Overclocking
Starting out from stock, we’ll see what we can get out i7-8700K up to. By default, the Chip can boost up to 4.7Ghz on a single core. Our memory will start at its XMP rated 3200Mhz.
We’ll first start out with ASUS’s EZ Tuning wizard that can be accessed from the BIOS or via Ai Suite 3 from the desktop.
Answering a few simple questions gets you an estimation of performance gains,
… and accepting them applies them and follows with a reboot.
And we come out of a reboot at 5.15GHz with our ram running at a reduced 2746MHz effective.
This gave us quite the boost from our stock 1439cb score! It did hit the voltage pretty hard, 1.44V is quite high and resulted in some very warm temps even with a high-performance water cooler.
After tweaking the settings a bit, we backed off to 5.1GHz even, lower the voltage a hair, and pushed our ram back up to 3366 MHz which pushed our Cinebench score to 1681, a new best so far for this particular CPU.
We were able to push our CPU to 5.2GHz but couldn’t quite get it 100% stable at a voltage we liked, so we didn’t continue testing it.
