Overclocking
Another day and another predictable Core i7 4770K overclocking session. If you’ve read any of our other recent Z87 motherboard reviews our Core i7 4770K sample only does 4.8GHz stable enough to benchmark. Any higher than that and the voltage increases required to get it to 4.9 or 5 cause the CPU to overheat and throttle lower than 4.8GHz. Of course anyone that knows about Haswell will also know that the overclocking isn’t really limited by your motherboard because most of the VRM is on-die or controlled on-die. Therefore it isn’t at all surprising that the MSI Z87I Gaming AC motherboard easily maxed out our Core i7 4770K chip at 4.8GHz with 1.2975 vcore. There was flexibility in achieving this, you could use a fixed voltage, offset voltage or adaptive voltage and they all worked fine. Mileage may vary between set ups and we do know that most Core i7 4770Ks struggle to go beyond 4.4~ GHz. Our overclocking result would be a best case scenario for most people, but even we struggled to tame the temperatures with a Corsair H100i, as our Core i7 4770K ran into the high 80s and low 90s just from short load scenarios.
I recently cobbled a mini ITX system together for myself with spare parts I had lying about some of which included a Bitfenix Prodigy case, a MSI R9 290 GFX, i5 4670K CPU and an Asus Z87 Gryphon mobo, a reasonably decent gaming build you’ll agree. While everything worked fine (it was a pain in the ass to hide the full length PSU cables) it all ran far too hot for my liking especially the GFX which reached a toasty and cacophonous 92 deg under testing. Needless to say I disassembled it, packed everything away in their boxes again and returned to my tried and tested ATX system. Mini ITX makes sense in a lot of ways especially in the HTPC arena but it’s not everybody’s cuppa tea and definitely not mine, I’m a gamer at heart.
That’s more to do with the R9 290 being a hot card tbh… if you used GTX 780 you’;d get much better temps I think 😛
It is a very hot running card at the best of times made even worse in small enclosures, add that to the fact that my sample used a reference cooler. On an open test bench I recorded temps of ~ 83 deg. The temps could probably be improved a bit with a quality and correctly applied TIM. Don’t get me wrong, I like the mini ITX form factor but they have their limitations.
BTW. I liked the review. Thanks.
I agree the form factor is limited but what you can do with the form factor seems to be improving significantly every year…it wasn’t THAT long ago that we could only get Atom CPUs in the ITX form factor and the only cases that were available were hideous enterprise-style boxes. I think anyone building an ITX system from scratch (and out of their own money 😉 ) is likely to use an Nvidia card GTX 750Ti-GTX 780Ti depending on budget. And thanks, glad you liked it.
I run an i7-4770K, with the MSI Gaming AC Mini itx board and a EVGA GTX 760 w/ACX in a bitfenix. My temps are perfectly fine. I think its the R9 290. I’ve heard they run really hot
Amazing really, especially when you will learn it still has a fully fetched PCIe x16 slot, KillerNIC Gigabit Ethernet, WIFI, USB 3.0 and heck even four SATA 6 Gbps ports. To make things even tastier we pair it with a GeForce GTX 760 GAMING ITX graphics card, and the combo… well it’s just awesome. http://num.to/457-287-619-226