I am aware that significant variations can occur when overclocking and cooling. I am only looking for tendencies among various options rather than exact assured results.
From what I’ve read and watched on overclocking, a 20% frequency increase often seems to be achievable with stock air cooling. Is this congruent with your experience and what you’ve learned?
I’m wondering how much further overclocking can go with the fancier kinds of air cooling and with water cooling.
Provided there is a sufficiently powerful PSU, is cooling the main limiting factor in overclocking? With sufficient cooling, could frequency be doubled in CPUs and GPUs by just increasing the frequency multiplier and voltage?
The ultimate limiting factor is the design on the CPU, but ignoring that, more cooling means a higher overclock by slamming more volts into it. For example, using liquid nitrogen cooling it is possible to run an old 3 GHz Celeron at 8 GHz.
Most home overclockers are concerned about prematurely frying their CPU with too much voltage so cooling isn’t really an issue if you have a high-end air heatsink or water loop. You reach “this is a bad idea” voltages before “this is a bad idea” temperatures.
If I take “20% on stock cooling” to mean running a 3.5 GHz 4690k or something at 4.2 GHz on stock cooling, that sounds possible depending on your CPU’s idiosyncratic quality. With stock cooling you can pretty much overclock to the stock voltage limit. That’s around 4.2 GHz for most of the recent generations of Intel CPUs.
If you want to do this, you should just spend $30 on a non-stock cooler though. Even if the stock cooler works, it’s going to be damn loud.
Not to mention that, for the latest generation of unlocked Intel processors, you don’t even get a stock cooler in the box. I just built a new computer using the i5-600K Skylake processor, and all that comes in the box is the processor itself.
I shelled out about $70 for a Noctua cooler, although the CoolerMaster linked by Jophiel gets great reviews, and probably would have been more than enough for my needs.
If it’s not precisely that, it’s the same brand and general size and price.
I got an old-timey Phenom II X4 955 at 3.2GHz.
For me, that’s a big part of it, combined with unfamiliarity with overclocking. As my PC gets closer to its fifth year and I realize that I’ll have to upgrade for a few applications I quite want, I’m becoming less concerned though.
How do I know that my overclocking is getting close to “this is a bad idea” voltages? I don’t know if this matters but I have a 750W PSU. I don’t know exactly how much power my PC draws right now but it’s not anywhere near 750W.
Given that GPUs are often as or more expensive than CPUs, would it make sense for a gamer to watercool the GPU? Would it too get bottlenecked by voltage before heat so that a good air cooler would make more sense?
How does one safely go beyond the stock voltage limit?
As a point of curiosity, how high could a water-cooled 3.5 GHz 4690k routinely run at if it weren’t for voltage?
I don’t know the headroom on an X4 955, but I’m sure it’s 4 GHz or more.
People figure out the voltage limits from the product spec sheets and learning from other’s misfortune. For example, AMD says the max recommended voltage for your CPU is 1.425v. You’ll see a voltage setting in the CPU configuration section of your BIOS or with a program like CPU-z.
Another important aspect for voltage is power delivery to the CPU via the motherboard. MOSFETs regulate the power that is delivered to your CPU. If too much power runs through those, they can heat up and fail. That’s mostly only a problem on the cheap motherboards in OEM machines or the budget (sub-$100) range.
Reaching the highest safe voltage is usually a tedious process of overclocking a slightly, loading into Windows, and running a stress test benchmark. If everything is stable, you increase the overclock and try again. If it crashes, you increase a voltage a little bit and test it again. At some voltage increase the temperate will rocket way up as the amount of heat being produced overwhelms the ability of your cooler to extract it. That’s when you need something stronger or give up.
An H60 is a low-end cooler. It’s flaw is the weak fan and sparse radiator that prevent it from dumping heat out of its system. The water warms up and then its ability to extract heat from the CPU is compromised.
hwbot.org is a great site for overclock information, since it’s kind of the record repository. The current record for a 4690k on water is 5.5 GHz. He or she used 1.64s, which is way above what most people are comfortable with.
GPU overclocking has a number of issues that are keeping it down. The main problem being that for the money that you’d spend on the equipment to overclock, you could just buy a faster GPU to begin with and do even better than if you had overclocked. Also, since you need to work within the space limitations of PCIe slots, you’re forced to use a custom water loop. Those basically start at $300.
I don’t know your situation, but personally, I wouldn’t sink any more money in a X4 955 system.
The same thing happened with me when I built my new rig a couple of weeks ago (OMG I love it it is so damn sexy!). I bought the linked cooler and it is perfectly fine for all of my needs.
Corsair cooler stock fans are pretty unimpressive to begin with: loud and weak. I have an H75 but immediately tossed the stock fans into the spare parts bin and used Cougar Vortex fans.
Overclock and multiple core CPUs: Let’s say I get an Intel 4GHz 4 cores CPU, would it make sense to set core1 to 5GHz, core2 to 4.5GHz, core3 to 4GHz and core4 to 3.5GHz?
My thinking is that core1 is always used so it make sense to overclock it the most. core2 is often used but not quite as much as core1 and so on. That way, the most used cores get the highest frequencies while not using up as much voltage or heat dissipation on the less-used cores.
How often to the 3rd & 4th or 5th & 6th cores or the 7th & 8th cores get used for someone who does the usual computer stuff + gaming + messing about with Blender? Some of the CPU benchmarks I’ve seen showed very little gain beyond 2 cores.
Is it even possible to set per-core overclocking like that? I’ve never heard of it. Just set a moderate overclock, test for stability, and be happy with it.
As for the OP, water cooling hasn’t really been better than air cooling for years now. Heatpipe air cooler designs are very efficient. Water cooling is quiter, but more complex and expensive. But unless you want to really tinker around for the sake of it, air cooling is fine - just confirm your case is wide enough if you get a really tall heatpipe style cooler. Self-contained CPU water cooling loops are simpler, but I’ve never used one personally. Definitely pricier for a decent setup.
Don’t worry about doing aftermarket cooling for a video card. Just get one of the higher end cooling units. There are dozens of models of every type of video card that distinguish themselves by things like the cooler setup - there are plenty of good designs.
As i said above, i put a Noctua NH-D14 in the computer i just built. It keeps my CPU at around 25[sup]o[/sup]C at idle, and i literally can’t hear a thing. My Fractal case probably helps with soundproofing, but even with the sides off, the Noctua is incredibly quiet.
I may have misunderstood what this guy says at 11 to 12 minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CHs5_TdpXE
Now that I’ve rewatched it, he seems to say that it’s possible to tell the CPU to go to say, 5GHz when only using 1 core, 4.8GHz when using 2 cores, 4.5GHz when using 3 cores etc. Which does mean that it’s possible to push particular cores quite high while reducing the chances of overvolting and overheating (I think).
Definitely not.
Are there any air cooling units that use copper from the chip all the way to the outside of the case?
