CPU overclock i7 vs i5

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JasonLavender

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Apr 4, 2016
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Just a quick question:



How far could I overclock the i5 6600k with a budget cooler (Hyper 212 Evo or Cryorig H7) and with a high end cooler (NH-D15 or Corsair h115i).

Same goes for the i7 6700k.



Thank you!
 
Solution
amtseung
Skylakes are so power efficient, the temperatures between the 6600k and 6700k should be nearly identical, assuming both are running on an equal VCore, equal clock speed, and on the same cooler. This isn't an FX monstrosity, so chances are, even with a $30 Hyper 212 variant (or H7 or whatever 120mm tower heatsink fan cooler thing), you'll be hitting your silicon stability limit before you hit the thermal threshold. The rest comes down to your ambient temperature, case airflow, and the silicon lottery. If you won the lottery, you'll get close to 5ghz, and if you lose, you'll struggle to reach 4.5ghz. It's all luck, and can largely be visualized by a bell curve with a normalized distribution. You can't RMA a CPU just because it can't...
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amtseung

amtseung

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Jan 28, 2014
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Skylakes are so power efficient, the temperatures between the 6600k and 6700k should be nearly identical, assuming both are running on an equal VCore, equal clock speed, and on the same cooler. This isn't an FX monstrosity, so chances are, even with a $30 Hyper 212 variant (or H7 or whatever 120mm tower heatsink fan cooler thing), you'll be hitting your silicon stability limit before you hit the thermal threshold. The rest comes down to your ambient temperature, case airflow, and the silicon lottery. If you won the lottery, you'll get close to 5ghz, and if you lose, you'll struggle to reach 4.5ghz. It's all luck, and can largely be visualized by a bell curve with a normalized distribution. You can't RMA a CPU just because it can't overclock well. In fact, overclocking voids the warranty, probably to stop people from returning CPU's that didn't win the silicon lottery or were bricked while overvolted.

Theoretically, an i7 will overclock slightly better than an i5 because i7's are typically binned to run hyperthreaded, but in practice, the difference is so small, you won't notice it.

The bigger coolers can provide, as stated above, a small difference in temps, translating to a miniscule increase in performance. Plenty of sites have, by now, benchmarked a myriad of different CPU coolers on top of CPU's much hotter than anything from the Skylake family. Google it.

Throwing money at the problem is a matter of hitting the threshold of diminishing return. Whether you want to pay or not is entirely up to you.
 
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