said:

The ram is not overclocked out of the factory, it is rather rated to be overclocked up to a speed, in your case 3000 MHz. You still need to manually change the clock speed of the ram in bios.

It is set to 3000mhz, as it is 2133 default in the bios. The main question of this post is if my CPU is fine. So is it? 

[Quaker]

Since it runs "butter smooth" at stock clocks, why not just leave it that way?

 

I've often heard in the past of some games/apps thta have trouble with OC'd CPUs because of timing issues. Perhaps reducing the OC to 4.4GHz or raising the voltage a bit might cure it.

[Crossbred]

1 minute ago, callmeoldsport said:

It is set to 3000mhz, as it is 2133 default in the bios. The main question of this post is if my CPU is fine. So is it? 

If it's stuttering in games I would just turn it down. I'm sure someone more experienced could get it to run smoothly but it's going to be a hassle.

[typographie]

3 hours ago, callmeoldsport said:

No I didn't overclock my ram. It's already 3000mhz as it is. I was just wondering if my CPU is okay after having it like that for a month or so? The stutter was clearly a drop in frequency, however. So a bump in voltage would help. 

Provided this happened while your temperatures were safe, it just sounds to me like it's a borderline unstable overclock. AIDA64 isn't really all that intensive, and just because your overclock passes AIDA doesn't always mean it's rock-solid stable. I don't think there's any damage, or that anything even really "went wrong," per se… It probably just needs either a higher voltage or lower frequency.

 

If you back it off to 4.4 GHz, does it hold its frequency in games?

[callmeoldsport]

42 minutes ago, typographie said:

Provided this happened while your temperatures were safe, it just sounds to me like it's a borderline unstable overclock. AIDA64 isn't really all that intensive, and just because your overclock passes AIDA doesn't always mean it's rock-solid stable. I don't think there's any damage, or that anything even really "went wrong," per se… It probably just needs either a higher voltage or lower frequency.

 

If you back it off to 4.4 GHz, does it hold its frequency in games?

Yeah, that's all I really needed to know. Like I said, I just wanted to make sure it was alright that it was running like that for a month. If there was a huge issue, the computer would've shut down or even worse, not even powered on. I'll fiddle with it in the future but for now, the things already very efficient at stock so it's no big deal. Thank you everyone on this thread for the advice! 

[typographie]

11 minutes ago, callmeoldsport said:

Yeah, that's all I really needed to know. Like I said, I just wanted to make sure it was alright that it was running like that for a month. If there was a huge issue, the computer would've shut down or even worse, not even powered on. I'll fiddle with it in the future but for now, the things already very efficient at stock so it's no big deal. Thank you everyone on this thread for the advice! 

For what it's worth, my i5-6600K at 4.5 GHz needs about 1.32 V to be stable. While every CPU is different and I can't predict your results, 4.5 GHz at 1.25 V sounds optimistic to me. Some chips may do it, but I'd expect those to be an unusually good specimens.