Just recently started my attempt at overclocking my CPU (i7-8700k), after 2 years of ownership. I was able to overclock my GPU fairly successfully without any artifacts in the Kombuster stress test as well (Geforce RTX 2080).
For some context, I recently had the time to dedicate some time to the game “Gears 5”. I originally played on a “hand-me down” Ultrawide 1600p monitor at, what seemed at the time, a locked “smooth” 60 fps. I was also playing on controller as well at the time so it was of no issue to me. Admittedly, it took me a while to realize that all the “twitch-pros” were playing their intense matches at ~144fps/hz.
However I have recently upgraded to a g-sync compatible monitor running at 1080p capable of 240hz. This has caused me to fine-tune my build as much as possible, i.e. what was mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. However, my i7-8700k seems to get EXTREMELY hot under certain stress tests. As I recall, my build would crash under stress tests like Prime95 with stock clock speeds, this was at the time in which I first purchased the processor and motherboard. Wasn’t even aware of the High-performance setting in Windows at the time either for turbo speeds so it was running at the range of 3.7-4.7. Cooling at the time wasn’t bad either, it was a corsair water cooler, but even then it would overheat and cause my build to BSOD to prevent overheating. Since then, I ditched the water cooler and got a Noctua tower cooler since the water cooling system seemed ineffective and also provided a weird radiator noise. However, this processor has NEVER played nicely with any cooler i throw on top of it. It always seems to ramp up the fan speed by itself under idle conditions and never seemed to sit below the 35 degree mark when idle.
Back to my overclocking question, I was able to get it to overclock to 4.8 Ghz @ 1.315 V. XMP is also enabled in the motherboard, c-states are disabled, and all of the rest of the accompanying junk is disabled in order to ensure that my processor is running at a locked speed. I tested this overclock using Cinebench. Cinebench seemed like the right stress test to run since every other frequency crashed immediately due to overheating issues and it provided me a “quick” way to determine whether or not the processor can actually perform at its speed and voltage. I was also able to run OCCT for quite a substantial amount of time, other frequencies/voltages would crash with that as well, but I didn’t run it for an overnight run. However there was a large amount of errors in the program, but from what I read from other users, that seems negligible. Definitely could run OCCT overnight, and I plan to. Temps on Cinebench were pushing the 95 degree mark, and around 80 degrees on OCCT. However, I found Intel’s Processor Diagnostic Testing (IPDT) software, quite interesting. My processor was able to pass the test within 5 minutes or so. I wasn’t expecting it to pass at all given the issues I have had with it even before overclocking. Given the processor’s cooling issues, what are some stress tests that I can run in order to ensure stability? Is what I’ve done enough to ensure stability? What are other tests that I can run that don’t require aspects like: “PRIME95 FOR A MONTH STRAIGHT”? (yes, that is exaggeration). Don’t get me wrong, it’d be cool to run prime95 for 24 hours, but the amount of load,temperature, and time is unreasonable for my needs of cpu processing power. I’m just a college student looking for some overclocked gaming when I have the time.
Is my overclock successful?
Max stress test times/loops so far based on my own judgement of time, performance, and temperature (keep in mind that my processor and its cooling is “janky” in of itself, so I didn’t want to fry anything):
Cinebench: 15 minutes
OCCT: 1 hour
IPDT: 1 loop with all passes (just installed this program, I know you can indefinitely loop it lol)
PCMark10(extended): Score of 8,536
Edit: Gears 5 Benchmark on Ultra settings: 130.5fps avg, 273 cpu rendering fps
Multiplayer matches also run extremely smooth at a g-sync range of 160-200fps
