5GHzwhenoverclocked,so4.8GHzis a good
starting frequency to aim for. Enter a CPU Ratio
multiplier of x48 and a Ring Ratio of x45.
You should be able to use a vcore of 1.3V to
achieve the above overclock, and this should
result in temperatures that are within the
range of most decent air coolers and liquid
coolers. To test this, head back to windows
and use Prime95, CoreTemp and CPU-Z
to monitor your progress. So long as the
temperature remains below 85°C after ten
minutes, you can increase the CPU multiplier
in 100MHz steps. Once you hit the limit on the
CPU and your PC becomes unstable, reduce
the frequency by 100MHz and then start to
reduce the vcore in 0.01V steps, testing in
Prime95 for ten minutes each time.
If progress isn’t going so well, one thing to try
is increasing the power limits in the EFI. These
provide a safety net for how much power the
CPU can draw, but they can hinder overclocking
and it’s fine to max out these as shown. With
all our tweaks made, we eventually settled
on 1.25V at 5GHz, which saw a peak CPU
temperature of 83°C under load.
HOW TO OVERCLOCK INTEL’S
LGA2066 CPUS
LGA2066 CPUs can vary wildy when it comes
to overclocking and part of the reason for
this is that from the 9000-series onwards,
Intel reintroduced soldered heatspreaders.
As a result, these CPUs ran a bit cooler under
load than previous generations, and both
9000-series and 10,000-series CPUs can
usually hit all-core frequencies well over
4GHz. However, overclocking them still needs
some potent cooling.
Once you’ve checked
your baseline performance,
temps and frequencies,
you can jump right into the
EFI and get overclocking.
To start with, set a CPU
multiplier of x41 to give
a CPU frequency of
4100MHz and enter a ring
ratio multiplier of 30. This
is a good starting point and
should be within range
of large air coolers and
liquid cooling.
As with the LGA115x
chips, you’ll need to
increase the power limits too in order to
unleash the full potential of your CPU. Feel free
to max out these as shown, but note they’re
often hidden away in the depths of menus
such as CPU features.
You need far less vcore than with Intel
mainstream CPUs to reach your maximum
overclock and heat will quickly become your
enemy. It’s likely you won’t need more than
1.2V to get there, so start here and work
backwards. Now head back to Windows and
test these settings.
While we’re not using any AVX workloads
to stress-test, if you’ll be encountering them,
you’ll need to make sure there are suitable
offsets in place to reduce CPU frequency in
the EFI. AVX workloads add a huge amountof heat to the CPU and most EFI’s are already
geared up to reduce CPU frequency, but you
may want to fine-tune them to your own
cooling system.
Once you reach the maximum stable CPU
frequency at 1.2V, you should begin to rein in
the voltage in 0.01V intervals. We settled on
1.15V and 4.5GHz with our Core i9-9980XE,
which kept CPU temperatures under load
below 85°C.OTHER WAYS TO OVERCLOCK
INTEL CPUS
Intel has more granularity when it comes to
overclocking and there are several alternative
but slightly more complicated ways you
might consider for overclocking your CPU.
Per-core overclocking allows you to overclock
individual cores. This can allow you to get
the most out of your CPU, as some cores will
overclock further than others. On LGA2066
systems, the best-overclocking cores are
usually identified in the EFI too.
Intel CPUs also benefit from Adaptive and
offset overclocking modes. These allow you
to set peak voltages for your CPU to reach
depending on the load, which can mean your
system consumes less power and runs cooler,
especially at low to medium loads. However,
they can be fiddly to get right and can apply too
much or too little voltage in certain workloads,
which is why for this guide we’ve focused on
manual overclocks.Increasing the power limits can help achieve
better overclocking on Intel chips
Applying per-core overclocking can be the best
way to boost Intel CPU performance