i5 2500k, overclocking and VCORE

[Labradford]

Hello there, I got myself and i5 2500k and a z77 Extreme4 mobo, 4.4ghz is the farthest I can go without having to adjust anything related to voltage, everything on auto settings. Here's how my BIOS CPU voltage section looks like, just not my actual picture or settings ( http://www.overclock.net/content/type/61/id/1427486/width/500/height/1000/flags/LL ] In short, I can't see my actual voltage core setting unless I monitor it while on load, and I can only give it some small increments or decrements of .005, and 1.384v seems to be my vcore on Auto settings, there's no voltage core options that let's you manually set a value with your keyboard.

Now, I got some questions:
1. I can only hit 4.7ghz if my max vcore is at 1.48ghz, is this normal? I've read people reaching 1.47ghz with the vcore below 1.40ghz. Anything above it and I get BSODs.

2. I can't see my actual vcore, I have to toy around with increments, putting the CPU on load and monitoring it, and it's plain annoying, it lets me increment small amounts from X, but it won't show me the numeric value for X. Could I try overclocking software instead? Having to go to the BIOS every time that I want to change something is annoying, I remember that I used to use Asrock Extreme Tuner for overclocking without having to reset and go to BIOS, but I've heard that overclocking your CPU with software is bad.

3. Is there really a big performance difference from 4.4ghz to 4.7ghz? Am I just better of staying at 4.4ghz and not tweaking anything related to voltage, potentially damaging my stuff?

 

[nikoli707]

some prefer 1.35v max on the core. some prefer 1.40v max on the core. but everyone agrees that 1.50v on the core is dangerous and you better have a killer water cooling setup if you are playing around with voltages that high. me personally with sandy bridge, under 100% load it would be ideal to be near 1.35v while at idle it would be nice to be under 1.40v.

you should use hwmonitor to log your min/max vcore, i prefer to use intel burn test set to extreme for the initial voltage fine tuning, and compare those numbers to the vcore set in the bios. they will be different, this is normal. also turn off all the power saving features like c1e and c3/c6 so that your min voltage doesn't drop while tuning, you can turn them back on later once you know your stable. going back and forth into the bios for small changes is part of overclocking the right way. dont use overclocking software. use prime95 small fft test for 12 hours as a final stability test.

that picture you have shows that you have llc(line load calibration) on at level 4. did you turn that on because you were getting too large a difference between your bios set vcore and the actual load vcore?