i7 7700K Overclocking Guide/Troubleshooting

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AntaresSQ01

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Hello, I recently got an i7 7700K and an MSI Z270 board.
Having made this move from an i3 540, overclocking was a little more complicated than in the earlier days (OCing the i3 was literally this: turn up FSB, lower QPI link if needed, lower ram clock if needed, turn up voltage, done)
I'm having a little trouble understanding and seeing through the MSI Z270 bios compared to the old DOS based bios and also even more trouble with what the heck this regular and turbo mode are on the i7 (oc wise)
Now I used the OC genie v4 on the mobo, i thought that would be a decent first step, which made a few changes here and there and i did have to create a custom fan curve but it did technically get my CPU to 4.6ghz which is all good and well, but not anything major over the 4.2/4.5 ghz base speed (the latter 4.5, i saw the base settings on the i7 made it so only the first core is 4.5, the rest are 4.4?).
But this in caused some weird thing, where i got lower score on Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (924 stock, 884 OC-d) I did see that it couldn't max out the CPU for some reason, peak clock speed was jumping between 4.28-4.34 which was very weird considering task manager and CPU-Z both show maxed clocks in games, but not in IETU. Now before anyone asks this is 100% not due to thermal throttling since my temps stayed around 65-70°C on a bit more silence focused fan speed curve.
So, what i'm asking for is if anyone has hands on experience for some OC on the MSI bios, I'm looking to get around 4.8ghz for now,

Here are my specs:

Mobo: MSI Z270-A Pro
CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K
RAM: 1x8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 2666mhz
GPU: Gainward GTX 760 SC Edition
Cooler: Cryorig H7*
PSU: Corsair CX600M
Storage:
-Corsair Force LE 240GB SSD
-Samsung HD204UI 2TB HDD
-Samsung HD501LJ 500GB HDD

* If anyone tries to tell me that's insufficient cooling I'll ignore them until i see the results for myself, considering I got my i3 540 to 4.2 GHz from 3.07 GHz on a STOCK intel cooler, and still got temps maxing at 80°C under load

EDIT: According to IETU benchmark online comparison I'm doing very badly with this CPU, other people are reportedly getting around 1100-1300 points with the same Mobo and cpu combo with similar clocks
 
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miggtt699

miggtt699

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Hello!

I honestly think you should give up on the SW overclocking tools and do it from the bios, but do so without using any automatic settings or anything of said nature.

I'm going to share what I'd do, in hopes that it helps you of anything:

I'd start by disabling any enhancements the board may have, any feature that looks fruity to you in the overclocking/CPU tab, turn it off or set it to normal, w/e. Enable load-line calibration, increase the power limit on the VRM to 125% (should be enough) if your board has any of these options.

Then I'd look up the max recommended voltage for 24/7 on a 7700K which seems to be from a quick google search.. 1.35V on air. Then you try and set your memories to their default clocks to prevent any instability and set the multiplier to 48, AVX to 44 and try booting into windows. If your computer doesn't post at all, try 47 multiplier, "wash, rinse and repeat" until you get it to windows and can through Cinebench R15 3 times. If it bluescreens, again, turn the multiplier down.

When you find a multiplier that is stable, you can then start decreasing the voltage (You can do this in software if you want, as its more versatile than having to reboot every time) until you can't run Cinebench R15 anymore and take note of what voltage made it crash, and then you just give it a 125mv to 250mv increase, just to give it some stabilty. If it then crashes again at a later date during a game or what have you, give it more voltage or play with the AVX multiplier.

From there on you can start trying to overclock the memory, messing with the memory voltage and ETC. I'd say if you run a stress test to find out the maximum temperature for your CPU at said clockspeed, don't push it over 80ºC (for 24/7 OC, daily use) to give it some flexibility margins and add longevity to the CPU.

This is as much as I can muster from Z170/Z270 overclocking. I hope this helps you of anything.
 
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AntaresSQ01

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Hey, thanks for the message,
Turned off OC Genie 4 but otherwise I've been doing everything from the bios here is what i managed last night (before your answer)

Got the regular multiplier to 48x,
Voltage is 1.248 base with positive adaptive offset of 0.030
I increased the CPU Current limit from Auto (115 presumably based on XTU (excuse me calling it ITEU in above post)) to 140 since XTU showed Current limit throttling, (I'm a bit unsure about this cos at some places i read that "Current kills CPUs" but at others that it doesn't really matter so just crank it to 256 (Mobo max limit)
As for memory, I enabled XMP and other than that i did nothing to RAM.
I disabled Intel C-States (I really am unsure about all this new tech with the exception of a few obvious ones like "Thermal protection" and "Hyperthreading" :D So if you could get a list of things you turn off in your bios i can have a look of which one of those I have and turn them off too.)
As for AVX I left it with no offset as even then in Realbench it didn't get too hot still around 70C
I put Cache up to 45x for 4.5GHz aswell so its withing 300mhz of the core.
Now other than this I've not done anything apart from fan settings (still a bit on the silent side)
So after all this in XTU I'm still only getting 930 points over 924 on all base clocks and settings, so something is not right still, i would assume that if the current jump (884 -> 930) would apply to the base points that i would be fine with but that's still over a 100 points below the lower end of the average results which is really bothering me...
I did see that this time around XTU did max the CPU at 4.8GHz regularly and there was no current limit throttling or anything of the sort.
 
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miggtt699

miggtt699

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I personally haven't dealt with Z270 or anything newer than X79.

In my view those things you can leave enabled as, when you're not using your computer too hard, it'll save on power and run cooler.

I hope you do indeed get familiar with overclocking on a new platform, I get what you mean, I came from socket 775 myself and this X79 stuff gave me a bit of a homework to do to get my 3960X clocking high, its all too different from the old days. xb
 
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AntaresSQ01

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Alright, Thank you for the help, I'll wait a little longer maybe others have some experiences too, in the meantime I'll experiment too and try to find out why my points are so much lower, I mean, it can't be faulty hardware cos if that's the case i reckon the difference would be more than 20% or so :p
 
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AntaresSQ01

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I doubt the mobo is a limiting factor I know from first hand experience it most often isn't, as long as it can OC and has decent quality it will take you right near those top OCs. If I really wanted to i think i could easily hit 5.1GHz with this hardware combo but the performance is already enough for me I just wanna see what results can a little milking yield. XTU didnt offer comparison for RAM channels but people getting around 1100-1200 points all ran either 8 or 16 gigs and they were generally slower than mine at 2133 and 2400 mhz. I'm a bit unsure about what XMP does but afaik it adjusts RAM speeds to CPU to run at advertised speeds? As for the RAM itself, I made sure that in the price range i was looking at i'm getting the best option for OC and the Crucial Ballistix sport LT has proven itself to be one of the most overclockable in that range with people saying they got timings as low as 11-12-12-39 showing it. As for stress tests I've run about 4hrs of XTU and 2-3 hrs of Intel Burn Test with no signs of instability so i'm all good in that department.
 
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AntaresSQ01

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Okay, tinkering here and there as off current status, seems like RAM has large impact:
5.0GHz @ 1.35V @ 84°C Peak and 74°C Average on a 1hr long Realbench session
RAM set to 3000MHz ("memory try it" on the board did a good job so it's stable as well)
I managet to get: 1054 Points... Massive improvement over the 924 default and 884 "after OC" but still isn't quite there... I'll experiment with RAM timings a bit, since i didn't really touch those and I'll see if i can get to 1100 points at least.
 
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