[Solved] How to overclock in High Sierra

[Mo Facta]

Hi all,

So I have a successful build with this hardware:

i7-8700 (non-K)
Gigabyte AORUS Gaming 5
32 GB DDR4-3000
EVGA GTX 1050 SCC 2GB
Samsung EVO 960 512GB M.2 (system)

Everything works except the on-board WIFI, but I know there is no support for it yet. No biggie.

HWMonitor reports an obvious Speed Stepping on the CPU frequency, despite my manual setting of the CPU frequency and vCore in the BIOS and despite Speed Step being disabled. The system seems a bit sluggish, TBH. When things get going its fine but the CPU seems to ramp up a bit slow.

Basically, I just want to get this CPU to run at a constant 4.2GHz on this machine and have it be a bit snappier. It is for audio production so I don't need it to scream, I just want to to work at its max turbo frequency all the time.

It looks to me like MacOS is ignoring the BIOS overclock settings. How do I fix this? Help would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Cheers

 

[P1LGRIM]

i7-8700 (non-K)

Intel's answer.

 

[Mo Facta]

Intel's answer.

Thanks @P1LGRIM. I realise this is a non-K version and you can't overclock it. So my wording was probably wrong. Apologies.

Intels non-K processors usually had "limited overclocking" facilities in that you could at least get them to max turbo (sometimes over max turbo, like in my i7-3770 @ 4.2GHz) by manually tweaking the multiplier, vCore and BCLK in the BIOS.

Are you telling me that this feature has been disabled in later gen processors? In which case, it's fine. I don't mind.

The main issue I have here is that with HWMonitor I'm seeing idle CPU frequencies of around 1GHz, sometimes lower. The multiplier stays at 10x until there is load and then it ramps up to over 4GHz, which is cool, but the system seems sluggish when you first click on items/applications and then seems to speed up. So maybe my power management is incorrect?

Could you give me some pointers on correct power management of the i7-8700? It is also showing up as an Unknown processor in About This Mac.

Cheers

 

[P1LGRIM]

Could you give me some pointers on correct power management of the i7-8700?

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/macos-native-cpu-igpu-power-management.222982/

 

[Mo Facta]

Just wanted to update on this.

The reason why I posted this in the first place was because I was getting stuttering and micro lags when opening apps and windows like the Finder, etc. I thought it was a power management problem but it turned out it wasn't.

The problem turned out to be the NVIDIA web drivers I was using. So I used the patch script in this post:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...3-with-nvidia-card.244466/page-2#post-1692575

Fixed the problem completely. Thanks for all the help and kudos to this great community!

Cheers