i5 4690k and general overclocking concerns

BrutalAce

New member
Hello everyone,

My system specs are

Motherboard: MSI Z97-G45 Gaming.
CPU: i5 4690k.
GPU: Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC.
RAM: 8 GB Kingston HyperX Beast @ 1600Mhz.
PSU: OCZ GameXtreme 850 watts.
CPU cooling: Zalman CNPS 10x Quiet.
Case: Cooler Master Storm Sniper.

I mainly use this system for gaming but I am new to overclocking and don't know much about it. Previously I had i5 2500k but I haven't overclocked it much but now I have i5 4690k and would like to try some increase, in fact I actually did but then took it back to stock due to curiosity.

My system runs on performance power profile so the CPU always remains at 3.9 Ghz instead of oscillating between 3.5 and 3.9. Recently I took it 4.2 Ghz from bios (20% OC as shown in OCCT), I did this by increasing the multiplier 1 by 1 to 42 and left everything else on auto because I don't know anything about voltage tweaking and honestly beside VCORE I don't understand all other voltage settings.

Now I have tested the CPU at this overclock in Prime95 (for an hour or so), OCCT for 10 mins and Intel Extreme Tuning Utility for 10 mins (note I tested every multiplier increment) and it ran well without any BSOD or something, I also played several games on it without any crashes.

Temps at 3.9 were (32 Idle, 60 - 64 benchmarking, 45 - 48 gaming).
Temps at 4.2 were (32 Idle, 63 - 67 benchmarking, 45 - 50 gaming).

Now my question is how safe are these temps for prolonged use or if I want to increase it a bit more like 4.4 ? I am asking this because I usually leave my system in idle state with some programs running like Photoshop for long time without turning it off so does that shorten the life of CPU if it runs at higher frequency ? I know idle temps are okay but I just want to be safe.

Also how safe it is to overclock your GPU without touching voltages ? does that also shorten the life of GPU ?

Thank you and sorry if these are noobish questions.
 
Temps are fine but you are better off with taking everything off of auto and setting it manually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBEeXajbG2o&list=UU_SN80_V2GymyCWM2oTYTeg

Basically all the same concepts can be applied. Just with a differnet mobo some things may be called different names and such. Just follow the advice and apply it to your system.

If you really don't know what something does then don't touch it. Ask here first as someone may be able to help guide you in the right direction.


GPU is more or less the same except its easier to do.
At stock everything just use a benchmark like Valley/Heaven and test your rig. After that push the core clock up by 20mhz(can do whatever you like as long as its consistent) and keep going till it fails. After that bump up the voltage by 10mv and just keep doing this until you hit a point you no longer want to go further. Also may want to set up a custom fan profile to be more aggressive to keep the card cooler. If you are only using it for gaming and not benchmarking all the time then don't set its 24/7 OC at the max you can get it. Be more conservitive as GPUs can run into problems faster than a cpu would.
 
Thank you very much for the reply, that video is going to be very helpful. I haven't watched it all but I am doing in parts and writing some notes to digest this stuff.

If I don't understand anything then I'll post a screenshot of my bios so someone can guide me on voltage settings.

Basically I don't want to push it too much and I don't do a lot of benchmarks except for testing stability, for the moment my system does very well at 1080p but I doubt that I might need some overclocking for future demanding games like The Witcher 3 so it's better to learn this now and the fact that I haven't done any overclocking on my old i5 2500k gives me a feeling that I wasted monkey on "K" series CPU.

Thanks for the GPU advice as well, I want to stay safe first so I'll try OC without touching voltage and see how it performs in Valley/Heaven. Is it okay to OC with MSI Afterburner because my card is from Sapphire but I find MSI afterburner more informative than Trixx ?
 
Ya its perfectly fine to use Afterburner over Trixx.

Since you aren't interested in really pushing the hardware to the max just pick a CPU target you want to aim for like say 4Ghz or 4.2Ghz for example. Neither of those clocks are hard to reach and can still be used at pretty low volts(generally speaking).

I should also add that while your GPU might be stable in all benchmarks, some games just won't take the OC at all.. They only like the clocks at stock. So if you have any games like that(for me its World of Tanks, no matter what i do it crashes) just make another profile and use stock settings and just lower the volts a bit.
 
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