TUF GAMING Z490 PLUS MB
10900K
The motherboard is set out of the box to run all cores at 4.9ghz with no time limit which I am happy with.
Obviously being asus all the power levels are quite high as standard with this overclock.
Before I go further, no matter how much I read about LLC I still don't understand it.
What I do know is that I was wrong in thinking that level 1-4 was better than 5-7 when it comes to setting a manual LLC when the cpu is overclocked and this is why I was having a lot of BSODs when I was first tinkering. I thought that I was doing good for getting away with a level 4 LLC (BSOD once every few months). But after some further reading after a planet coaster (game) started crashing and then starting to BSOD (was fine since the undervolt for months in this game before that which is strange) it seems that actually level 5 and 6 are best when you're offsetting the voltage.
I offset the voltage -0.100v
I am not sure if this a good undervolt but touch wood, since I set the LLC to level 5 i have been stable.
CPUZ would shoot to 97C before the undervolt within seconds of a stress test. the cpu does still get into the 90s if I run the test a couple of times but it only shoots up to 86C on the first run. To be honest I just remembered Planet coaster was hitting over 80C before the undervolt and now only reaches 70C on the same park (in the summer time.
I am not sure if it is worth trying to undervolt further at this stage at LLC 5 or just leave it as it is if I was getting BSODs at LLC4 at this undervolt. The CPU still gets hot in the summer months but I have set a temp limit for the cpu in the bios to 80C. In far cry 5 in the summer time the cores will throttle but only for a few seconds down to 4.6ghz and still bounce back to 4.9ghz (they would throttle further if I was to run the game over 144fps. getting a faster exhaust fan would most likely keep the temps from climbing in the summer.