Overclocking Help

Hey there Tek-folk. I am going to be building this http://pcpartpicker.com/p/ZqhGt6 In a week.

I am going to be over clocking my 4690k to around 4.4 ghz(If the silicon lottery allows me)  and I was wondering what to use for stability tests. I have seen people Recommend Aida 64. I have also bought 3D mark when it was 80% off on steam.

Are there any other stress tests I should run. Am I missing anything important? 

I'm on a p67 mobo and 2600k with decent overclock.

Here are three programs I used to help with my overclock.

HWMonitor (for temperatures)

CPUz (for voltage, and clock speed measurements)

Prime95 ( for stress testing CPU)

 

Apparently prime95 is not a good stress test for newer CPU's due to some voltage jumps.

Yea I have seen people warning people about using prime 95 on anything new because it ads Voltage to your CPU witch can cause Instability. 

Prime95 is the stress test of choice still despite it showing its age, While Prime95 will increase your voltage if you set it to adaptive in the BIOS, it's not by a huge amount and why would you test an overclock with adaptive voltage anyway? If your CPU passes Prime95 small fft test for 24 hours it is considered to be completely stable by most standards. I  have used it with my 4770k, 4970k, FX-8350, and FX-9590; with varying levels of success.

That said Prime95 is one of the most stressful tests that can be applied to a CPU. As such it makes Haswell based chips really scream; you don't need to use it, I also use Realbench, Intel burn test, Intel tuning utility, superpi, and push graphic benchmarks and high end games and such. I've heard really good things about Aida 64 atleast for Haswell and Asus recommends it. 

Basically for stress tests if you can run them for 30 mins or more at safe temperatures you have a fairly stable overclock. I always use more then one benchmark/stress test as they all use different algorithms to test the CPU so what is "stable" according to one is not always ok. Not checking with multiple tests will translate into normal programs having issues at load, if you don't have a very stable system you will get errors, blue screens, and the like. Almost all of these programs are free, and most of them take up little to no hard drive space so go nuts use them all!

A 4.4Ghz overclock on a 4690k is fairly conservative BTW; shouldn't be a big issue unless you really lose the silicon lottery badly. 

Thank you very much for all the info :D

Yes I am aware that a 4.4 overclock on a 4690k is very conservative. However I would rather have lower temps than the extra 0.4 Ghz that I could get on the chip. I might push it to 4.5 if it's super stable but really I don't think the heat to performance is worth it going beyond that. 

Since you have mentioned Asus. I chose the asus motherboard for it's excellent pricing in my region and all the praise their BIOS have gotten. And the 5-way optimisation in AI-suite looks pretty good. I saw the video that Logan did with JJ from Asus and that pretty much sold me.

However I have gotten some mixed feedback on the Auto-Overclocking that is in AI-Suite. Something about adding too much voltage. Not to the point that it is unstable. Just a little bit more than is necessary...

Do you recommend using AI-Suite for overclocking? And do you think it is a good Idea to overclock the chip using AI-Suite and then just testing the voltage to see if I can get it stable with a little bit lower voltage ??  

Asus's 5 way system is pretty good, It is the best current auto overclocking software there is. That said I have little experience in using it. From what I've read 5 way optimization is quite capable however, I doubt it is able to get the best clocks at the lowest possible voltage. I would however, recommend using it to try and see where your chip falls just as a starting point to get to know what you are working with. As far as extra voltage goes, high input voltages will shorten the lifespan of a CPU; but, thermally speaking as long as you keep below 85-90c at full load that chipset is fine. The cooler you chose is pretty powerful so as long as you keep your core voltage below around 1.25-1.3 you should be safe. My experience has been even with very high overclocks with high voltage the motherboards, graphics cards, PSU, and hard-drives fail before the CPU does.

With all that said I understand why you would want to protect an expensive and useful part. I've just never had a CPU fail before, my systems have all been highly overclocked and all the CPUs still were working fine after the system had been scrapped/sold/tossed. Then again Haswell sucks, so there is that.

OCCT - great stability and stress testing suite - pumps out nice graphs as well. 3dmark especially Vantage (old) will also determine a stable oc. 

& yeah dont let the motherboard auto overclock anything - its a turd and should be avoided. Get to know your cpu and set voltages along with everything else manually.

I  think that I will do it that way. See what the Software gets it to and then do it manually to get it as stable as possible at 4.4 - 4.5 Ghz

But yea thanks for the feedback (: