Overclock log

[Chameleon]

Introduction

This will just serve as a small little OC log for me and I'd love for you guys to chime in with any opinions you have on what I'm doing.

I don't quite have what I'd consider a stable OC yet, but I'm working on it.

My thing is I like to overclock with a negative vcore offset. Opinions on this? It keeps things nice and cool while delivering great performance.

What're your experiences with overclocking the 3770k on air?

Setup

I'm using the ASRock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard with the i7-3770k. (Hyper 212 EVO)

Here are the universal settings I'll be using for my overclock

PLL = 1.709

VCore = -0.010v (I found that anymore and it defeats the purpose, I could essentially take it lower and raise the turbo voltages to compensate. Although that might happen later =P)

LLC = 3-4 (I will shift it around to best suit my OC when I reach it, but I'm using this for testing)

Overclocking

I will only be using voltage offsets since I'm not a fan of fixed voltages. I'll mainly be working with the turbo offset since I'm keeping vcore at -0.010v for now.

I've had a few stable setups so far, and here's what I've taken from it with my chip.

I can keep 4.3GHz stable at -0.010v VCore and +0.004v Turbo and LLC 4

I can boot and have a mostly stable system with the same 4.3GHz settings, although mostly isn't 100%

If I want to boot 4.5GHz without any issues I have to raise my turbo voltages by a large marigin.(and I mean large, the 0.008v step was fine, but it didn't stop BSODing me on boot until I upped it to over 0.030v and it was still unstable.) So instead of making my undervolting redundant, I decided to settle on 4.4GHz.

Trying to get 4.4GHz stable now @1.2v(-0.010v vcore | +0.004v turbo | LLC 3). If I decrease voltage I get an unstable system, if I shift LLC to 4 I get an unstable system, but I keept hitting 81C during my stress tests.....I find this crazy since I had 4.2GHz stable with low-mid 60s on 1.125v vcore. Should I be seeing this kind of scaling in temperature?

My stability requirements

No crashes on ANYTHING.

No crashes even during stress testing while I multi-task.

No going above max vcore

No breaking 80C ever(I know the roof is 98C for throttle and optimal would be anything below 90, but I don't personally want to ever go above 80)

Ability to run stessful CPU processes for long intervals of time with no error.

Ability to render large projects without ANY hiccups.

Stress testing

Funny enough, I can generally tell if a clock is stable just by rebooting a few times. I've been tinkering with this for a few days and have found multiple stable setups and noticed that on literally every unstable setup catalyst control center crashes on boot xD

To test serious stability I do p95 initially with HW Monitor & Real temp monitoring. I basically do

Phase 1 - Boot test

Nothing crashes on boot(This is is something random I'm doing since CCC has been pretty consistent)

Phase 2 - Short stability test (For inbetween clock speed testing)

Prime95 5 minute blend

Phase 3 - Real stability testing(I only do this for settings I'm considering)

Prime95 custom blend with small FFTs and 8GB+RAM for one hour

IBT 5-10 runs on Very High

Prime95 normal blend 30 minutes

Phase 4 - Final test (Generally an overnight test for stability)

Leave P95 running for 4-8 hours

Leave IBT running for an additional 2-3 hours

Render something large in sony vegas@1080p (This and the blender test are because I've had "Stable OCs" crash during rendering and I can't ever have that)

Render something large in blender@1080

Reboot a few times to test any crashes(to see if CCC wants to crash for me)

[andi1455]

I like your stability testing :)

[Chameleon]

I like your stability testing :)

Thanksies ^^ Stability testing right now actually xD 4.4 like to pretend it wants to be stable but just keeps teasing me =/

[Chameleon]

So I've hit a bit of a wall. I've been working my way around this wall for the last few days to find it may not be a hardware stability issue but I want to rule my OC out of the problem.

I can run and pass all of my stability/stress tests EXCEPT for sony vegas 1080p rendering tends to crash on literally every setup regardless of how high I crank the voltage. Here are the steps I've taken so far.

Downclocked to 3.8-4GHz and attempted to render(Failed)

Set RAM timings to the listed DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 listed on the package

memtest86 ran for 5 hours(No errors)

I'm not overclocking my RAM and I have no stability errors while recording, playing games, stress testing goes fine(Even while multi-tasking),nothing ever crashes but the render just seems to "stop" and refuse to cancel as well.

It is kind of annoying that I have been ruling out possible low voltage stable systems just because my renders failed -.-