Hey everyone,
 
I'm happy to rejoin the EVGA Motherboard family after an unfortunate jump to ASUS on my previous build. I'm curious what the experience has been overclocking the 8700k on the more mainstream boards in the EVGA lineup. Personally, I'm having a hard time getting a stable overclock higher than 4.9GHz at 1.4 VCORE. The clock is fantastic, however running a voltage that high for 24/7 usage doesn't sit well with me. All this especially since I've seen 5GHz overclocks with voltages that are substantially lower than that from reviewers and people running other motherboards. Are there other settings I can alter to increase stability at a lower voltage, or have I simply lost the silicon lottery? Also, could my decision to run a MATX build be a limiting factor?

I first had a Asus Z370-g and had the same overclock but with like .3 volts more. Now running 5.1 @ 1.35v still need to do some memory overclocking. havent found a good tutorial on how to approach it and what the max 'safe' voltages are for ddr4

mouacyk...

Thanks for the reply! I'll try messing with those settings a bit. I already delid the processor, so temperatures have been pretty great even with the modest overclock that I managed.

mouacyk...

Your input got me to 5.0 like a charm once I had time to get in there and fiddle around with the settings. I'll have to to a little tweaking to get it stable for everyday use, but it looks like my biggest omission the first go 'round was not factoring in the RING timings. Thanks again for your help!

Mouacyk, how are your settings working out so far? Still stable?
Also wanted to ask you what Vdroop setting did you end up using?
Thanks! 

Great, thank you for the update! Seems manual settings are still the way to go. I guess adaptive option is better than nothing, but it does overshoot the voltage quite a bit. That's the problem with all automatic settings - they're just too aggressive. I'm also surprised that with Vdroop off the system doesn't overcompensate for you with crazy high voltages, like some people reported. Maybe it also depends on the chip itself, I dunno... Anyway, please update this thread if you come up with even better settings, I'm sure it'll help a lot of people, as there's just not much info about overclocking on this particular board. 
 
P.S. What bios version are you on right now? I was just looking at your AIDA screens from April and noticed that you were still on 1.02 then. Was that on purpose? I mean sometimes older versions prove to be more stable.

My board came with BIOS 1.02, and I just wanted to try it first.  My approach is don't upgrade it, unless there's a problem I'm trying to fix.  My CPU/RAM overclocks were stable and usable on 1.02.  I am on 1.05 now, just hoping that some of my other gripes with LLC and RTL/IO training might be implemented, but sadly they are not.  Since my oc is still stable, I'll stay on 1.05 now.

I have the same case and looks like the same Noctua cooler . That VID is ridiculously low, good for you, but I guess you get what you pay for. What was your price premium on the chip?

That's not a bad price for a guaranteed 5.1Ghz. I personally pulled a trigger on a 8086K, but haven't delided it yet, so can't report on it's real overclocking performance. I'd be interested in your lowest stable VID @ 5 Ghz, if you get a chance. 

mouacyk
Is there a way to tune RTL/IO's directly on this board?

Unfortunately there isn't, hopefully that can be addressed in a future UEFI update.  It also needs DRAM VTT control.  Such a shame, as it has great DRAM OC compatibility otherwise.

dtrishin

FaisTZ73
I don't have the time to go backwards.  But I will go up some probably. 
 
CPU 51/46  .../ring
Manual 1.330 w/V droop disabled.

51 @ 1.330 will probably give you 50 @ 1.30-1.29, which isn't bad at all. That's what I'm aiming at.
 

Sabishii Hito

mouacyk
Is there a way to tune RTL/IO's directly on this board?

Unfortunately there isn't, hopefully that can be addressed in a future UEFI update.  It also needs DRAM VTT control.  Such a shame, as it has great DRAM OC compatibility otherwise.

Yeah, and better LLC options like other motherboard manufacturers have implemented a long time ago: 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% level or something like that. 

Also higher VDIMM than 2.00v!

dtrishin
Frankly, I doubt we'll see the changes we want for z370, but hopefully with z390!

Yea I paid $125 for this board.  But I had to have a micro ATX board for this case.  I wasn't going to wait around any longer.  Price was right.  Maybe we see 5.5's in a few years.  Not worth trying to prophecy that one.  Just go with it.  See where this board can take us.  All the cut outs and placement of things at right angles made a big difference.  I like what I see. 

Joining the ride..
 
5 Ghz, 46 ring, 1.30 volt +25% drop (means the 8700 is constantly at 1.28 for normal operations and 1.20 under stress).
2 hours Prime95 AVX smallFFT + 2 hours Prime95 NO AVX smallFFT + 1 hour OCCT  stable. (So far) 

mouacyk
Originally started at 1.35v with 5GHz on core and 4.7GHz on Ring.  After stabilizing 5GHz at 1.365v, had to drop Ring to 4.6GHz.  AVX offset left at 0 for now because Realbench, encoding, and compiling are stable.  Eventually, I switched voltage to adaptive 1.315v, which on load goes to 1.336v for non-AVX and 1.384 for AVX.  If you haven't delidded your CPU and temps are limiting you, consider getting it delidded.
 
Over this week, finally got around to stabilizing RAM at 4266MHz-18-18-18-38-2T with 1.45v, 1.25v VSA, and 1.25v VCCIO.  Had been running 3600-15-15-15-1T prior to that with 1.4v, 1.1v VSA, and 1.05v VCCIO.
 

 
With optimized timings for RAM:
 

It's good... i am not able to post over 4133 and i have a very good memory kit...