The Edge Up has posted up what must be the most detailed Kaby Lake overclocking guide using ASUS motherboards. Going through what the vCore should be, delidding benefits, types of coolers to reach 5GHz and even speed of RAM.
Conroe, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and anything in between, we’ve overclocked them all. Each had their pros and cons, but the standout architecture in that list was Sandy Bridge. Good samples were capable of achieving stable overclocks of 5GHz on air cooling. It’s a landmark that has proven elusive, until now. Finally, we have a worthy successor: Kaby Lake. Intel’s latest processors make 5GHz overclocks possible with air cooling, and you even can go beyond that. No need for lengthy intros when excitement levels are at fever pitch. Let’s get down to business!
Frequency expectations – i7-7700K
Our R&D dept has tested hundreds of CPUs and found the following frequency ranges are workable for overclocking Kaby Lake i7-7700K CPUs:
- 20% of samples are stable with Handbrake/AVX workloads when running at 5GHz CPU core speeds.
- The AVX offset parameter can be used to clock 80% of CPU samples to 5GHz for light workloads, falling back to 4.8GHz for applications that use AVX code.
- The ASUS Thermal Control Tool has now been ported into UEFI and can be used to configure profiles for light and heavy (non-AVX) workloads to extend CPU core overclocking margins on air and water cooling by up to 300MHz.
- Memory frequency: The best CPU samples can achieve speeds of DDR4-4133 with four DIMMs (ROG Maximus IX series of motherboards needed). DDR4-4266 is possible on the Maximus IX Apex. For mainstream use, we recommend opting for a memory kit rated no faster than DDR4-3600, as all CPUs are capable of achieving such speeds.
CPU power consumption and cooling requirements
One of the questions that always arises when we’re dealing with overclocking, is how much Vcore is safe? Generally, we recommend constraining an overclock to stay below 2 X the stock power consumption of the processor under full load. To work out what that figure is, we can measure the CPU’s power draw via the EPS 12V power line using an oscilloscope and current probe.
To generate workloads, we tested with the brute-force loads of Prime95’s small FFT tests (AVX2 version) and also with ROG Realbench, which uses real-world rendering and encoding tests. Using both “synthetic” and real-world tests allows us to establish voltage recommendations for both scenarios.
Go check it out!
