I’m diving into the world of overclocking with my 13th Gen Intel CPU and was wondering if anyone has experience overclocking the E-Cores and P-Cores specifically for MSFS 2020.
While I’ve found some general overclocking guides for Raptor Lake, I haven’t stumbled upon anything specific to MSFS. Additionally, I’m curious if anyone has insights on whether overclocking E-Cores and P-Cores separately is even beneficial for MSFS.
Here are my specific questions:
Have you found any good overclocking guides specifically for MSFS 2020 and Raptor Lake CPUs?
Do you think overclocking E-Cores and P-Cores separately provides any performance benefits in MSFS?
If so, what approach have you found most effective (e.g., focusing on P-Cores, balanced increase, etc.)?
Are there any specific considerations or risks to be aware of when overclocking for MSFS?
I understand that overclocking can be risky and potentially unstable, so I’m definitely approaching this with caution. However, I’m interested in exploring the potential performance gains for MSFS if done safely and effectively.
Any insights or experiences from the community would be greatly appreciated!
The only immediate advice I could give you is if/when the sim starts to crash, accept that it is your overclocks that are likely doing it, and reduce or remove them entirely to get things stable again.
It’s the only advice you are likely to get in that regard, so don’t waste time looking for an alternative. Just undo the overclock.
I have my 2017 i5 7600k CPU overclocked from 3.8 to 4.6 (okay, not that extreme I know) and have found no problems in running a stable FS20 despite frequent warnings about overclocking and advice to the contrary.
YMMV but I would recommend doing the overclocking in small step ups and then testing the sim/PC for stability. Don’t shoot for the stars immediately would be my advice. Also monitor thermals and ensure you have adequate cooling.
You can go down a deep rabbit hole if you want to. There are several Youtubers that have some overclock examples on Intel. JayzTwoCents is one example.
I tend to try and keep it simple and fast, so I do 10% of the work and probably get 80% of the benefit. I could spend hours tweaking to get another 10-20%, but I don’t feel it’s worth it.
So, I simply do a P-Clock overclock, picking 300 MHz for all-core, set it in BIOS and then run a CPU stress test like Prime95.
For my system, I have an i5-13600K, overclocked from 5.1GHz to 5.4GHz all-core on the P-cores. E-cores are left at stock.
Prioritize overclocking P-cores first, then E-cores. Overclocking E-cores doesn’t have much benefit for MSFS, and pushing them too far can significantly increase power consumption with relatively little performance impact. However, I have noticed the background Fenix app puts a decent load on the E-cores, far more so than the PMDG.
I’d recommend tuning the AC and DC LL first. Simply decreasing AC LL the lowest until stable is effectively undervolting. Depending on the motherboard, tuning DC LL so that VID=Vcore is also good for proper IA power calculations. The default boost behavior for Raptor Lake is already quite aggressive. You wouldn’t go wrong just keeping stock settings to make your life easier. Most average 13900K should be able to easily push 5.6 to 5.7 Ghz using adaptive voltage, and 4.4 Ghz on the E-cores with minimal effort. The Ring can be pushed to at least 4.8 Ghz, if not higher. Avoid going over 5 Ghz for the Ring, as this usually requires a significantly increased Vcore.
You haven’t mentioned RAM, but faster RAM can significantly improve the 1% lows on MSFS due to it being so CPU-limited. A decent 7200 MT/s kit on a 4-DIMM motherboard should be possible, while 8000+ MT/s is doable using a 2-DIMM motherboard (like the Apex). This is obviously outside the scope of your question, but just thought I’d mention it.
It mostly matters on the temperature or how sensitive the program is you’re running. I’m got a 10700 I’ve overclocked to 5 ghz from 3.8. It works great, but I’ve got a good cooling unit. Running MSFS it runs generally the 60’s C. Long as you’re not to hot, it usually doesn’t matter too much.
Like others said, if you get crashes or any instability, cut it down. Heat also kills electronics. Know that by overclocking you’re likely shortening it’s life, but in my situation for example, I won’t cry a lot if I’m forced to upgrade. I can’t really justify a new computer if it’s working, but if it died, I’d figure it out
Last night convinced me not to mess with any OC on this system (B550A-Pro, 5800X3D, DDR4-3600/CL14) except for XMP.
I decided to fool around and switch PBO to manual, then change my curve from negative 30 to 0.
“Memory Overclock Failure. Press F1 to load BIOS defaults.”
Tried negative 10. Nope.
Tried negative 20. Nope.
Tried setting it back to negative 30. Nope.
Scratching my head, because at that point the only thing that had changed was PBO Auto → PBO Manual. All other settings were unchanged.
So I switched PBO back to Auto. Still wouldn’t boot. Now I’m puzzled. Did I fry my RAM? Bust a cap? Anger the AMD Gods?
The only way I could get it to boot properly was to disable XMP and manually set my DRAM frequency to 1066 MHz. That, of course, was not acceptable with my DRAM, which was running fine at 1800 MHz before I decided to be a trunk monkey.
So I downloaded the latest BIOS and used MSI Flash to load it.
Reset my fan curves, enabled XMP-2, turned Virtualization (SVM) OFF.
I did set my CAS timings from 14-15-15-35 down to 14-14-14-34 (where it was running well before.)
Loaded most current chipset drivers.
That’s it. I’m done. No more BIOS mucking about for me. I can’t take the stress…
Ha … I’m a tinkerer too and I’ve been to that same place countless times in the past. I’ve had plenty of heartstopping moments only to later think, ****, why did I do that? The system was actually working okay.
It’s my inner ‘Tim the Toolman’ (TV Series ‘Home Improvement’ reference) messing with me.
I will say that bumping my CAS levels up a little gave me a 14% (7% x 2 channels) improvement in memory latency as measured with Aida64. I haven’t had any stability issues since I first did that a few months ago, and my performance has been pretty good. I can see a capped 90 FPS/ 11.11ms latency as reported in dev mode counter.
