Overclocking Core i9-9900K is bad idea

Overclocking Core i9-9900K

Intel is not facing a good stage in this year 2018. Along with its problems of its lithography of 10nm the problems of supply of the chips to 14nm are added and later it has been criticized by the data that the company in charge of analyzing its Intel Core i9 -9900K did it for “error”. Now Gigabyte hand Intel has another small front in its 9th generation due to the temperature under overclocking.

The controversy is given by the hand of Gigabyte, where even though most of the analysis websites have NDA, it has been ahead of all by showing a brief overclocking guide to the i9-9900K.

Recall that the i9-9900K is part of the 9th generation of Intel Core processors, which has 8 cores and 16 threads and that for the first time since the 2XXX series these processors will be soldiers being the consumer platform.

Through a PDF, Gigabyte explains how to reach a frequency of 5.3 GHz on its AORUS Z390 Master board, which is the highest-end motherboard available to these new processors.

The configurations that the brand shows are made up of several parameters, some of them of dubious recommendation:

In them we see how they activate the LLC in Turbo mode (to palliate the Vdroop), raise the voltage to 1.3V, set the frequency of all the cores to 5 GHz, raise the cache speed to 4.7 GHz and, above all, disable all the energy saving modes or frequency reduction states while increasing the maximum temperature that the CPU can support up to 110 degrees.

As if this were not enough, we must know that the cooling was a Bitspower loop although no specific components are mentioned, that is, it uses a custom liquid cooling, but we must clarify that Gigabyte specifies that it would be necessary to use it to pass 5 GHz.

It does not detail if it has been used for all tests or only for those that exceed this speed.

The data speaks for itself, saving that Core Temp does not show the real voltage and that the consumption shown is not either, the temperatures are really high for such a slight overclock.

We must start from the basis that the frequency that is able to reach the i9-9900K in all its stock cores is 4.7 GHz, this means that the increase is just 300 Mhz and that the CPU is already very tight. home.

But Gigabyte did not stop there, the guide continues to raise the frequency further. They are slowly going up while passing Prime95 as stress software.

In both captures, it is appreciated not only that the temperature is high, but that the Vdroop they have is brutal, becoming more than one tenth complete under a stress test with AVX.

At 5.3 GHz temperatures are unsustainable even with custom liquid cooling. The voltage has risen to 1,428v and still have Vdroop, although lighter and more manageable.

This means that these new microprocessors demand much more power and that Intel did well to restructure the socket pins and not allow compatibility with the 7 and 6 series of their Core processors in Z370 and Z390.

In addition, Gigabyte recommend using AVX offset, since the vast majority of games do not use these instructions and we can maintain a higher speed with the same voltage, but if AVX is used, the speed would be diminished.