How to Overclock Your System Using Intel’s New One-Button Utility
Windows: Intel has made it much easier to overclock your processor by increasing its default clock speed to make it even faster, at the risk of burning your chip. There’s just one big caveat: you’ll need one of six supported 9th Gen processors (all from the Coffee Lake family) to use its simple new overclocking utility. You will also need 16GB of free space on one of your drives, but I doubt this will be a problem for most system builders looking to overclock their systems.
Let’s talk about processors first. Do not bother installing Intel Performance Maximizer ( Windows only) unless you do one of the following:
- I9-9900K core
- I9-9900KF core
- Core i7-9700K
- Core i7-9700KF
- Core i5-9600K
- Core i5-9600KF
If you don’t know what you have in your system – well, first of all, overclocking may not be for you. Assuming you are forgetful, you can always open the system section of the Windows Control Panel, which will tell you exactly which processor you are using:
If you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, I don’t think Intel is testing these things; I can probably use this application with any old processor, ”you are wrong. I tried exactly the same approach, in the spirit of a life hack, and I couldn’t even complete the installation of the application:
As soon as you log in, the Performance Maximizer app will inform you that overclocking is a serious business. It can damage or destroy your processor if you (or a utility) screw up something. (Intel also adds a small link to its performance tuning protection plan , a $ 20 Standard Warranty update on your 9th Gen processor that allows you to swap out a fried processor for a working one if your overclocking drops.)
Once you choose where you want the utility to take up the 16GB of reserved space, it will need to work wonders and then it will “run some tests on your system to tune overclocking.” According to the utility, you can spend “several hours” testing with quite a lot of system reboots during this process.
Also, the whole process might not work (or you might not get as overclocked as you hoped) if you have configured any performance-related settings in the motherboard BIOS, if you have already enabled any auto-overclocking feature. in the BIOS, or if you have used other overclocking applications to tune the frequency of your processor. (Other BIOS requirements for using the application can be found in the Intel User Guide .)
When the utility is ready – a process that takes “quite a long time ,” notes Keith May of Wccftech, – your results may not be as good as they initially appear. For example, when May launched the utility, he overclocked his Core i9-9900K processor from 4.7GHz (all cores, turbo) to 5.10GHz, an 8.5% increase. It might not sound like much, but it’s a decent boost in the overclocking world (especially if you don’t have to mess around with any settings yourself).
Problem? As May describes, his system could reach 5.1 GHz, but it didn’t stay there for long:
While it noticed a slight performance boost in its Cinebench benchmark, Intel’s overclocking also raised the temperature of its hottest core by 10 degrees Celsius. Again, these are all expected overclocking results, but Mei didn’t seem too worried about the final result: on average, an increase in the frequency of all cores for his chip by about 100 MHz.
“Maybe your run will go further than mine, and at first I was very happy – I thought, dude, 5.1. This is great. I’ve ever brought this thing up to five gigahertz, ”May said.
Our advice? As always, if you want to overclock your system, do some before and after tests to see if the extra wear and tear is worth the results. Use utilities such as HWiNFO to get an idea of what your system is doing before and after (for voltage, clock speed, and temperature) so you can better understand how Intel’s utility is helping you, if at all.
You will probably see better results if you manually overclock the processor, but this is not something that everyone is comfortable with. Intel’s tool is simple, even if it can’t get your system to the max. Make sure you figure it out a bit to see if it’s worth it.