I opened the BIOS and looked to see how high I could go. I crept the clock speed up to 3.72 ghz without hiccups, but anything more produced problems. I went into the voltage settings to bump up the cpu voltage and continue to raise the clock speed, but was surprised to find that there was no option to change the VCore voltage. Therefore, I can not safely raise the clock speed past 3.72 ghz, even though my cpu temperatures are around 50 degrees at full stress.
First off, let's go back to basics:
Your i7-3770K runs with a default multiplier of 35 (times the base clock of 100 MHz comes to 3.5 GHz). But with turbo enabled this isn't really important information. What matters is the turbo multiplier it uses. Intel defines the defaults for the 3770K as 39/39/38/37 (for 1/2/3/4 cores active). Unless you get the funky new IB power management working OS X will usually be running with 4 "active" cores 99% of the time, so it's the last number (37) which is important. Thus
a stock 3770K is effectively a 3.7 GHz processor.
Unless you disable EIST in the BIOS, About This Mac will display the default clock (3.5 GHz). But using HWMonitor you can see a pretty graph of what frequency the CPU is actually running at at any point. It will probably idle at 1.6 GHz, and skip up to a few higher values and then to the max configured in the BIOS. Note that the base 100 MHz clock in some boards is often reported as 99.something, and this flows through to the frequency reported once the multiplier is put in. But the same basic theory applies.
Many Gigabyte boards (I presume this includes your GA-Z77-DS3H) overclock the CPU by default, meaning that
at "Auto" settings your CPU will probably be a 3.9 GHz CPU.
With Ivy Bridge the simplest form of overclocking is to simply increase the turbo multiplier. Leave the base 35 multiplier alone, but take the 4 turbo values from Auto to 40, and check it runs smoothly. Take them to 41, and test again. Etc...
As you get higher the average temperature will increase, and after a while tweaking the V[sub]core[/sub] will reduce that. In my systems I set the V[sub]core[/sub] to "Normal" (instead of "Auto") and then change the offset (instead of setting a static V[sub]core[/sub] value). Beyond that you can tweak more settings, but through these simple changes I've had no trouble setting an i7-3770K to 4.5 GHz, an i7-3770 (non-K) to 4.1 GHz, and an i5-3570K to 4.3 GHz. At some point in the future I might get enthused and tweak them further, but getting this far wasn't hard.
I tend to leave all the four multipliers the same. If the system
does manage to shut down a core I don't want it crashing because it's reached a clock speed that hasn't been tested and bedded in.
You
can tweak the system further by increasing the base 100 MHz clock (and in the old days this was the fundamental way of overclocking) but the amount you can increase this is limited. This clock affects the timings used by the PCIe bus, the RAM, and the Z77 chipset itself. For most people the bigger and safer "bang" is achieved by simply increasing the CPU multipliers.
tell ma after if the problem can solved with this. Good luck!
