CPU overclocking:
Who says new platform, says adaptation time. Here, in addition to discovering Alder Lake, we will also have to learn how to overclock the memory. As we only received the processors a week before the end of the NDA and as we had to carry out comparative tests first, we did not have the opportunity to take a close look at the OC. That’s why we will come back to it in more details in the coming weeks. A guide will also be prepared.
Protocol:
Before starting, it is necessary to have one or more reference scores with our i9-12900K at stock frequencies, i.e., without having made any modifications except for having activated the XMP profile. It is also very important to have a sheet of paper at hand that will allow you to note down all the tests that you will perform as well as the results or failures. Personally, I have hundreds of sheets of my tests on which I sometimes go back to know how the processor behaved on such motherboard or in such test conditions. My own little bible. For H24 overclocking, you will of course have to take more time to fine-tune the voltage in order to provide it with the minimum necessary but also to adjust each core independently if you want to take advantage of the maximum performance.
Load-Line Calibration:
In the case of Alder Lake, even if Asus advises a Level 4 for overclocking, I opted for a Level 7 in order to have the least vdroop possible. Basically, I want the voltage chosen to be as close as possible to the load voltage. In the tables below, you can see the selected voltage, the effective voltage in idle and finally in load . The readings are made with a multimeter at the PCB of the motherboard. It is very important to know the real voltage brought to the different components but especially to your processor.
Overclocking under watercooling in different stages:
Alder Lake i9-12900K
As usual, I will start the tests by choosing, via the BIOS, a starting frequency applied on the 8 cores of the i9-12900K. I chose a starting frequency of 5000 MHz with a multiplier of 50, a BCLK of 100, a voltage of 1.20 volt and a Level 7. All other options are in AUTO. The idea is then, in the OS, to test the stability on several runs of Cinebench R15 multithread . If it’s stable, I increase the frequency by 100 MHz while rechecking the stability. If the benchmark crashes, I increase the voltage by 0.05 volt steps in order to find a stability allowing to run the benchmark. The objective is to get a “quick” idea of the maximum benchmarkable frequency. It is also very important to have a benchmark score under Cinebench R15 by taking care to note the voltage(vcore), the max temperature during the benchmark, the power consumption and of course, the score obtained. During the benchmark, the Core Temp window is open which has a slight negative impact on the score. Here are our different results.
The limit is around 5.3 GHz on all eight cores. As you can see, it heats up and consumes quite a bit. We go from 4126 to 4376 points, a gain of six percent. We disabled the E-core to see if it made a big difference. In terms of score, yes, since we go from 4376 to 3187 points. Even if the consumption decreases, the temperature hardly changes.
Alder Lake i9-12600K
As you can see, the principle is the same for our i5-12600K. We will follow an identical protocol except that we will start from 4500 MHz with a voltage of 1.15 volt.
The 5100 MHz mark is reached, that is to say 600 MHz of bonus, which is really very interesting. The score goes from 2602 to 2859 points, which is a gain of almost ten percent.
Now let’s see what’s in store for memory overclocking with the arrival of DDR5. If you are a regular visitor to our site, you know that memory optimization is something that requires a lot of time and patience.
