I5 2500k Overclocking

[jrwizbang]

Hello everyone. I recently bought an i5 2500k and was wondering what a good vcore is for certain clock speeds. I don't really have any idea because I've run AMD machines for my whole life up until now, I figured I'd give intel a go. If someone could give me just a general walk through of intel overclocking or in specific for the 2500k that would be great. Also, I don't know what to over clock it to, if even at all. I do lot's of gaming, lots of music production/recording, some video/photo editing, and 3d design. How much would I really benefit from over clocking seeing as this is already a beast of a processor. Thanks in advance!

-Wizbang

 

[jrwizbang]

Also, I read the 2600k/2500k overclocking guide but there's just too much to read. I just want to know what I need to know, having switched from AMD to Intel.

 

[DJDeCiBeL]

Hello everyone. I recently bought an i5 2500k and was wondering what a good vcore is for certain clock speeds. I don't really have any idea because I've run AMD machines for my whole life up until now, I figured I'd give intel a go. If someone could give me just a general walk through of intel overclocking or in specific for the 2500k that would be great. Also, I don't know what to over clock it to, if even at all. I do lot's of gaming, lots of music production/recording, some video/photo editing, and 3d design. How much would I really benefit from over clocking seeing as this is already a beast of a processor. Thanks in advance!

-Wizbang

Honestly, each chip is different pretty much (for the voltage required to get it to run stable at a certain speed), so there is no exact answer for that. The (very) general rule though, is just trial and error, to see what the lowest possible Vcore to be stable is for you. For me, I can run a Vcore of just 1.22V at (an admittedly modest) 4.1 GHz rock solid stable, but as I said, your mileage might, and quite possibly will, vary. The most you should run for an everyday overclock should be less than 1.4V though, and much over 1.5V will kill the chip in short order.

As far as how to overclock, for the Sandy Bridge processors, it's all about the multiplier and voltage. The Base Clock can't really be messed with much (the most you could ever go would be 105 MHz or so, and depending on your mobo, even that might not be possible).

For what you're doing, overclocking would definitely benefit you, although you shouldn't need to go crazy with it, unless you just want to. If you're still using the stock HSF, I wouldn't recommend going too much further than I have because the stock HSF isn't that great (I hit 86C in Prime95, but it only gets to 74C or so in games and other real world processor intensive things. That's still too warm though, so I'm getting a Cooler Master Hyper-212 Evo soon, and I will definitely OC more then).

 

[jrwizbang]

Best answer selected by jrwizbang.