Locked i7 8700 BCLK overclocking.

[Princess Luna]

Hello there!

 

I have a locked i7 8700 on a Gigabyte Z370M D3H mATX and 16gb of GSkill 3200mhzCL16 RAM, cooling is the Cooler Master Hyper 212X build that's with my boyfriend now while he is very glad with the performance and it seems to have paired with his 1080 Ti just fine for gaming, he wants to further overclock it although he isn't skilled at it and myself I have never messed around overclocking locked CPUs myself.

 

So from what I understand the only way to overclock it is through the BLCK since we're lucky enough to have a Z370M chipset, we actually have it stable at 102.65mhz with the default turbo boost multipliers, therefore all cores boost of around 4.415ghz without touching any thing else, already gives a single core score of 192 and 1402 multi-core at cinebench, great results aready.

 

But we want to push further, issue is that then the XMP profile derps due to the memory reaching too above the 3200mhz rated speed and the system fail to boot.

 

I am to understand then that to push further we might have to work on the memory manually or even work on the voltages? The CPU is all auto and it pins down at 1.18v when fully stressed, operating at 71Cº peak package.

 

Spoiler

But most importantly... Is any of this worth it?   realistically speaking since this is just for gaming we could just leave it as is which already really good any ways.

[Jurrunio]

I'd recommend dropping memory settings all the way down to 2133 XMP-off, then play with BCLK and find the highest BCLK achieveable. Only then, come back for memory overclocking.

[Alexalmighty502]

keep in mind it overclocks the memory AND the pcie lanes if you feel you REALLY need the increased performance by all means keep tinkering

[Princess Luna]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

.

I'll need guides because I have always been lazy in my life and went with XMP xD'

 

@MageTank save me one more time pointing out where to go, this system only works in dual channel to being with because of your insight on the excessive pressure on the CPU cooler :3

[Princess Luna]

1 minute ago, Alexalmighty502 said:

the pcie lanes

Actually no, PCI-e lanes is no longer affected by the base clock since Skylake.

[Alexalmighty502]

2 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Actually no, PCI-e lanes is no longer affected by the base clock since Skylake.

curse intel changing things and making old knowledge null and void  

[TrigrH]

15 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Hello there!

 

I have a locked i7 8700 on a Gigabyte Z370M D3H mATX and 16gb of GSkill 3200mhzCL16 RAM, cooling is the Cooler Master Hyper 212X build that's with my boyfriend now while he is very glad with the performance and it seems to have paired with his 1080 Ti just fine for gaming, he wants to further overclock it although he isn't skilled at it and myself I have never messed around overclocking locked CPUs myself.

 

So from what I understand the only way to overclock it is through the BLCK since we're lucky enough to have a Z370M chipset, we actually have it stable at 102.65mhz with the default turbo boost multipliers, therefore all cores boost of around 4.415ghz without touching any thing else, already gives a single core score of 192 and 1402 multi-core at cinebench, great results aready.

 

But we want to push further, issue is that then the XMP profile derps due to the memory reaching too above the 3200mhz rated speed and the system fail to boot.

 

I am to understand then that to push further we might have to work on the memory manually or even work on the voltages? The CPU is all auto and it pins down at 1.18v when fully stressed, operating at 71Cº peak package.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

But most importantly... Is any of this worth it?   realistically speaking since this is just for gaming we could just leave it as is which already really good any ways.

Its not the XMP.

 

Its the fucking intel microcode, that has disabled BCLK on everything above skylake, it wont post on anything higher than ~103 no matter what memory settings you use.

[Coaxialgamer]

Just a question : is BCLOCK in coffeelake still tied to other systems ( pcie , sata..) like it was in sandy bridge , ivy , haswell and broadwell ?

The whole Non-K skylake thing a couple years ago means i've lost track

[AnonymousGuy]

1 minute ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Just a question : is BCLOCK in coffeelake still tied to other systems ( pcie , sata..) like it was in sandy bridge , ivy , haswell and broadwell ?

The whole Non-K skylake thing a couple years ago means i've lost track

I'm in the same boat.  My knowledge of bclk is outdated to where I usually say "it's not worth a 3% overclock to introduce a fuckload of system instability".

[Princess Luna]

1 minute ago, Coaxialgamer said:

k

Since Skylake BLCK only affects CPU and Memory however now someone says there's hardware microcode added in Kaby Lake to avoid posting with more than 103ish mhz... I will put memory at 2133mhz default JEDEC and see if I can boot with 110mhz on base to see how it goes.

[Alexalmighty502]

atleast its not only me being confused about bclck on modern cpus ive been looking around online and it seems like it only effects ram and cpu speed

[TrigrH]

2 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Since Skylake BLCK only affects CPU and Memory however now someone says there's hardware microcode added in Kaby Lake to avoid posting with more than 103ish mhz... I will put memory at 2133mhz default JEDEC and see if I can boot with 110mhz on base to see how it goes.

from what ive seen it wont work, if it does you can run memory up as high as ~2600

[Princess Luna]

34 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

from what ive seen it wont work, if it does you can run memory up as high as ~2600

Yeah it won't work, 102.75 seems as high as it goes, CPU on full load now is at 4.420ghz instead of the out of the box stock clock of 4.289mhz, that's still a nice improvement I suppose.

 

Memory is at 3333mhz 16-17-17-37

 

got 1407 on multi-threading cinebench yay, couldn't get to the finest Ryzen 5 2600X in multi-threading cuz HT sucks compared to SMT but at least 193 single thread is awesome for a locked CPU.

[TrigrH]

2 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Yeah it won't work, 102.75 seems as high as it goes, CPU on full load now is at 4.420ghz instead of the out of the box stock clock of 4.289mhz, that's still a nice improvement I suppose.

 

Memory is at 3333mhz 16-17-17-37

100% cpu microcode locking you out.

[Jurrunio]

34 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

I'll need guides because I have always been lazy in my life and went with XMP xD'

 

@MageTank save me one more time pointing out where to go, this system only works in dual channel to being with because of your insight on the excessive pressure on the CPU cooler :3

On memory timings or BCLK?

[Princess Luna]

Just now, Jurrunio said:

On memory timings or BCLK?

Seems the thread is done, the locked i7 8700 is all cores boosting to 4.420 opposed to 4.289 it did out of box which helped out, memory end up at 3333mhz 16 17 17 37

 

I think it's as much juice as we can get from this system

[Jurrunio]

39 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Seems the thread is done, the locked i7 8700 is all cores boosting to 4.420 opposed to 4.289 it did out of box which helped out, memory end up at 3333mhz 16 17 17 37

 

I think it's as much juice as we can get from this system

Actually surprised to see a 3200 C16 kit do 16 17 17 37, these kits usually use Hynix die which does more like 16 19 19 38 at 3333

[xg32]

7 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

.

 

47 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

.

it's a pretty nice oc overall, better than alot of setups, like how i used hynix c16 with a 8600k, barely boots past 3000 :(, this 8700 is still better.

[MageTank]

1 hour ago, Princess Cadence said:

I'll need guides because I have always been lazy in my life and went with XMP xD'

 

@MageTank save me one more time pointing out where to go, this system only works in dual channel to being with because of your insight on the excessive pressure on the CPU cooler :3

With a 2.65% overclock, you should not need to change any voltage to stabilize your ram. With 102.65 BCLK, your memory should be running at 3285mhz, which is not even 1 strap higher. I would check RTL/IO-L offsets to make sure they are not training wildly. They need to be within 1T of each other. For example: If RTL A is 50, RTL B must be 49, 50, or 51. 2T can be stable, but it's pushing it in my opinion. If it's falling outside of 2T, apply the RTL Init formula from my memory overclocking guide. This will force RTL/ IO Offsets to train within a specific window, preventing them from going out of spec. 

 

Once you've determined RTL settings are within spec, Dial in the rest of your secondary and tertiary timings manually. This will prevent any auto-training issues when you restart the system. Helps to have MRC Fastboot disabled to make sure it does not interfere with this process. 

 

Lastly, you can look into lowering your memory multiplier one strap lower, then tighten your timings to compensate for the loss in bandwidth. If this option allows you to achieve lower absolute latency, then it's worth the trade in bandwidth. If you have any further issues, I can try to figure out why it's crashing in-depth.