Curious about overclocking, looking for safe guidance

User Support Hub Hardware & Peripherals
21

Lol listen to them, don’t oc. I spent the first three months trying to push oc on cpu/ram, turbo/no turbo, gfx oc with a 2080ftw…

In the end and months of trying, all wasted, this game will hardly ever(but still occasionally) crash but it just loves vanilla systems.

And I find if you oc anything at all this game will do its best to melt every freaking component, she runs hot.

Run vanilla, spend your time tweaking graphics and traffic to find what works for you, there WILL be compromise. Always. GLHF.

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22

I’m not sure how my system changes things but somehow both my CPU and GPU are dynamically ovrclocked.

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Can’t say for certain but what you seem to describe is downclocking? Laptops especially will slow a processor down when the load is light so they use less power, batteries last longer, and they don’t generate as much heat. I might be misunderstanding what you mean.

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Thank you all for your responses. I’ve spent some time over the last couple of days looking at various tutorials, particularly with reference to my cpu and gpu, and given the minimal improvements that seem to be achieved I have concluded it’s not worth the time and hassle for me.

@Redeyesjm - Everything is carefully backed up and can be restored, but that’s an excellent point to be careful of. You are correct, my interest in this is mostly for my own learning and tweaking skills but I think it’s a blind alley. However, I have already learned that if I want to try adjusting anything then I should ignore the auto overclocking apps, so that’s good at least!

Kind regards,
Grahame.

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Did you also learn that Windows, your BIOS/UEFI, your GPU driver “package”, all have their own “AUTO clocking” options built in?

Some called, “xxxx TURBO xxxx” or “xxx BOOST xxx” etc. It is always a good idea to familiarize yourself with all the little extras that get installed on your computer. Took me forever to figure out why my new processor was 2.8Ghz but every time I looked in Task Manager it was showing 3.5Ghz. MSI snuck one in on me.

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It’s a slippery slope…

My advice, avoid the “auto-tune” type tools. Especially those that get bundled with a motherboard. None of them are particularly great.

Of the the auto-tune type tools I’ve played with XTU is “ok” but only if you aim for relatively modest clocks.
For anything serious (and also safe) it’s best to dial in your own settings in the bios. - and usually if you websearch your CPU or motherboard and the term “Overclocking” you will generally find plenty of guides for your kit. Check out a couple of different guides before you start though so that you start to get a feel for what you are changing up and what the risks are.

Finally. Not all CPU’s are made equal even of the same model. Some have more OC headroom than others and you may find a point at which your target OC just requires too much voltage.

If the bug bites you then throw out that AIO cooler and start looking at serious cooling :slight_smile:

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Hi Willis.
Yes, there are a lot of choices / stumbling blocks out there! The Nvidia driver comes with the GeForce Experience app, but I have been careful to leave that standard and disable the ‘auto’ enhancement. The Gigabyte mobo and gpu together work well with the Gigabyte ‘App Center’ which also includes an auto OC tool, and that is in the default ‘out of the box’ setting. As mentioned above, I had a try with the MSI afterburner app but the auto scan overclock didn’t work with FS, and the setting were hard to get rid of.

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Thanks for the advice, it is much appreciated. I’ve done a few searches, watched videos and read some lengthy reviews and the general consensus with this cpu (as others have mentioned already) is that any likely gains will be extremely small, so I am going to leave well alone.

My pc’s weakest point for FS is the gpu, but I got lucky with my 3060 and found a new one in stock at MSRP, but that was the best card the retailer actually had available. Just like everywhere else, the really high end cards are practically unobtainable new here in the UK. My 3060 has a small factory OC and is stable, plus it benefits frpm 12GB of RAM, so I am not going to mess with it and it’s enough tp keep me flying very happily.

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The best and only bit of OC I ever did was with one click on my current MSI B550M’s “Memory try it” function. A pair of 8GB G-Skill DDR4-2132 (14-14-14-34) still solid @ 3600MHz on the same base timings.

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What is good about the overclock though is that Windows gets way snappier. I never used a Ryzen computer so I can’t compare, but I’m not sure if clock would make a difference in Windows.

My i5-9600K at 5Ghz was sweet running Windows. Now I have a stock i7-9700K and I’m not that interested in OCing it for now, but the snappiness would be welcomed.

31

First question with overclocking is what type of cooling do you have?

I run a massive Noctua NH-D15 chromax-black to get my 9900k up to 5.2ghz@1.475v

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Really important a good cooler, that’s the very first OC step.

I got its old brother, the Noctua NH-U12P SE2 (double fan) from 2012, running i7 10700K at 4,9 1.210V (temp 73) and at 5.0 at 1,260V (temp 82).

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I have an Aorus extreme RTX3080 and the Aorus tool works just fine. I maxed everything out.

I had CTDs with some older drivers, but non with the newer ones.

34

Loads of responses here already but I will add my 2c from experience.

First of all, you can get better msfs experience with some overclocking but it’s very CPU specific.

When I was running the sim on my old 4790k, I benefited from OC tremendously, I found that 4.8GHz all cores and 4.9GHz two cores was the sweet spot for my CPU and msfs. I never had any issues.

Now I’m on 10980XE and I tried many kinds of OC scenarios with 5GHz all cores constant , 5.2GHz turbo and eventually found that it’s not worth the heat and power consumption as my system was consuming over 800w with the CPU consuming over 400w. I currently tune the speed stepping to remain in the zero bucket most of the time and a maximum 5GHz clock speed when any core is under load. This seem to give me reasonable performance and manageable heat levels. No point running 10980 at 110 degrees, though it works fine with no CTD.

Top reasons for CTD when overclocking:

  1. Not enough voltage for a given clock speed, the solution is to increase the voltage if you can and remove limits if necessary.

  2. Insufficient cooling: this can be the case even with decent water cooler. Your water block might not have sufficiently close contact with your cpu heat spreader or your CPU Crystal might not have good enough thermo exchange with the heat spreader etc.

  3. The application that is crashing is using AVX instruction sets: if this is the case you need to under clock your CPU for avx instructions. As far as I know the msfs doesn’t use them, as it never crashed while I played with overclocking, unlike cinebench .

I normally do my overclocks in the bios, but I’ve used the intel’s XTU as well as gigabytes native app however I found this little utility extremely handy and easy to use. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/%3Famp

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One important point about overvolting - heat load goes up approximately linearly with clock frequency but with the square of the increase in voltage. (Processor power dissipation - Wikipedia) Because of the squared relationship, make too big of an increase and you can generate more heat than some coolers can remove. That can lead to all sorts of other bad things like thermal runaway, cracked chips, etc.

Anyone increasing voltage on CPU, GPU, or memory needs to know what they are doing - and take small steps doing it - since voltage increases can quickly overheat chips. Small increases minimize the risk.

Just a heads-up for anyone thinking they might give overclocking a try. It’s not that hard but know the considerations and dangers. There are damage disclaimers for a reason. Also, if a computer runs too hot/fast, it can start making errors that may corrupt data. There’s tests to verify stability but they might not catch the once in a blue moon data corruption issues that can manifest in many different ways.

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Thank you all again for all the recent replies, lots of interesting views and options. This is clearly a huge topic, and I have begun to read some articles and watch a few videos before I start messing around with clocks and voltages.

I think for any practical experiments I will try these along with my son - he is studying computer science currently and I helped him to build his first pc last year from a variety of very cheap / old parts, so we will use that original machine as a test-bed, and both of us can then pick up some handy knowledge as we go, without breaking anything expensive.

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37

Hi Salem and CodeLoran,

I have a Corsair H100i pro xt 240mm AIO cooler, although I replaced the Corsair fans with ones from be quiet. With this cooler in place, the highest cpu temp I have seen is 60 degrees.

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38

60! Very good temp indeed!

For my OC, The very first thing I did was to keep all stock settings in my bios for my i7 10700K, so no OC, and undervolted the vcore, running Cinebench each time to find the good voltage. I went down to less than 1.150 when the Auto vcore was usually at around 1.350. The PC was running far cooler for the same turbo speed. I saved this profile as “Normal” one.

Then I changed the core multiplier to force all core at 4,8 (it’s 4,7 default) and set vcore to say 1.350 (after checking how high it goes in auto) and then lower it 0,010 until cinebench crashed, then raise 0,010 once and it’s done. Then same thing for 4,9 and 5,0.

They are other important factor in Bios . To give you an idea I can give you below my changes for the 2 OC I stress tested.

Common for OC:
CPU ratio Apply Mode : All Core
CPU Ratio Offset when running AVX: 0
CPU SA Voltage: 1.200
CPU IO Voltage: 1.200
DRAM Voltage: 1.350
Intel C-State: Disabled
CPU LoadLine Calibration Control: 3 ou AUTO = Flat

For OC 4,9GHz Stable (CURRENT, max temp 73):
CPU Ratio: 49
Ring Ratio: 46
CPU Core Voltage 1.210 (1.200 crash)

OR

For OC 5,0 GHz Stable (TESTED, max temp 82):
CPU Ratio: 50
Ring Ratio: 47
CPU Core Voltage 1.260 (1250 crash)

That’s the only changes I made. For now I keep the 4,9Ghz, good enough and cooler. Just don’t use that as-is, each processor are different and I don’t want to be responsible for a cooked one! :crazy_face:

My MB is MSI Z490 MPG Gaming Edge Wifi, so names in Bios can be different in other brand…