help with overclocking?

hahaha. Thanks Rubius and Erock


Sandy Bridge overclocking is different than OCing of the past. It used to be that Intel was able to push the FSB really high and you overclocked via raising this FSB number.

But wait, let me get back to the basics first:

The system runs off of a clock speed. On your computer, this speed is 100MHz. EVERYTHING on the motherboard is derived from this number. Your processor speed is a multiple of 100 x whatever. Same for the memory and anything else. If you were to change this number to say 101MHz, everything would be overclocked just slightly.

Changing to 101 would not make everything run 1MHz faster, remember that this is the base clock speed. So lets say that hypothetically, your processor's stock speed is 3GHz. This means that your processor has a multiplier of 30 (as 100 x 30 = 3,000MHz aka 3GHz). So if you raise the base clock (referred to hereafter as bclk) to 101, that means you have 101 x 30, which = 3.03GHz.

With Sandy Bridge (the CPU that you have), you should not raise the bclk very much. The system will become highly unstable if you run the bclk too much higher than stock. Whereas former Intel systems were running with a fsb of all the way up to 500MHz, these new ones max out around 105MHz. The way you overclock a SB processor, you raise the Turbo Multiplier instead.

This turbo multiplier may be called a turbo multi, or just a clock multiplier, or something along those lines. It is whatever the motherboard maker decided to call it. What it does is all the same, it raises the turbo speed of your CPU. "K" series CPUs have unlocked multipliers, this allows anywhere up to a 60. So theoretically you could run your CPU at 6GHz if you could cool it enough and push enough voltage through it.

A stock SB can easily overclock really far. You dont need to pump lots of voltage into these, you can hit at least 4.2GHz on stock voltage in 99% of cases. And speaking of voltage, do not run the CPU higher than 1.4v. This will cause damage to your CPU and significantly lower its life span. Even with less voltage, you must cool the CPU properly or risk irreversible damage and lifetime degradation. You should not let your processor get above 85 degrees C when fully loaded, even though the TMax is actually 100.



So to begin, we will go into your bios. Change to advanced view. This is where all the good stuff is.

Look under the AI area, you should see a bunch of stuff for core voltage, memory voltage, and lots of other voltage and current settings. In this area is also clock multiplier and dividers. And a sub-menu for further DRAM Timings and CPU Power States.

In this area, leave everything how it is so far. Move to the next tab over (advanced), you should see an area for the CPU Ratio. This is probably set at auto, or whatever the default is for your CPU. Change the CPU Ratio to 42. Then Save and Reboot.

Load into Windows and run some stress tests. I like Intel Burn Test if you have the latest LinX libraries installed, and Prime95 Small FFT. Make sure you are on Windows 7 SP1, or you will not be stressing your CPU enough to run true stability tests. SP1 allows programs to make use of the AVX instruction sets that let the processor work harder on these programs.

If everything is fine, you can start going higher and higher on speed till something errors out. Once you get an error, try raising your vcore a couple points.

To raise the vcore:
Your motherboard is probably defaulted to offset mode, which is fine. I prefer forced mode though. It is easier for me, although not as power efficient. Set the voltage type to forced, or set, or whatever. Then set the actual voltage to 1.35v Re-run the stability tests.

You can keep raising the voltage and speed as long as you are testing at 100% stability and are under 85 degrees at full load. But do not go above 1.4v. Also, do not set Load Line Calibration to anything higher than 50%. I prefer 25% myself. Too technical as to why you should not do this.



When overclocking, if you crash with a blue screen of death, look at the error code. If it is a code 124 or 101, you need more vcore to remain stable. I used to know a lot more, but I forget them now off the top of my head. 101 and 124 are the ones you should be seeing when OCing the CPU anyway.




If you want to overclock the memory you can. Just ask me to do a write up on that.
EDIT: dont overclock your memory. I know exactly which sticks you have and they are perfectly fine as is. You cant really go looser timings than 9-9-9 anyway, ya sure there is 11-11-11 but why go to that for more speed when you are already at 2133MHz? Just no need.
The important thing is to make sure you are actually running at 2133 speed in the bios. You should check on that. Remember, your voltage is 1.5v, not 1.65 on the RAM. Dont set it to 1.65 unless you talk to me first. This is the absolute max you can go before the memory controller "pops" and dies unless you take other precautions first.

 

How goes the overclocking?


You know, I probably should have made sure you knew what the clear CMOS was and how to do it before we started this...

 

The clear CMOS is a jumper on the motherboard that you change to the other position and then back again 10 seconds later to reset the bios data to default in case of a failed overclock that wont even let you get as far as the bios. These are very rare occurrences now days but its still good to know.