Monday, January 24th 2022
Intel Not Happy About BCLK Overclocking of 12th Gen CPUs, Warns of Damage
You may, or may not have noticed that in certain parts of the interweb, groups of people that are generally referred to as "Overclockers" have managed to get their cheap Celeron G6900's and Core i3-12100's to run at much higher clock speeds than Intel intended and now the company is unhappy about it, as they're anticipating that they're going to lose sales of more expensive CPUs. As such, Intel has issued a warning via Tom's Hardware
"Intel's 12th Gen non-K processors were not designed for overclocking. Intel does not warranty the operation of processors beyond their specifications. Altering clock frequency or voltage may damage or reduce the useful life of the processor and other system components, and may reduce system stability and performance."
Jokes aside, the lower end SKU's of Intel's 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs seem to be phenomenal overclockers, if you have the right motherboards. If the motherboard doesn't have an external clock gen, plus support for adjusting the BCLK on non-K CPUs, then you're not going to have much luck. This means, at least at the moment, that you're looking at fairly pricey Z690 motherboard, although there are rumors that we can expect the odd B660 motherboard that will get an external clock gen, with at least three models already reported to have BCLK adjustment support via beta UEFI updates. Pro Overclockers have already managed to hit speeds in excess of 5.3 GHz with the Celeron G6900 and that is only by adjusting the BCLK and the Voltage, which is no mean feat, as the CPU has fixed clock speed of 3.4 GHz, which makes this a 57 percent boost in clock speed. Intel is said to be looking into this unintended ability to overclock these CPU SKUs and is apparently looking at locking down this ability with a new microcode update in a future UEFI release.
Update: Added a screenshot from TPU's upcoming Core i3-12100F review, showing 5.2 GHz at 130 MHz BCLK.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
"Intel's 12th Gen non-K processors were not designed for overclocking. Intel does not warranty the operation of processors beyond their specifications. Altering clock frequency or voltage may damage or reduce the useful life of the processor and other system components, and may reduce system stability and performance."
Jokes aside, the lower end SKU's of Intel's 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs seem to be phenomenal overclockers, if you have the right motherboards. If the motherboard doesn't have an external clock gen, plus support for adjusting the BCLK on non-K CPUs, then you're not going to have much luck. This means, at least at the moment, that you're looking at fairly pricey Z690 motherboard, although there are rumors that we can expect the odd B660 motherboard that will get an external clock gen, with at least three models already reported to have BCLK adjustment support via beta UEFI updates. Pro Overclockers have already managed to hit speeds in excess of 5.3 GHz with the Celeron G6900 and that is only by adjusting the BCLK and the Voltage, which is no mean feat, as the CPU has fixed clock speed of 3.4 GHz, which makes this a 57 percent boost in clock speed. Intel is said to be looking into this unintended ability to overclock these CPU SKUs and is apparently looking at locking down this ability with a new microcode update in a future UEFI release.
Update: Added a screenshot from TPU's upcoming Core i3-12100F review, showing 5.2 GHz at 130 MHz BCLK.
139 Comments on Intel Not Happy About BCLK Overclocking of 12th Gen CPUs, Warns of Damage
RAM, PCIe, NVMe, SATA, USB and most other things that do run in sync with BCLK do need to be able to deal with increased frequencies somehow. 1-2% change might not cause many disruptions but beyond that it gets increasingly more crapshoot. And no, the problems you get may not be simple or obvious :D
Back in the old days when the FSB was decoupled from the rest of the system by a multiplier, you could exploit that multiplier fantastically. These days, ~100MHz is the rule. Go much beyond 103MHz BCLK and you're basically asking for trouble with most configs. There are much better and cost effective ways to get 3% more performance so unless you have already narrowed down which was the best 12900K in terms of silicon lottery from a batch of several, and are just LN2 overclocking for a record attempt, there is no merit to it - the money invested in specific motherboard/RAM that's likely to hold a stable BCLK overclock is better spent on a faster CPU or better cooling.
Regarding what enables this option - absolutely BIOS. You can technically have it on any board, its a simple in-die clock change. At least from my understanding, even without such "external clock gen", its not an overclocking fairy.
The reality is that you don't get 3%, you get whatever the ADL-S CPU enables you. Can be 10%, can be 20%, can be 30% or more (with 130MHz BCLK)
At $250-500 premium over a perfectly sensible B660 alternative, you might as well just spend that on a much faster chip - going from an i5-12600K on Z690 high-end board to a 12900F on a B660 is a no-brainer for me. No, you can't overclock the 12900F but it already runs at 5.2GHz so how much headroom is there in the silicon left to overclock anyway? All that for a $200 difference in CPU cost.
The overclocking appeal (for me) is taking something cheap and slow and making it much faster without wasting money to do so. If the upcoming B660 boards with external clock gen cost even $100 more than other viable options, then we're looking at i3 4C/8T vs i5 10C/16T and that's too much of a core count advantage for any overclock to make up IMO. The i5 also already has faster clocks and more cache at stock so you have to reach a 15-20% overclock just to match the i5 performance out of the box and that is just the break-even point ignoring the additional cost of the motherboard.
One of the main things I missed when "multi-only" oc became a thing. finding the perfect balance of FSB/Multi and voltage :) ...
Aaand influencurs and tubers found another headline to base 15 minutes of bullshit on. Yay.
For everyone else: nothing to see here, really.
And only likely on the highest end board.
Or your 50% Oc will destroy your GPU ,nvme drives and usb chips.
No one's shown a bench with a GPU in action for example.
Snowflake OCs, I call them. The value of them is their presence in a christmas tree box with AIO showing those glorious numbers so you can look at your window all day. What do you mean, workloads? This is a consumer CPU. It idles. At best it records a benchmark or Youtube video.
But DDR5 prices make them also unattractive until the first DDR4 board with ext clock gen arrives...
At least PCIe runs independent from BCLK since Comet Lake I think.
The 2700x i had simply ran at 4.35Ghz at boost. With a 103Mhz BCLK we where looking at a healthy 4.5 up to 4.65ghz boost.
FSB since the 386 always had favor due to the "rest" of the system, bus and all that being increased.
However bclk can be done even without having NVME controllers, NICS refuse to operate. It however requires boards, that do have a seperate clockgenerator, and not rely on the internal CPU.
www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclocking-amd-ryzen,5011-8.html
Uncle tom did some testing back in the day, roughtly 5% extra can be archieved, significant reduction in access latency in CCX's and all that.
Yes i agree "better cooling" is the overall answer to having better performance. It means that Boosting(s) and such will hold longer without reaching it's threshold in temperatures.
As for intel: nice gimmick but who buys a 600$ board to start overclocking with a low end chip?
Presumably there's a DDR4 variant coming soon thanks to the DDR5 drought right now?