Minimal OC on i7 920

[random667]

I have my new i7 rig set up and started messing with overclocking the CPU.
On the motherboard I disabled turbo, and set the BCLK from 133 MHz to 150 MHz, so I am now running at 3.0ghz
I have not changed any other settings, and I am running the stock cooler.

Everest is showing my cpu temps at around 65° - 68° at idle, which seems kinda high to me.

Are these temps normal, and are there any other settings I should adjust to increase performance without shortening the life of the CPU?

Thanks

 

[foolycooly]

those temps are too high at idle. Before thinking about reseating the heatsink/re-applying the thermal paste (most likely culprit), I would manually change at least your core voltage in the BIOS. If it is set to auto it can overvolt your processor resulting in higher temps. For a 150 BCLK you should be fine to set he vcore at 1.2v. Try this, reboot and recheck. If you are stills seeing temps above 45ish at idle, you'll need to make sure your heatsink is correctly installed.

 

[random667]

Thanks, that did the trick, my idle temps are running at 43 - 49 now.
Any other tweaks you recommend I should make, like QPI or PCI Express speed?
I also have some artic silver paste but I didn't use it since I wasn't planning on overclocking at all when I built this.

Thanks again!

 

[foolycooly]

Thanks, that did the trick, my idle temps are running at 43 - 49 now.
Any other tweaks you recommend I should make, like QPI or PCI Express speed?
I also have some artic silver paste but I didn't use it since I wasn't planning on overclocking at all when I built this.

Thanks again!

those temps are fine for the stock cooler. As mentioned, I would suggest investing in an aftermarket cooler like the xigmatek dark knight:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233029

 

[jay2tall]

I had the same issue when I left the vcore on auto. I think it was just giving it to much juice. 1.2V was fine for me at stock, and 1.3 got me to 4GHZ.

 

[random667]

Thanks, I think I will upgrade the CPU fan, that dark knight looks great.

 

[random667]

I bumped the BCLK up to 166 so I am at 3.33ghz.
This increased the memory speed up to 1333
I had to increase the vcore up to 1.225 to get it stable.

My temps are now at around 50° at idle and around 65° under a heavy load.

EDIT:
I just did a test and my system runs hotter with the default bios settings at 2.66 than it does overclocked to 3.33 due to the vcore being set to auto by default.
So I am now running cooler and faster than stock.

 

[jay2tall]

^
Yeah this seems to be the trend with the i7. If you leave it on auto it gives it more juice than it needs. The stock voltage is 1.2V and runs it MUCH cooler.

I was tweaking with mine last night and tried to set the ratio to 21, it was stable, but ran much much hotter. I am wondering since 21 is technically turbo mode, if it runs something in the CPU harder or something. IF I upped the bus to achieve the same speed it ran cooler but was not stable. I guess I 'll have to live with my 4GHZ Oc rather than 4.2

I was able to set my memory to 1T instead of 2T. Which gave me a few extra points on 3Dmark06. It put me over the 18,000 mark.