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Trouble overclocking 3930K with Asus P9X79 Pro

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Sep 24, 2011
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Motherboard
ASUS P9X79 PRO
CPU
i7-3930K @ 3.2 GHz
Graphics
GTX 980 TI
Mac
  1. iMac
  2. MacBook Pro
  3. Mac mini
  4. Mac Pro
Classic Mac
  1. iBook
  2. Performa
  3. Power Mac
  4. PowerBook
  5. Quadra
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
I am completely new to overclocking and am trying to achieve a realistic 4.2 or 4.3 stable overclock with the 3930K and Asus P9X79 Pro. For my first attempt, I did the noob thing and left almost everything on Auto and just raised the multiplier. This resulted in some higher than average temps (75-79 C on hottest core) and resulted in me posting here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/hardware-...locking-noob-these-temps-okay.html#post616582

Dschijn was great at calming me down and helping me understand how it all works a bit better. I did more research and I am now manually configuring the CPU VCORE voltage to try and get this cooler. I have given up on getting to 4.3 GHz and am trying to efficiently hit 4.2 GHz. The strange thing is, doing this manually has resulted in a slightly VCORE voltage of 1.350 (auto gave me 1.332). So now I have even higher temps, but possibly a more stable system?

I have attached a picture of my temps while running Prime95 torture test for reference. The first one is about 20 minutes into the test and the other is an hour later. Am I doing something wrong or does this seem correct?
 

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Your temps are very high without a doubt. Are you using water cooling? When over clocking a CPU, especially a power-hungry one like this, you have to use water cooling. I recommend the Corsair H80i for the best performance/cash ratio.
 
First of all, your temps are high. Typically you want to see them in the 40º range for normal/idle operation and no more than mid 70º's for processor intensive tasks. You can tip into the 80º's but crashes might ensue (especially if you're rendering stuff).

Making things worse is that Summer is here, which means higher than normal room temps which will raise the internal temp unless you're running your AC all the time.

OCing is a weird dance between raising voltage, and keeping temps low. I highly recommend a liquid cooling solution...worth it big time. H80 is what I have, if you have the space in your case get an H100.

Adequate case ventilation is a biggie too, make sure you have a good intake/outtake system going and that your case is sitting in a place where it's getting adequate ventilation and not being blocked by stuff.

Usually you want to keep the vCore below 1.4 with 1.5 being an absolute maximum. The lower the better, but you have to get it as high as it will need to be for your system to be stable and not crash all the time.

You might also want to adjust the boot-up voltage which is another setting in your BIOS.

Most of what I know, I learned here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2254410

http://www.gskill.us/forum/showthread.php?t=10512

and

http://archive.benchmarkreviews.com...w&id=834&Itemid=99999999&limit=1&limitstart=3


Not easy stuff to read, but you'll have to man up and spend some time educating yourself.

Getting 4.2 to 4.5 ghz should be achievable, anything more than that is really up to your CPU, cooling system, and how long you expect your machine to live. At some point I was at 4.7ghz on mine, but it was iffy so I scaled back to 4.5 and it seems to be hanging in there.

Good luck!
 
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