Overclocking an i5-4670K with the Asrock Extreme4

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Karl Zhao

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Apr 4, 2013
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Hey everyone,
I've been trying to overclock my i5-4670K, and I keep encountering unusual circumstances.
First of all, I read somewhere that instead of just adjusting the CPU voltage, you have to adjust the CPU voltage, the cache voltage, and the input in order to deliver the voltage properly on an Z87 Extreme4. I've tried playing around with these, but I don't know how each of them works and how they are relevant to each other, so I don't really know what I'm doing with them. The board is quite new, so there aren't many guides on it and the Asrock website provides no help at all.

My chip also seems to be extremely bad. On 1.29v, I can barely hit 4.3GHz. Asus has done some testing and they said that 70% of their tested chips have hit 4.5GHz on 1.25v. I'm just thinking that even if my chip is at the bottom of the chips, I still think I should be able to hit 4.4GHz on 1.3v, which I can't do.

Something else that is confusing me greatly is that my chip seems to run much cooler than normal chips. According to many websites, 1.25v in Haswell can only be managed well by a dual-fan or high-end single-fan water cooler. I have a Seidon 120M, which isn't actually all that high-end, but on 1.29v, I get load temperatures of around 68-71. In fact, I don't even get hot enough to throttle until I reach voltages of around 1.37v, which apparently is an insane voltage for Haswell.

Seeing these facts, my idea is that the voltage isn't actually changed when I try to, because I need to change the other 2 values on my motherboard. If that's true, can someone please help me change them and explain what they are supposed to be? And if it isn't, can someone explain the problem and what I should do to fix it?
Thanks!
 
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LooseFuji

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Feb 20, 2013
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I've got the same setup, in terms of both motherboard and CPU. The last chips i overclocked were core2duo's, back in the FSB days, so please take the following as personal observation rather than fact... I don't want to screw up anyone's stuff. It's apparently easier to use "fixed mode" for CPU voltage, you then just give it a value and it sticks to it. As far as i know there's no need to change the Input Voltage, i've set mine to "fixed" at stock 1.900V. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some benefit to upping the Input Voltage, but i don't know about it yet. I've overclocked mine using the "adaptive voltage" setting, which means it'll ramp up the volts when they're needed, but power back down during idle. I'm very underwhelmed by the overclockability of my chip too, i couldn't do 4.2GHz out of the box until i'd messed around quite a bit and done a lot of forum reading. I now have a CM Hyper 212 EVO cpu cooler and i can do 4.4GHz, 1.28V @60c load... but i don't hold much hope of getting any faster.

Basically in the BIOS (if you want to try the adaptive voltage method) you should choose adaptive mode. You've then got a couple of values to input: CPU Adaptive Voltage and CPU Voltage Offset. From trial and error, and checking out voltages from within windows etc, it seems that under load your CPU will get the Adaptive Voltage you've inputted PLUS the Voltage Offset.

In my very limited experience, the Voltage Offset (V.O.) seems to be the key here. I lowered my CPU Adaptive Voltage from 1.250 + 0.030V.O. (=1.28V) to 1.200 + 0.080V.O. (=1.28V) and it all seemed to work fine. It seems to me that you should put a lower (maybe even stock) voltage for the normal CPU Adaptive Voltage, then set your Voltage Offset to be whatever extra juice it needs under load.

I'm guessing that i may even get away with CPU Voltage of 1.100V and Voltage Offset of 0.180V (=1.28V)... as long as they add up to the voltage needed at full speed. For the most part the chip stays underclocked at 800MHz (8x multiplier) @ ~0.800V whilst browsing etc, but as soon as i benchmark (or play games, presumably) CPU-Z v1.64.1.x64 shows 1.283V @ 44x when using Level 3 LLC.

Your mileage may vary, you should probably experiment with different levels of LLC from within the same BIOS menu, if only to make sure your volts aren't going sky high under load (very common with Asrock boards apparently). I'm actually still messing around with it all, i'm now trying to minimise the CPU Cache Voltage since finding my minimum CPU voltage.

The above info has worked for me, the only voltages which really matter are all in that menu, and using Adaptive Mode you really only need to set CPU Adaptive Voltage to stock, then set Voltage Offset to however many extra volts are needed at full load. For your chip to do 4.3GHz, you could set 1.200V CPU Adaptive Voltage and 0.090V Voltage Offset, which would deliver 1.290V under load (give or take... depending on what your LLC is set at).

There was also a BIOS update recently, you can download it directly from within the BIOS menu. I couldn't get past 4.1GHz stable before the update.
 
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Midnitewolf

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Nov 5, 2013
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I am having similar issue using a Asrock Z87 Killer. Two chips so far. At stock clocks both chips pulled 1.211 volts which is insane. First chip I could get to 4.2 GHz on 1.275 volts but felt that was kind of crazy considering all the review and info I read said stock voltage should be about 1.0-1.1 volts and then again about all the people OCing to 4.5-5.0 GHz out there so I RMA'ed it. Second chip still 1.211 volts stock but I can't even get 3.9 GHz out of it. In fact any change to clock multiplier or voltage immediately crashes the system and the BIOS itself doesn't even want to load after the crash. That one was definitely RMA'ed.

Also same thing on the temps. They are extremely low. First chip I managed 4.2 GHz for a bit on 1.275 volts and the temps didn't break 68c on just a cheap Xigmatek Loki. I even managed 4.4 GHz for a short while under load and still was under 75c so I still had a lot of thermal headroom, a lot more than I was lead to expect with a compact 92mm fan tower heatsink anyway.

I also had to RMA the MB so I know it isn't a bad MB (unless all the Asrock Z87 Killers are bad or perhaps a bad batch).

Anyway, it just seems there is a really bad batch of processors floating around out there right now so you might just be one of the unlucky ones like me.
 
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surr3a1

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Dec 11, 2013
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10,510
Hello all,

I have the Asrock z87 Extreme 4 with i5-4670K since 2 days. The cooler is Evo 212 from Cooler Master.

I was able to get to this point:

speed: 4.3Ghz

multiplier: 43 (everything else is default).

volts in override mode: +1.27 (maybe even lower but this is where I stopped last night).

I tried to get the 4.4 at this voltage but it fails in windows after a minute.

I also tried to set the voltage at 1.3V and the multiplier at 45 at which point it wouldn't boot at all! I had to reset CMOS.

The temperature of the CPU at this setting is 36C, which is very good.

When setting it at 4.4Ghz and booting to UEFI directly, I could see 47-8C for the temp but as I said it was not stable in win and would crash.

I will post here again if I get something better out of it and with the exact settings.

Cheers.

P.S.

I did not update my BIOS at all because I just read about the importance of it. Will do tonight.


 
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