Now that the OC Formula is available for sale its time to learn some tricks to using it.
Lets start with an overview of where all the necessary components are.
And some fun new buttons on the edge.
Normal restart is as it sounds normal restart. You will use this one primarily like you normal would use normal restart button.
Hard restart is new and its excellent. Perhaps the nicest feature that has been added this generation. This is for when your restart button wont restart for you and you have caused a bad crash IE. PCH has lost communication to the CPU or you may have noticed on z170 MOCF when you have pushed your mem to the limit and restart wont work. Before you would have to flip off your psu switch. Now you can use the hard restart button.
Safe Boot will be for a situation where you cannot train etc and you dont want to clear cmos and lose your profile you can press the safe boot button a couple times while booting and it will start in safe mode allowing you to go to bios and make changes to your current settings.
Next we will checkout the heatpipe VRM cooler.
Being an OC board ASRock has used a proper VRM cooler featuring fins with plenty of surface area and a thick heat-pipe that extends on to the IO area. For normal benching I dont even use a fan on it in an open environment. On ln2 I would suggest removing the VRM cooler and going bare board. The Cold for the cpu pot is plenty. If you leave it on your session will be very short and very wet.
Underside shot
Overclocking
SkylakeX when you arent worrying about power phases and vrm overheating and you have confidence in your motherboard x299 overclocking is simple. It's heat management. Its no magic that on water cooling using 1.35v you are near the limit of the cpu's thermal capabilities. On ln2 we are using only around .17v more than water. Water you will be lucky to hit 5ghz on a 10 core and on ln2 some can hit 6ghz. This shows you just how much the temperature is the key. So if you want to get the most out of your CPU then you will delid it and use a Liquid Metal TIM such as Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut etc. The temperature savings is around 30c at 1.25vCore on the 10 core.
If you are unaware there are two size dies for skylakeX. LCC is low core count and is 6/8/10 core. HCC is 12/14/16/18 and is almost twice as large. HCC with all that extra surface is running like a completely different cpu than the LCC. That is why you will see some 12 cores are running higher freq overclocks than the 10 cores or lower. All about getting rid of that heat!
Keeping temps in check we are ready to pop into the bios where there are a couple things to keep your eye on.
Benchmark Tweaker you will want to enable. Will do some behind the scene magic to create some extra bandwidth among other things to enhance your benchmarking scores.
Always keep an eye on if have quad channel. Some CPUs are more sensitive than others to things such as System Agent voltage. Also as always IMC's will vary and some cant be pushed as high as others without dropping channels. If you add or remove any memory its best to clear CMOS before trying to boot again.
The FIVR page is where you are going to want input your System Agent voltage Core voltage and Mesh Voltage. There are also SA and VCCIO voltages in the Voltage page as well but setting them in unnecessary Ive yet to touch them at all. Also dont forget you need to set both sets of vdimm.
Normal Conditions water cooled profile
45x CPU 32x Mesh 100bclk 3600mhz mem
2.1vInput 1.2vCore 1.3vMesh +350 System Agent 1.800vDimm
Max safe ranges for water
-2.1 Input voltage set it and forget it
-1.25vCore is about the limit for undelided, and 1.35-1.40 if you opt for a LM tim
-1.40vMesh on the ones ive tested that is around the peak for scaling should be around 34-36x
-+400 System Agent
FAQ What is mesh? Mesh = the new name for cache.
Some information about input voltage. Input voltage can be thought of as the voltage that feeds the other voltages of the CPU. If you just keep raising vcore and vmesh eventually you will require more input voltage or you will cripple your performance. If you test only with a program like prime 95 it wont even fail but the performance will truly be around half if you are too low on input voltage. So you must be careful with what you think may be stable or if buying a pretested chip etc. You should require an efficiently scored benchmark at least to gauge the chips quality.
For example the only difference between these two results is the input voltage
I follow the school of setting 2.1v input and never needing to touch it again on water cooling. You should not experience any issues with 2.1v even up to 1.4vCore and 1.45vMesh.
Liquid nitrogen.
Seems best to set most voltages in the OS. Boot around 2.1 Input and 1.25vCore. If you boot super high voltages you may find that you are dropping cores once in os.
Most benching will be done around -90c to -105c. There seems to be a scaling wall around 1.53 - 1.55vCore on most of the CPUs maybe a thermal limit where voltage doesnt help.
The sweet spot for mem seems to be 3600-3800mhz depending on the bench. X265 and geek seem to like as much as you can manage. All the others you will find even dual channel is giving the same as quad.
Cold bug might hang code 15 let it sit there and heat up and try restart button once you are at proper temp.
KabyX Overclocking -to be continued
BIOS
http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/BIOS/2066/X299%20OC%20Formula(L1.11)ROM.zip
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/X29OCF113.zip
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/X29OCF113A.rar
Tools
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/AFDSetup(v3.0.154.2).rar
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/AsrTCSetup(v4.0.4).rar
Lets start with an overview of where all the necessary components are.
And some fun new buttons on the edge.
Normal restart is as it sounds normal restart. You will use this one primarily like you normal would use normal restart button.
Hard restart is new and its excellent. Perhaps the nicest feature that has been added this generation. This is for when your restart button wont restart for you and you have caused a bad crash IE. PCH has lost communication to the CPU or you may have noticed on z170 MOCF when you have pushed your mem to the limit and restart wont work. Before you would have to flip off your psu switch. Now you can use the hard restart button.
Safe Boot will be for a situation where you cannot train etc and you dont want to clear cmos and lose your profile you can press the safe boot button a couple times while booting and it will start in safe mode allowing you to go to bios and make changes to your current settings.
Next we will checkout the heatpipe VRM cooler.
Being an OC board ASRock has used a proper VRM cooler featuring fins with plenty of surface area and a thick heat-pipe that extends on to the IO area. For normal benching I dont even use a fan on it in an open environment. On ln2 I would suggest removing the VRM cooler and going bare board. The Cold for the cpu pot is plenty. If you leave it on your session will be very short and very wet.
Underside shot
Overclocking
SkylakeX when you arent worrying about power phases and vrm overheating and you have confidence in your motherboard x299 overclocking is simple. It's heat management. Its no magic that on water cooling using 1.35v you are near the limit of the cpu's thermal capabilities. On ln2 we are using only around .17v more than water. Water you will be lucky to hit 5ghz on a 10 core and on ln2 some can hit 6ghz. This shows you just how much the temperature is the key. So if you want to get the most out of your CPU then you will delid it and use a Liquid Metal TIM such as Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut etc. The temperature savings is around 30c at 1.25vCore on the 10 core.
If you are unaware there are two size dies for skylakeX. LCC is low core count and is 6/8/10 core. HCC is 12/14/16/18 and is almost twice as large. HCC with all that extra surface is running like a completely different cpu than the LCC. That is why you will see some 12 cores are running higher freq overclocks than the 10 cores or lower. All about getting rid of that heat!
Keeping temps in check we are ready to pop into the bios where there are a couple things to keep your eye on.
Benchmark Tweaker you will want to enable. Will do some behind the scene magic to create some extra bandwidth among other things to enhance your benchmarking scores.
Always keep an eye on if have quad channel. Some CPUs are more sensitive than others to things such as System Agent voltage. Also as always IMC's will vary and some cant be pushed as high as others without dropping channels. If you add or remove any memory its best to clear CMOS before trying to boot again.
The FIVR page is where you are going to want input your System Agent voltage Core voltage and Mesh Voltage. There are also SA and VCCIO voltages in the Voltage page as well but setting them in unnecessary Ive yet to touch them at all. Also dont forget you need to set both sets of vdimm.
Normal Conditions water cooled profile
45x CPU 32x Mesh 100bclk 3600mhz mem
2.1vInput 1.2vCore 1.3vMesh +350 System Agent 1.800vDimm
Max safe ranges for water
-2.1 Input voltage set it and forget it
-1.25vCore is about the limit for undelided, and 1.35-1.40 if you opt for a LM tim
-1.40vMesh on the ones ive tested that is around the peak for scaling should be around 34-36x
-+400 System Agent
FAQ What is mesh? Mesh = the new name for cache.
Some information about input voltage. Input voltage can be thought of as the voltage that feeds the other voltages of the CPU. If you just keep raising vcore and vmesh eventually you will require more input voltage or you will cripple your performance. If you test only with a program like prime 95 it wont even fail but the performance will truly be around half if you are too low on input voltage. So you must be careful with what you think may be stable or if buying a pretested chip etc. You should require an efficiently scored benchmark at least to gauge the chips quality.
For example the only difference between these two results is the input voltage
I follow the school of setting 2.1v input and never needing to touch it again on water cooling. You should not experience any issues with 2.1v even up to 1.4vCore and 1.45vMesh.
Liquid nitrogen.
Seems best to set most voltages in the OS. Boot around 2.1 Input and 1.25vCore. If you boot super high voltages you may find that you are dropping cores once in os.
Most benching will be done around -90c to -105c. There seems to be a scaling wall around 1.53 - 1.55vCore on most of the CPUs maybe a thermal limit where voltage doesnt help.
The sweet spot for mem seems to be 3600-3800mhz depending on the bench. X265 and geek seem to like as much as you can manage. All the others you will find even dual channel is giving the same as quad.
Cold bug might hang code 15 let it sit there and heat up and try restart button once you are at proper temp.
KabyX Overclocking -to be continued
BIOS
http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/BIOS/2066/X299%20OC%20Formula(L1.11)ROM.zip
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/X29OCF113.zip
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/X29OCF113A.rar
Tools
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/AFDSetup(v3.0.154.2).rar
picx.xfastest.com/nickshih/asrock/AsrTCSetup(v4.0.4).rar
