Hey guys, I'm trying to overclock my 3.4Ghz i7 2600k, and I want to know just how far it can go without significantly shortening the life of it. I've got it at 4.5 GHz right now and with my H100i cooler it's idling at 30c and below. The current vCore is 1.35 I think. Can I safely go any higher, and if so what multiplier and vCore should I use? Thanks in advance
You have a good bit of voltage range, you can go up to 1.45v if you wanted to with that cooler. Idle temps dont matter at all, what you need to check are load temperatures when under 100% load from a program such as Prime95. As long as you stay within voltage and thermal limits the CPU will be fine for a very long time and you will get rid of the computer before the CPU dies on you. I doubt you will get too much higher than 4.5GHz though, 4.5-4.7 seems to be about the average OC range on Intel processors from Sandy Bridge all the way to Haswell. Its good that you are running somewhat low voltage still, that means you might get those extra few hundred MHz before you top out
Alright, I used prime95 a while ago so I'll have to do it again but in games like Far Cry 3 and Planetside 2 I don't even hit 60c
Your CPU is rated to 105c I think, but it will usually get unstable once it gets into the upper 70's and into 80's. Prime puts a much harder load on the processor, so you use it to stress test because it is a worst case scenario load.
Pushing to 4.7 from 4.5 won't give you much of a fps increase. Using prime95 to test under full load = stability test and has nothing to do with your temps in PS2 or FC3.