4770K - much higher o/c without HT enabled

[stampedeadam]

Hi guys, I thought I would share my experience overclocking my 4770k. Hopefully it will be of interest to someone.

Have had this chip for a while now - since late last year and bought a HUGE phanteks cooler for it in the hope it would let me get a good overclock (like this but chrome instead of blue):

Well unfortunately... it didn't turn out that way. The most I could get stable on reasonable voltages was 4.3ghz across all cores with 1:1 uncore ratio. Then bumped my 2133 2T memory to 2200 1T with all other timings as standard. I tried to increase various voltages, higher than I was comfortable with TBH and nothing I did would let me hit 4.4, even putting the memory back to standard etc... so I dialled the voltages back and settled with 4.3ghz. Temps were never a problem - in OCCT with AVX enabled I barely got above 65 degrees. So lots of temp headroom, but the chip just didn't want to go there, regardless of what I did... until yesterday coming back from the pub I had a brainwave... looking at my 8 logical cores on the CPU meter thing and thinking, actually it's very rare that even three of these threads are used (I only play games) and surely it must put a load on the CPU? So I turned it off and just by increasing the multiplier I am now at 4.8ghz at 1.287v core 1.199v cache, 2.05v input voltage and 1.64v memory.

I can see a definite performance increase in the games I play, despite the fact I've gone from 8 threads to 4. Gonna see if I can push the core up just a bit to make 4.9ghz stable.

 

[YouWhat]

Congrats on getting the higher clock speeds.

Most games, the amount of threads won't make much difference as they aren't optimised for them, they are usually optimised for the lowest common denominator eg dual cores, or quad cores so anything that you throw at it after that, will more than likely sit idle, or just perform background tasks.

The extra threads come in handy in more of a production environment be it video editing and rendering, 3d modelling and rendering, photoshop / picture editing etc, these are more streamlined for as many threads as you can throw at it, and the more the better, this is why most people recommend an i5 for gaming machines as they not got the extra threads and are substantially cheaper because of it.

 

[stampedeadam]

Thanks for the reply. Just bumped it to 4.9ghz but the core is now at 1.32v. Uncore multiplier at x45. Temps are getting into the high 70's now so I will leave it at that. Very happy with it won't be bothering with the upgrade I had planned to the 4790k.

I did wonder if I should have just got an i5 4670k but I know they have only got 6mb cache instead of 8mb. Does this make a big difference to games? Suppose I can always switch HT on and lower the clock if I need to at some point.

 

[Master&Puppet]

Yea dropping HT does make clocks higher simply because the power requirements are less with fewer threads.

As for gaming performance i5s are more than powerful enough. Cache will have no noticeable effect on gaming. If you had bought the 4670K there is a huge chance that you wouldn't have made it to 4.9GHz (not that it is necessary though) but at least you have HT if you want it.

 

[RamboOC]

Yea dropping HT does make clocks higher simply because the power requirements are less with fewer threads.

As for gaming performance i5s are more than powerful enough. Cache will have no noticeable effect on gaming. If you had bought the 4670K there is a huge chance that you wouldn't have made it to 4.9GHz (not that it is necessary though) but at least you have HT if you want it.

yes the i7's are usually binned higher than i5's

 

[Kaapstad]

There are games that favour using an i7 and even some that prefer intel hex cores.

Below is an old game bench (Dirt Showdown maxed out @4K) that I ran on an IB-E 4930k. What is interesting is I have scored a lot more fps @4K than the next nearest person in that thread managed @1080p using i5 and i7 quads.

There are a number of other games that like getting run on an i7 in multi GPU setups.

 

[pcgod]

Thanks for posting this here, i was having the exact same trouble, i thought my 4770k was a piece of trash.. i will try this now (Y)