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Could really use some help - 4770k

ThermalX
Level 10
I've been trying to dial in an overclock lately and I've hit a wall. My motherboard is a Maximus 7 Formula. So my CPU (4770k) is a bad overclocker, I tried 4.3Ghz and it took over 1.35V to get it stable. So I decided to drop it down to 42x on all cores, 39x uncore. I got it to run stable for an hour with manual 1.305 Vcore. All other settings default.

My problem is I don't want to leave the Vcore on manual, I want the power saving features enabled, so I tried adaptive. The problem there was that in testing with hwinfo I saw frequent (every 10 to 20 seconds) voltage spikes going up to 1.42 Vcore, with LLC set at 7 it dropped to a peak of 1.37V, but I'd rather not crank up LLC so high. I see these spikes in normal day usage scenarios. I've tried using + and - offsets on adaptive, always adjusting so that peak voltage draw is 1.305 Vcore. It just doesn't seem to stop the voltage spikes. From what I understand, it is a problem with Haswell architecture itself and how it deals with AVX.

So now I tried a typical vcore offset, it all seemed to go well until I crashed out of nowhere. Turns out, the offset I put in seems to possibly be putting the vcore too low on idle. This is my suspicion at least. To place my offset, I stress tested vcore on auto for 4.2 Ghz and peak draw came in at about 1.37V, I think it was. So I put in a negative offset of 0.035V. Going a bit lower and the PC won't even boot.

So I'm lost as to what to do. My options are stick with adaptive and suffer the voltage spikes, which peaking at 1.42V is disconcerting. Or stick with my offset I'm currently using, where vcore is 1.344V at peak draw, 0.039V higher than needed, however I still haven't thoroughly tested stability. For all I know it crashes again.

I should mention that along with the currently set offset I'm using, I did drop c-state to c3 hoping it won't idle as low.

So my question is, is there anything else I could try beside running manual vcore that could get me closer to peak 1.305 vcore. Anything I could do to stabilize those voltage spikes on adaptive or maybe increase voltage for idle state on offset vcore? To the best of my knowledge it can't be done as offset inherently applies to all states. Is there maybe something I could mess around with in cpu power management, maybe transient response time?

Or should I just take a hammer to the cpu for therapeutic effect? 😛
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2 REPLIES 2

ThermalX
Level 10
Anyone? I'm just looking for ideas, or if it's even possible.

Veovis
Level 10
I *had* a 4770k before I upgraded. The biggest boost I did for stability was delidding the CPU and adding cryonaut before putting the thing back together and applying new thermal paste to it. (Temps shot way down which meant I had more headroom to crank up the performance,) You may have to reapply the thermal paste if it's been too long, removing the thermal cap could make your clock more viable.