How to determine if an "OverClock" is stable?

[pastrychef]

I have access to a Corsair cwcH100 from another system that would fit in the case if we really thought it would help more than the Noctua Cooler presently installed. I have been running Prime95 for the last 2 hours (while working on the computer) using a heavy workload that should max the temps and I see a steady mid 80s with a spike to 90 occasionally. Your prompts have also lead me to read more articles about the Prime z370-A board, its VRM and other deep technical information. Now that I have the air cooler straightened out a bit I should back off the voltage. Most articles suggest that the 8700K should run at 1.3Volts. I have the current LLC level set to 5. I could bump that to 6 which should help out the VRMs a bit.

My guess is that your Noctua will perform equally as the H100i or maybe even better. Also, having the fans circulating air around the VRMs can only help. I would not switch.

It sounds like your temps are still within acceptable range. You just need to figure out the right settings to achieve stability.

 

[imikejackson]

I bumped the core voltage back to 1.30 volts and the multiplier to 48 with a 0 AVX offest. Turned on PRime95 and started working (again). I'll let it go all afternoon and see what happens. Interestingly the MB has a setting for "..easily setting a 5.0GHz overclock..." that instantly KP'ed when I booted. I may fiddle with settings here or there but I'll take stability over 200MHz of speed any day.

 

[Mojave84]

Enhanced Multicore Performance Enhanced > Enabled

 

[imikejackson]

@Mojave84 Since I set the BIOS to "Sync all cores" this effectively disables that function but by setting my OC to 48 I basically "get" the same effect as enabling it.

Update: I've now been running prime95 torture test since 11:30AM (14:50 as I post this) and it seems to be stable and passing. No KPs yet. I need to throw the compile stress at it while it runs to just make sure. I have a sneaky suspicion the RAM might not like something. Although the RAM is rated at 3200MHz and all the BIOS settings match the RAM itself.

 

[imikejackson]

Just an update that I let Prime95 Run for 22 hours without any errors. This also involved a compile test in the middle of it and no errors during our compile. The system is sitting at 4.8GHz OC and runs about 80~82C under load (According to Intel Power Gadget).