An Update

Because I haven't posted anything in a while, I thought I might as well post an update on what I've been doing.

Since my last post on Haswell memory overclocking, I've learned enough at BIOS modding Fiji GPUs to change some voltage offsets in a modded BIOS for my Sapphire Nitro OC+ Fury. So far, I've managed to break 20k graphics score in Firestrike and get a silver cup on Hwbot in Catzilla 720p by using the modded BIOS. The big benefit of the modded BIOS is the 500 mV overvolt that is placed on the HBM. This allows the HBM to be clocked up to the 600 MHz clock step. I intend on continuing to bench my Fury in the future.

On that note, I would like to talk a bit about the future of this blog/me overclocking. In under a week, school will start up for me again. I will likely go dark for weeks at a time while I deal with sports as well as homework.

Regardless, I'm about out of hardware to bench presently and am currently in the process of acquiring more. Below is a list of things I need/want to get sooner or later:

1. A 240mm AIO
2. A QX9650, LGA 775 mobo and DDR2.
3. A PGA 478 motherboard (I already have DDR1 and a CPU)
4. A platform and CPU good at Futuremark Physics tests and other CPU benchmarks. I don't know what this will be. It could be Ivy-Bridge-E or Ryzen or something else.
??. A new Z97 board and some good DDR3
??. Some older high end Radeon Graphics such as a HD3870 or HD 6970.
999. A Phase Change Cooler.

The phase change cooler will forever be on the bottom of my list since I enjoy overclocking at ambient and the cooler is extremely expensive.

I hope to begin getting some of this hardware soon and I might start bench it whenever I have a holiday.

-DrDominodog51

RAM Overclocking on Haswell

 My pursuit of high benchmark scores has led me to do many strange things to every component on my computer. Since Geekbench 3 is present the 2017 Hwbot Team Cup, the memory in my main (and only) PC  finally became the target of these strange tweaks.

The system being overclocked is as follows:

 -i5 4690k @4.7 GHz 1.425V VCore [Benchmark Stable]
 -Hyper 212 Evo
 -Asrock Z97 Pro4
 -Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 Fury [Stock]
 -One 8 GB stick of Crucial Ballistix Sport 800 MHz 9-9-9-24 1T 1.5V [Micron ICs]
 -One 8 GB stick of Patriot Viper 3 800 MHz 10-10-10-27 2T 1.5V [Unknown ICs]
 -Corsair RM750 PSU

My main computer is rather dusty.

With those parts, I began my quest to overclock my memory. I began by setting my DRAM voltage to 1.65V, changing a setting to make sure the memory was trained upon boot, loosening my timings to 13-13-13-35 1T, and raising the DRAM ratio. Past 1:8, the system couldn't boot with those timings, so decided to keep the memory at 1066 MHz and lower the timings.

I ended up with 11-12-11-27 1T as my final timings. These timings netted me a 14763 Multicore score. I could beat this score now that I've learned how to trick Geekbench 3 into allowing me to run the 64 bit version, but this is good enough for now.

After I was done with Geekbench, I decided to try and see how far I could push the memory frequency. For this, I underclocked my CPU to 3 GHz, as I knew I would probably end up messing with the base clock.

Initially, I began by removing my stick of Crucial memory and overclocking my Viper 3 stick in the first slot. I set the timings to 14-14-14-40 2T and began pushing the frequency. Beyond 1100 MHz, the stick refused to POST.

I, then, replaced the Patriot stick with the Ballistix Sport RAM and began overclocking with the same timings. The Crucial memory only got to 1100 MHz. I raised the System Agent and Digital + Analog I/O voltages by +0.05 this time (The Z97 Pro4 has these voltages as offsets). The stick was then able to boot at 1200 MHz.

The Crucial stick booted at 1200Mhz.

The stick was not able to POST at 1300 MHz, so I began to overclock the base frequency with a 1200 MHz memory clock. I slowly progressed through the BCLK speeds as my motherboard struggled to POST with even the slightest BCLK overclock.

I eventually got my computer to post at 103 BCLK which got the DRAM frequency to 1235 MHz.

I'm sorry about the lack of images of me doing this and the vagueness. I didn't really document what I did all that well, so I'm having to go off my memory. In the future, I'm going to try to document the process better.