Can you over-clock RAM with a non K CPU on a Zxx mobo?

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smilingcrow
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Can you over-clock RAM with a non K CPU on a Zxx mobo?

Post by smilingcrow » Mon Dec 08, 2014 3:41 pm

Intel’s byzantine market segmentation has me confused.
I have a Z77 ITX board and have ordered an i5-3470 as an upgrade and am also thinking of finally moving beyond 8GB.
Is it possible on a Z77 board to run RAM at higher than 1600 which is what the i5 is rated for?

Also it seems as if you can over-clock Ivy Bridge non-K by a 4 bins which equates to 4GHz which is a nice bonus on a £75 CPU. :)

Silencer56
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Re: Can you over-clock RAM with a non K CPU on a Zxx mobo?

Post by Silencer56 » Fri Mar 27, 2015 12:03 am

smilingcrow wrote:Intel’s byzantine market segmentation has me confused.
I have a Z77 ITX board and have ordered an i5-3470 as an upgrade and am also thinking of finally moving beyond 8GB.
Is it possible on a Z77 board to run RAM at higher than 1600 which is what the i5 is rated for?

Also it seems as if you can over-clock Ivy Bridge non-K by a 4 bins which equates to 4GHz which is a nice bonus on a £75 CPU. :)
Using Google can't be that hard...

Image
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kNWMfAaVj0

Yes, you can overclock any RAM outside of the manufacturer's specification. This will, however, only affect benchmarks. Unless you change the timing as well, you will have no noticeable effect on real speed, aside of crashes if your RAM is low quality.

Generally, taking an Ivy Bridge is not much cheaper than a recent Haswell while being significantly less energy efficient. If you don't care for that, well, take an even older K-series Intel CPU and just OC the hell out of it. But overclocking in general has nothing to do with silent PCs.

washu
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Re: Can you over-clock RAM with a non K CPU on a Zxx mobo?

Post by washu » Fri Mar 27, 2015 5:50 am

smilingcrow wrote: Also it seems as if you can over-clock Ivy Bridge non-K by a 4 bins which equates to 4GHz which is a nice bonus on a £75 CPU. :)
You won't get 4 GHz on all cores. Yes you can add 4 bins, but only to the existing per-core limits. On your i5-3470 you can only hit 4 GHz with 1 or 2 cores active. With three cores you will drop to 3.9 and with 4 cores to 3.8 GHz.

mczak
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Re: Can you over-clock RAM with a non K CPU on a Zxx mobo?

Post by mczak » Thu Apr 09, 2015 7:00 pm

I would disagree that Haswell is a lot more energy efficient. Yes somewhat but not that much. Though if you have an app making use of AVX2 that would probably help there... On the downside, you don't get the free 4 turbo bins any more with non-k cpus, so overclocking is out. (Certainly though getting Ivy Bridge just because of that would be silly, but of course the OP already has the board.)
I always thought the 4 free bins were just perfect - for some "normal" use case you don't really want to go higher anyway as that compromises power draw / efficiency completely due to the required voltage increase. They were not available on i3 and lower though neither (as these lack turbo).
I also agree it's not worth bothering with memory overclock - dual channel ddr3-1600 is really all you need, even going lower (or even going single channel) doesn't make all that much of a difference. Unless you're using the IGP, which may benefit from even higher memory speeds.

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