First time overclocking. Help?

KrytonTechnologies · April 12, 2018

Alright. So long story short I have never had a CPU with an unlocked modifier before. I've recently been playing a game that is cpu intensive and rather optimized, and decided it was time to upgrade my i7-2600, seeing as I had a bottleneck and was admittedly unhappy with the basic Intel motherboard it sat in. Tax returns came in and I went bananas. I got myself an Asus Prime Z370-A motherboard, an i7-8700k, and a Corsair H100i v2 AIO cooler, coupled with 2 x 8GB G-Skill Trident RGB 3000 MHz ram. I am very happy with the improvement and performance I have been getting, but I'd like to know if I'm pushing my luck here. I set the default values that the motherboard supplies for a 5 GHz overclock, with the exception of limiting the core voltage to 1.35, as It was allowing it to go up to 1.48 at times under auto settings and this made me rather uncomfortable, especially given that I know it is completely unnecessary. I have absolutely no stability issues, spare an unrelated driver issue thanks to my insistence on avoiding a fresh install, but I can sort that out. My temps don't go above 70 during gaming, even while streaming, with the exception of the occasional very short spike to 80-82, which hasn't been higher than 65-70 under any workload that I use the computer for, so despite not using my full processor's potential, the overclock does net me an extra 15 fps difference, which is just enough to keep it above 60 on high detail whilst streaming.

My concern is that running Aida64, I can see thermal throttling under a full stress test. It only throttles by upwards of 3%, and I never see the temps above 80 except under a stress test. Even benchmarking in Cinebench can't get my temps above 82 unless I run it multiple times. As a first time overclocker, I can't say I really know what I'm doing as much as I'd like. This is very new territory for me. If I use some common sense, is this a safe way for me to run my computer, given my workload (or lack thereof) for this computer? Thanks in advance for your help, everyone.

chckovsky · April 12, 2018

I would try to follow an overclocking guide for the specific chip you are overclocking. I know very little about overclocking, so I can't verify the info in this video, but this dude has some good videos on other subjects and seems generally know what he's doing

I've heard that especially Asus boards like to give more voltage than generally needed when using the "standard OC profiles" that come with the boards. Higher voltages generally equals higher temps.

Keep in mind that not all programs will give an accurate reading of temps, but I would've thought AIDA64 would be fairly accurate.

To answer your question, I don't think it will cause an issue, but overclocking generally does reduce the expected life span of a chip.