Overclocking the i7-4710HQ on a G751JY and issues

[Edweird]

WARNING! Image Heavy!

Hey, everyone.

I recently purchased this beauty of a machine - a G751JY. (i7-4710HQ, GTX980M, 8GB DDR3L, BIOS 205)
After rummaging around the forums and with you guys' help (thanks to ASUS Support as well) I have managed (for now) to get some extra juice out of the already almost unnecessarily powerful 980M using GPU Tweak for Graphics Cards with the 344.75 drivers.

Yay! This is just the +135Hz standard overclock and the memory running at 6000MHz effective. I haven't seen if it would go up but from what I've seen I should be able to hit 6400MHz no problem.



So that being done, I think it's appropriate to talk about the CPU...
Especially considering that I can imagine a fair few circumstances where the CPU would hold down this beastly GPU.

So, what does HWINFO86 tell my uneducated mind about this processor:



Okay, so I did some basic research and from I understand, this information tells us that this CPU can take 2 extra frequency multipliers - so technically, I should be able to get a free 200MHz overclock! That is significant on a mobile machine with the thermal headroom and the G751 is definitely that.

Okay, so I loaded up Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and noticed that the clock multiplier can be pulled up but only by a factor of 1...huh. Okay so our new multis are 36-35-34-34 and a cache multiplier of 36. (Worth noting that I'm a complete noob when it comes to overclocking.)

So I applied the settings and ran a benchmark to see what would happen.



Odd... the CPU hit 3.4GHz only once for a split second. I determined that, obviously, XTU stresses all 4 cores for this benchmark.
Looking down we can see something more odd - the CPU is being starved for current by XTU! I guess this is how XTU stresses the chip? I truly have no clue. However, my non-OC brain thinks that XTU does this to determine how effective the CPU is at blasting calculations when deprived of "food", which WOULD explain the lower clocks.

Moving on - I loaded up ThrottleStop because of its simple and effective threaded benchmark so that I could test individual cores.



This time, there is no throttling of any kind. We see that a single threaded test mostly works the CPU to about 3.4GHz, rarely peaking to 3.5GHz. XTU reports only 1 core being active. This is very odd. So we've set the multiplier to 36 for 1 core, the CPU has enough current but it barely makes 3.5GHz? Throughout my testing I have never seen this CPU go above 3.5GHz.

Next, 2 threads.



Hmm...same results. The CPU peaked at just over 3.5GHz - but this is expected as our 2-core multiplier is set to 35. But it rarely reached that speed. XTU jumped between 1 and 2 cores.

A solid 3.4GHz for 4 threads for a multiplier of 34 for 4 cores active.



Okay, so let's look at the benchmark results.
Again, we can see here that XTU starves the CPU of current and the CPU struggles to keep up at 3.1GHz.



The result:



No idea how this stacks up.

Now with the tweaked multipliers:



Throttling again, but this time it's a steady 3.3GHz.

Results:



...What? Same results? What's happening?

This is where I am stuck. First, as I understand it, the CPU should be able to do 3.7GHz. Second, it doesn't even do 3.6GHz through XTU. This is where I'm hoping some OC savvy people will jump in. Do I need to tweak something else to get an actual overclock out of this CPU? Could it be that ASUS has changed how the CPU behaves and limited the multipliers through the 205 BIOS release? And I'm not liking the dips on that blue curve down in the left corner...

Any and all feedback on the process and any discussion is welcomed and encouraged!

[taylor8335]

any good articles on ocing on my new g751 machine, i am very new to overclocking? thanks

[Mr__Matt_Eastwo]

Hey guys! After OCing, my G751JY's CPU peaks at around 82° in The Witcher 3 and Intel Burn Test. Average temp seems to be somewhere between 75 and 80 while gaming.

In your experience, is it ok if I keep my OC setting, seeing that the peak temperatures don't seem to go past 82°C?

Also, it's winter right now (I live in Montreal)... In a hot summer with 35°C and high humidity, in your experience, does the CPU temp go up significantly as opposed to colder seasons?

[Edweird]

Mr. Matt Eastwood wrote:
Hey guys! After OCing, my G751JY's CPU peaks at around 82° in The Witcher 3 and Intel Burn Test. Average temp seems to be somewhere between 75 and 80 while gaming.

In your experience, is it ok if I keep my OC setting, seeing that the peak temperatures don't seem to go past 82°C?

Also, it's winter right now (I live in Montreal)... In a hot summer with 35°C and high humidity, in your experience, does the CPU temp go up significantly as opposed to colder seasons?

Absolutely fine, I have no idea how you get 82. Mine hit 90 with Witcher. I'd say anything between 85-90 is fine for extended gaming sessions. My G751JY is almost 3 years old now and I run it hot at near those temps every other day for hours so...do the math. Summer WILL increase your temps, but just by a few degrees. Biggest difference I've seen is maybe 5 degrees. What OC have you done? I can still only get 0.1GHz out of it with XTU.

P.S Generally not a great idea to necro a 1.5 year old thread. 🙂

[Mr__Matt_Eastwo]

Awesome, thanks! Yeah, that is exactly the same OC I did/was allowed to do. I undervolted core and cache to -0.050 V and set the multipliers and cache ratio to the allowed max.

I bought the laptop used a month or so ago and first thing I did, I brought it to a repair shop to have all dust cleaned out. They said there wasn't much in it, but I figured, might as well 🙂

I will spend a few days playing various games, then if it's stable (which I fully expect), I'll undervolt some more. Thanks for the info!

P.S.: hehe, cool, I'll remember that 🙂

[Edweird]

Mr. Matt Eastwood wrote:
Awesome, thanks! Yeah, that is exactly the same OC I did/was allowed to do. I undervolted core and cache to -0.050 V and set the multipliers and cache ratio to the allowed max.

I bought the laptop used a month or so ago and first thing I did, I brought it to a repair shop to have all dust cleaned out. They said there wasn't much in it, but I figured, might as well 🙂

I will spend a few days playing various games, then if it's stable (which I fully expect), I'll undervolt some more. Thanks for the info!

P.S.: hehe, cool, I'll remember that 🙂

-50 is what I use as well, has been stable for half an year with no crashes. It crashes like...once every 2 weeks at around -80.
The thermal design is quite interesting, it definitely does not collect as much dust as you might think.

[Mr__Matt_Eastwo]

Yeah, I read up a bit on it when I bought this laptop, pretty sophisticated cooling! I expect I'll be happy with this machine for a few more years to come.

[Edweird]

Huh...I've been running Prime95 for half an hour and have never gone above 72 degrees. The fan is going at 2600RPM at this temp.

This is on the Blend setting, though. The heat one gets it to about 80 degrees - it hits 3000RPM there.

This is with a -50mV undervolt.

[NitroX]

Strangely, you have the best temps I've heard until now. What model do you say you have ?

[Edweird]

G751JY-T7065D.
It's marketed for Romania/Bulgaria.
Came stock with 205 BIOS.
Also, it only hit that 80 degrees for a couple of seconds and only on 2 cores. Before that number appeared it was running at ~2600RPM.

Here's a shot of it running Prime95 Blend. This is before the -50mV.
If you look closely, core number 3 and the cache actually hit 3.6Ghz!

[Edweird]

Update: For some reason my High Performance plan had minimum CPU state set to 5%. Setting this to 100% allowed all 4 cores and cache to hit 3.6GHz but it wouldn't do it freely like it does with 3.5GHz. This was using things like Prime95. A 45-minute session of Planetside 2 showed me being capped by CPU but none of the cores reached 3.6GHz in that time. GPU is set at 1261MHz and 6GHz memory clock.

CPU was at 72 max, GPU was at 71 max. Average FPS was ~60.