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Overclocking the i7-4710HQ on a G751JY and issues

Edweird
Level 10
WARNING! Image Heavy!

Hey, everyone.

I recently purchased this beauty of a machine - a G751JY. (i7-4710HQ, GTX980M, 8GB DDR3L, BIOS 205)
After rummaging around the forums and with you guys' help (thanks to ASUS Support as well) I have managed (for now) to get some extra juice out of the already almost unnecessarily powerful 980M using GPU Tweak for Graphics Cards with the 344.75 drivers.

Yay! This is just the +135Hz standard overclock and the memory running at 6000MHz effective. I haven't seen if it would go up but from what I've seen I should be able to hit 6400MHz no problem.

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So that being done, I think it's appropriate to talk about the CPU...
Especially considering that I can imagine a fair few circumstances where the CPU would hold down this beastly GPU.

So, what does HWINFO86 tell my uneducated mind about this processor:

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Okay, so I did some basic research and from I understand, this information tells us that this CPU can take 2 extra frequency multipliers - so technically, I should be able to get a free 200MHz overclock! That is significant on a mobile machine with the thermal headroom and the G751 is definitely that.

Okay, so I loaded up Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and noticed that the clock multiplier can be pulled up but only by a factor of 1...huh. Okay so our new multis are 36-35-34-34 and a cache multiplier of 36. (Worth noting that I'm a complete noob when it comes to overclocking.)

So I applied the settings and ran a benchmark to see what would happen.

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Odd... the CPU hit 3.4GHz only once for a split second. I determined that, obviously, XTU stresses all 4 cores for this benchmark.
Looking down we can see something more odd - the CPU is being starved for current by XTU! I guess this is how XTU stresses the chip? I truly have no clue. However, my non-OC brain thinks that XTU does this to determine how effective the CPU is at blasting calculations when deprived of "food", which WOULD explain the lower clocks.

Moving on - I loaded up ThrottleStop because of its simple and effective threaded benchmark so that I could test individual cores.

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This time, there is no throttling of any kind. We see that a single threaded test mostly works the CPU to about 3.4GHz, rarely peaking to 3.5GHz. XTU reports only 1 core being active. This is very odd. So we've set the multiplier to 36 for 1 core, the CPU has enough current but it barely makes 3.5GHz? Throughout my testing I have never seen this CPU go above 3.5GHz.

Next, 2 threads.

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Hmm...same results. The CPU peaked at just over 3.5GHz - but this is expected as our 2-core multiplier is set to 35. But it rarely reached that speed. XTU jumped between 1 and 2 cores.

A solid 3.4GHz for 4 threads for a multiplier of 34 for 4 cores active.

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Okay, so let's look at the benchmark results.
Again, we can see here that XTU starves the CPU of current and the CPU struggles to keep up at 3.1GHz.

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The result:

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No idea how this stacks up.

Now with the tweaked multipliers:

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Throttling again, but this time it's a steady 3.3GHz.

Results:

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...What? Same results? What's happening?

This is where I am stuck. First, as I understand it, the CPU should be able to do 3.7GHz. Second, it doesn't even do 3.6GHz through XTU. This is where I'm hoping some OC savvy people will jump in. Do I need to tweak something else to get an actual overclock out of this CPU? Could it be that ASUS has changed how the CPU behaves and limited the multipliers through the 205 BIOS release? And I'm not liking the dips on that blue curve down in the left corner...

Any and all feedback on the process and any discussion is welcomed and encouraged!
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47 REPLIES 47

cablebandit
Level 7
sorry to not offer any help but are you using the 344.xx nvidia drivers becuase of the overclocking capability? I ask because i am using the newest drivers and now evga precision doesnt work and crashes

cablebandit wrote:
sorry to not offer any help but are you using the 344.xx nvidia drivers becuase of the overclocking capability? I ask because i am using the newest drivers and now evga precision doesnt work and crashes


Yes, the solution is to go back to 344.75/80, as suggested by hmscott. This got GPU Tweak working for me.

Edweird wrote:
Yes, the solution is to go back to 344.75/80, as suggested by hmscott. This got GPU Tweak working for me.


thanks! I just downgraded drivers to 344.75 and now gpu tweak is working 🙂

NitroX
Level 10
You could change the refference clock if you want to really OC the CPU, though I wouldn't suggest it because the CPU will go even hotter. Intel XTU doesn't really stress de CPU to produce much heat, but if you will do a Prime95 test or a gaming test, in a demanding game, you will see that your CPU at normal clocks will reach 80-85 C. This is because the fans don't go on full speed when the hardware needs more cooling. This is already a known issue (if I may say so) and it is discussed in more threads around this section on the forum.
2nd: I really suggest you to be careful with this OC adventure that you started because OC-ing the GPU or CPU could void your warranty if the hardware gets damaged in the process.

Tbh I never felt that the CPU has bottlenecked my GPU until now. And I mostly play AC Unity which is a very demanding game on both GPU and GPU. So, at the moment I'm running my CPU with x35, x34, x33, x33 clocks and an Undervolt mode which reduced the heat generated by the CPU with about 5-6 C. I may try to see if the CPU could do a x36 on all 4 cores if ASUS will provide us an update for the fans rpm profiles just to be sure it doesn't melt down :)).

NitroX wrote:
You could change the refference clock if you want to really OC the CPU, though I wouldn't suggest it because the CPU will go even hotter. Intel XTU doesn't really stress de CPU to produce much heat, but if you will do a Prime95 test or a gaming test, in a demanding game, you will see that your CPU at normal clocks will reach 80-85 C. This is because the fans don't go on full speed when the hardware needs more cooling. This is already a known issue (if I may say so) and it is discussed in more threads around this section on the forum.
2nd: I really suggest you to be careful with this OC adventure that you started because OC-ing the GPU or CPU could void your warranty if the hardware gets damaged in the process.

Tbh I never felt that the CPU has bottlenecked my GPU until now. And I mostly play AC Unity which is a very demanding game on both GPU and GPU. So, at the moment I'm running my CPU with x35, x34, x33, x33 clocks and an Undervolt mode which reduced the heat generated by the CPU with about 5-6 C. I may try to see if the CPU could do a x36 on all 4 cores if ASUS will provide us an update for the fans rpm profiles just to be sure it doesn't melt down :)).


Under heavy gaming loads (Planetside 2 which sucks the life out of CPUs) I've seen it only go up to 78 degrees.
GPU Tweak only allows a +135Hz boost and I'm not gonna touch voltage. Moving the reference clock slider beyond 100MHz crashes the laptop and I know it to be a pretty daft idea in general. I'm not trying to do anything silly with this - I'm just tryig to bring the CPU to it's actual design performance levels and for some reason the laptop just won't let me have that - which makes no sense considering XTU comes shipped with these and it doesn't seem to be working right. It's only for CPU intensive games that I actually want to see what the CPU can actually pull out. Newer games are going to be using DX12 APIs etc to make better use of the ridiculous performance of the Maxwell GPUs anyways - I just want to learn how this baby works.

Also, I'd say the fans are actually going full speed on mine. Laptop came shipped with BIOS ver.205.
Even 80-85 degrees are not dangerous temps considering thermal throttling starts in mid-90s.

For this CPU it looks like -50mV voltage offset is ideal.

I'm on maximum offset voltage for both Dynamic and Cache and I didn't get any BSOD's by now (7days+ of use). I don't know about your machine, but I do know that the maximum rpm is about 4100/4200rpm and mine only goes as far as 3100rpm when I have 90+C on the CPU. Could you tell me how high your RPM goes at 80-85C ?

Also, I didn't know about the crashes from the reference clock. I never tried modifying it.

HulkSmash
Level 8
I'm doing everything I can to maintain a long lifespam on this machine. I did overclock my 970m to 135+ core, 280+ mem, but I did so because the temps are still great, roams around 68C during heavy gaming. However the CPU does get a bit hot at times, I've seen it reach 85C, not constant, but It's been there. NitroX I saw you happened to undervolt your CPU and got a few degrees down. Won't you be losing some performance by doing so, and if you do is it negligible? Also, how would I go about that, just tweak the settings on XTU?

Nope, you won't lose any performance. The CPU will still be running at the corresponding frequencies just that it will run on lower voltages = lower heat. The only problem is how much your CPU will let you undervolt it because at some certain point it may cause stability issues (BSODs of PC restarts). It's probably the best thing that you can do on a mobile device in order to increase it's life span and runtime on battery (though the runtime isn't quite noticeable on laptops, more on smartphones).
You can see more details about how I did my undervolting along with the original tips from HMScott, over here:
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?52467-Got-your-new-G751JY-G751JT-G751JM-Post-your-review-t...

NitroX wrote:
Nope, you won't lose any performance. The CPU will still be running at the corresponding frequencies just that it will run on lower voltages = lower heat. The only problem is how much your CPU will let you undervolt it because at some certain point it may cause stability issues (BSODs of PC restarts). It's probably the best thing that you can do on a mobile device in order to increase it's life span and runtime on battery (though the runtime isn't quite noticeable on laptops, more on smartphones).
You can see more details about how I did my undervolting along with the original tips from HMScott, over here:
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?52467-Got-your-new-G751JY-G751JT-G751JM-Post-your-review-t...

Much appreciated!