Overclocking oops moment...

[porina]

Revisiting OC my i3-8350k Coffee Lake system tonight. I've been using voltage offset rather than fixed for past testing. In short, I got a bit careless and applied +275mV offset in both bios and XTU. I was left wondering why higher clock ratios weren't stable any more, why temps were up, and then I saw core voltage showing over 1.7!!! Turned out they stack, and XTU didn't replace the bios setting. Ok, fixed that and things were back to normal. Makes me wonder, how high have people taken core voltages? I know the LN2 crowd use silly settings, but I'm on air! 

[W-L]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

Revisiting OC my i3-8350k Coffee Lake system tonight. I've been using voltage offset rather than fixed for past testing. In short, I got a bit careless and applied +275mV offset in both bios and XTU. I was left wondering why higher clock ratios weren't stable any more, why temps were up, and then I saw core voltage showing over 1.7!!! Ok, fixed that and things were back to normal. Makes me wonder, how high have people taken core voltages? I know the LN2 crowd use silly settings, but I'm on air! 

CPU begging for mercy!  

 

I've pushed my 4790K to 1.4V but haven't pushed for much more than that with a custom loop, 1.7V is in the realm of extreme Ocing. 

[McHox]

accidentally booted with 1.9v once,had a mini heart attack when it went +95°C within seconds 
apparently i didnt hit the second 1 properly for 1.19v ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[steffeeh]

This is why ALL overclocking motherboards should come with a physical switch for enabling extreme overvolting

[McHox]

1 minute ago, steffeeh said:

This is why ALL overclocking motherboards should come with a physical switch for enabling extreme overvolting

maybe not that,but a popup saying: "u sure u wanna go above 1.4v there m8?" would be nice

[vanished]

6 minutes ago, McHox said:

maybe not that,but a popup saying: "u sure u wanna go above 1.4v there m8?" would be nice

My BIOS lists all changes you've made on the screen where it asks you to confirm, so that's basically a thing already

[porina]

4 minutes ago, W-L said:

CPU begging for mercy!  

 

I've pushed my 4790K to 1.4V but haven't pushed for much more than that with a custom loop, 1.7V is in the realm of extreme Ocing. 

To be fair, the 8350k is my current OC plaything. For now I'm pushing for bench stable results, although I will follow up with 24/7 settings later on. The mobo isn't great at reporting CPU voltage so I was doing it blind in the early days. Either a recent bios update or hwinfo64 update means I can finally monitor it without using Asrock's own software which is a bit horrible.

 

Under my current test settings, desktop idle gets close to 1.5v, although that does drop to 1.4v or so under high loads. Haven't played with load line yet.

 

3 minutes ago, McHox said:

maybe not that,but a popup saying: "u sure u wanna go above 1.4v there m8?" would be nice

In this example this would be difficult to get working. Part of my problem was that the mobo doesn't report CPU voltage very well. In particular, XTU doesn't show anything. CPU-z only shows VID. Asrock's own software does, but it is a bit horrible so I don't want to use it. Only recently did hwinfo64 start to report the same voltage as Asrock's software, but it is one line of output and I don't look at it that often... would be so much nicer if it was reported in a way XTU could see it.

[W-L]

1 minute ago, porina said:

-SNIP-

Yea if your seeing large dips in voltage like that under load your going to want to raise your LLC, I personally recommend to have it around 2-5 depending on how your setup reacts but I have mine around 4-5 usually as it tends to prevent any drip in voltage for me. Lower is always better so it doesn't boost voltage too high so best to carefully experiment.

[porina]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

My BIOS lists all changes you've made on the screen where it asks you to confirm, so that's basically a thing already

If you're using fixed that would be fine, but my scenario happened as I was using two lots of offsets. I mistakenly assumed the bios and XTU offsets were the same setting, but it turned out they stacked...

 

Before anyone says, I would normally use fixed voltages, but due to lack of reporting I did early work using offsets only. For continuity I'm sticking with it until I can accurately translate that to fixed equivalent.

 

I think what might be more useful is a CPU overvoltage threshold that could be set, in a similar way to the over-current limits already in place. If voltage goes over a certain level, throttle.

[vanished]

1 minute ago, porina said:

If you're using fixed that would be fine, but my scenario happened as I was using two lots of offsets. I mistakenly assumed the bios and XTU offsets were the same setting, but it turned out they stacked...

Yeah I would have thought the same thing

1 minute ago, porina said:

Before anyone says, I would normally use fixed voltages, but due to lack of reporting I did early work using offsets only. For continuity I'm sticking with it until I can accurately translate that to fixed equivalent.

Yeah manual is generally safer I think since you know what it is rather than letting it jump around however it feels like it but I don't like how it locks the voltage in even when the chip idles

1 minute ago, porina said:

I think what might be more useful is a CPU overvoltage threshold that could be set, in a similar way to the over-current limits already in place. If voltage goes over a certain level, throttle.

That would definitely be a good feature

[porina]

1 minute ago, W-L said:

Yea if your seeing large dips in voltage like that under load your going to want to raise your LLC, I personally recommend to have it around 2-5 depending on how your setup reacts but I have mine around 4-5 usually as it tends to prevent any drip in voltage for me. Lower is always better so it doesn't boost voltage too high so best to carefully experiment.

Mobo is Asrock Z370 Pro4. I don't know if it is typical of other Asrock mobos as this is the only one I've OC'd with.

 

In part why I haven't touched it yet is the mobo offers 4 LLC settings. The little graphic in bios shows level 1 as a flat horizontal line, and this is the default it presents setting when you select fixed CPU voltage. Higher numbers show more droop in the line. I think this is the opposite way around to Asus, but I haven't done that recently so not 100% there. I had briefly dabbled with LLC setting 1 but my fixed voltage was too low to start with, and it still drooped anyway. I'll revisit this later as a low priority.

 

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Yeah manual is generally safer I think since you know what it is rather than letting it jump around however it feels like it but I don't like how it locks the voltage in even when the chip idles

I actually wanted to try offset voltage now we're in the era of offset ratios depending on type of CPU load. Right now we can set a base clock, and then apply a negative AVX offset to reduce clocks for those more demanding loads. What I don't have a direct ability yet is to manually set separate voltages for the two clocks. It has been suggested elsewhere that if the system varies voltage with clock, using offset voltage might offer part of that. I haven't got around to investigating that yet, but based on my current observations I don't think it is the case on this Asrock mobo anyway.

[vanished]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

I actually wanted to try offset voltage now we're in the era of offset ratios depending on type of CPU load. Right now we can set a base clock, and then apply a negative AVX offset to reduce clocks for those more demanding loads. What I don't have a direct ability yet is to manually set separate voltages for the two clocks. It has been suggested elsewhere that if the system varies voltage with clock, using offset voltage might offer part of that. I haven't got around to investigating that yet, but based on my current observations I don't think it is the case on this Asrock mobo anyway.

You know what I'd love is for the CPU to detect exactly how much voltage it needs for any given condition so it takes as much as it needs to never crash, but never more than that, thus saving power and lifespan, etc.  If this was combined with your voltage limit feature, it would basically make manual overclocking a thing of the past.  You'd just set a frequency of 10 GHz, cap the voltage at whatever you want, and the chip would automatically give you a perfect overclock by running as fast as it can given the allowed max voltage.  No more testing for stability, no more fine tuning to reduce heat output, etc.

[porina]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

You know what I'd love is for the CPU to detect exactly how much voltage it needs for any given condition so it takes as much as it needs to never crash, but never more than that, thus saving power and lifespan, etc.  If this was combined with your voltage limit feature, it would basically make manual overclocking a thing of the past.  You'd just set a frequency of 10 GHz, cap the voltage at whatever you want, and the chip would automatically give you a perfect overclock by running as fast as it can given the allowed max voltage.

I think part of the difficulty is knowing exactly how much power is needed. Quite simply we can't know that, so there has to be that safety margin applied, not to mention binning to fit market placements. The 2nd part sounds like what GPUs already do. Think of it as a more granular turbo feature. Intel are still going in 100 MHz steps but Ryzen already goes in 25 MHz steps. If not reaching power or voltage limits, the CPU can keep turbo-ing up.

[Intelfreak]

For me its 1.55 volt on air with my current i7 980x to reach 4.77 ghz. That voltage whas on perpase and not a mistake throw. It whas for benchmark runs.

 

It dit throw ran a bit hot... 95c.

 

I had a ups moment with a gtx 660 ti. I hard modet it so voltage got unlocked. Throw it to max and oc the crap out of it. Fire up furmark and puf she died hot and smelly.

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[W-L]

13 minutes ago, porina said:

-SNIP-

Hmm they don't really provide very fine control, I've used LLC on Asus boards as they have an option from 0-10. It's best to not really exceed 50% for most situations since it tends to overdo it on the voltage.