Intel Core i7-7700K: De-Lidded and Overclocked
Intel Core i7-7700K: De-Lidded and Overclocked
Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based Core i7 processors spoiled enthusiasts with the ease at which they could hit 5 GHz with CPU overclocking using air cooling. Sadly, these CPUs weren’t well-suited for extreme overclocking, and we were never able to push past 6 GHz under liquid nitrogen.
Ivy Bridge saw Intel selling Core i7s that were less amenable to traditional overclocking efforts, but much more receptive to extreme measures. Record-setting efforts saw them break the 7 GHz threshold.
The sixth generation of Core i7 (Skylake) demonstrated the best efficiency in a CPU yet.
Intel Core i7-7700K
Now imagine a processor that overclocks like Sandy Bridge under air cooling, like Ivy Bridge with the help of liquid nitrogen, and with Skylake’s efficiency. Could that be Kaby Lake? We’re going to find out.
For this little experiment, we’re using one of the latest motherboards to land in our French lab: MSI’s Z270X XPower Gaming Titanium.
Of course, processors are subject to the silicon lottery’s uncertainties, so we obtained multiple samples. You’ll see that the spread in what’s possible is large indeed.
De-Lidding Intel’s Core i7-7700K
Quite simply, de-lidding is the process of removing the integrated heat spreader that typically sits atop your CPU. The primary function of the IHS is to protect the die underneath, but by adding this shield between the fragile silicon and bulky heat sink, thermal transfer is restricted somewhat.
The Procedure
Although de-lidding was once considered an extreme measure reserved for the most hardcore enthusiasts, the process became more popular when it became clear that Intel’s Haswell-based CPUs ran hot, in part due to a different thermal interface material between the die and IHS.
It’s no longer necessary to white-knuckle the procedure with a razor blade or workshop vice, though. To de-lid an Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Devil’s Canyon, Skylake, or Kaby Lake processor, you need a tool like the Delid Die Mate, some good thermal paste, and glue (optional, silicone is preferred).
Simply place the processor on the correct side of the tool, oriented properly, close the tool, and turn the screw until the black glue breaks free when the two parts separate.
With the IHS removed, we can see Intel’s thermal paste, which looks quite dry. For information on how to thoroughly clean a bare chip (CPU or GPU), take a look at How To: Optimizing Your Graphics Card’s Cooling. We apply thermal paste (we’re using Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut) to the die and IHS. All that’s left is add a little glue and reseal the processor.
Rockit 88 — Intel CPU Delid Tool Kit
Thermal Paste
If heat isn’t removed from the die as quickly as it’s generated, the CPU’s internal temperature rises as a consequence. In order to minimize the IHS’ effect on thermal transfer, we need a good paste, which fills surface imperfections and eliminates the tiny pockets of air that’d otherwise inhibit heat sink performance.
In this role, not all thermal pastes are created equal.
In the image above, the thermal paste on the left limits heat transfer, resulting in a hotter processor. The higher-quality compound in the middle performs better, helping our hypothetical CPU top out at 70°C. Finally, on the right, the die is covered with a premium product that keeps the processor’s temperature at a maximum of 60°C.
We’re going to compare three different thermal pastes:
- Original thermal paste (Intel)
- Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
- Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut
Intel’s thermal paste doesn’t always perform very well, but it is applied to all of the Kaby Lake-based processors. Because it’s unavoidable, it serves as a logical reference for our measurements.
Kryonaut is a solid performer with a conductivity of 12.5 W/mK. But it’s quite expensive (an 11g tube can be found for around $26). Still, in this piece it plays second fiddle to an even higher-end product.
At the top of our hierarchy we have Conductonaut, a metallic paste that is conductive. Its thermal conductivity is listed as 73 W/mK. But you cannot use it below freezing, or on aluminum surfaces. Its price is as high as its performance, at about $11 per gram!
Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut
Results
Of course, results can vary from one processor to the next, but the delta between cooling solutions remains fairly similar. To show the disparity, we’re using Prime95 with a CPU core voltage of 1.3V.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
| Intel | 82.5°C |
|---|---|
| Kryonaut | 76.5°C |
| Conductonaut | 60.5°C |
As expected, Intel’s thermal interface material trails.
The Kryonaut performs only 6°C better. And the Conductonaut gives us a -22°C temperature drop.
Image 1 of 3
Our screen captures show that the temperatures are more homogeneous between cores once the thermal paste is upgraded. For the tests that follow, we are going to keep Intel’s paste as a reference, and the Conductonaut as its replacement.
MORE: Overclocking GeForce GTX 1080 Ti To 2.1 GHz Using Water
MORE: CPU Overclocking Guide: How (and Why) to Tweak Your Processor
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Jean-Michel «Wizerty» Tisserand is a French extreme overclocker, and former OC world champion. Passionate and curious, he’s always into pushing hardware to its limits. Willing to transmit his knowledge, he created the French Overclocking Federation, and writes merciless hardware torture articles!
Power and Overclocking — The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) Review: The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion
by Ian Cutresson January 3, 2017 12:02 PM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Kaby Lake
- 7700K
- i7-7700K
125 Comments
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125 Comments
The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) ReviewTest Bed and SetupOffice and Web PerformanceProfessional Performance on WindowsLegacy TestsGaming: Alien IsolationGaming: Total War AttilaGaming: Grand Theft Auto VGaming: GRID AutosportGaming: Shadow of MordorPower and Overclocking Conclusions: The New Champion
In the Words of Jeremy Clarkson: POWEEEERRRRR
As with all the major processor launches in the past few years, performance is nothing without a good efficiency to go with it.
Doing more work for less power is a design mantra across all semiconductor firms, and teaching silicon designers to build for power has been a tough job (they all want performance first, naturally). Of course there might be other tradeoffs, such as design complexity or die area, but no-one ever said designing a CPU through to silicon was easy. Most semiconductor companies that ship processors do so with a Thermal Design Power, which has caused some arguments recently based on performance presentations.
Yes, technically the TDP rating is not the power draw. It’s a number given by the manufacturer to the OEM/system designer to ensure that the appropriate thermal cooling mechanism is employed: if you have a 65W TDP piece of silicon, the thermal solution must support at least 65W without going into heat soak. Both Intel and AMD also have different ways of rating TDP, either as a function of peak output running all the instructions at once, or as an indication of a ‘real-world peak’ rather than a power virus.
This is a contentious issue, especially when I’m going to say that while TDP isn’t power, it’s still a pretty good metric of what you should expect to see in terms of power draw in prosumer style scenarios.
So for our power analysis, we do the following: in a system using one reasonable sized memory stick per channel at JEDEC specifications, a good cooler with a single fan, and a GTX 770 installed, we look at the long idle in-Windows power draw, and a mixed AVX power draw given by OCCT (a tool used for stability testing). The difference between the two, with a good power supply that is nice and efficient in the intended range (85%+ from 50W and up), we get a good qualitative comparison between processors. I say qualitative as these numbers aren’t absolute, as these are at-wall VA numbers based on power you are charged for, rather than consumption. I am working with our PSU reviewer, E.Fylladikatis, in order to find the best way to do the latter, especially when working at scale.
Nonetheless, here are our recent results for Kaby Lake at stock frequencies:
What amazes me, if anything, is how close the Core i7 and Core i3 parts are to their TDP in our measurements.
Previously, such as with the Core i7-6700K and Core i7-4790K, we saw +20W on our system compared to TDP, but the Core i7-7700K is pretty much bang on at 90W (for a 91W rated part). Similarly, the Core i3-7350K is rated at 60W and we measured it at 55W. The Core i5-7600K is a bit different due to no hyperthreading meaning the AVX units aren’t loaded as much, but more on that in that review.
To clarify, our tests were performed on retail units. No engineering sample trickery here.
With power on the money, this perhaps mean that Intel is getting the voltages of each CPU to where they should be based on the quality of the silicon. In previous generations, Intel would over estimate the voltage needed in order to capture more CPUs within a given yield – however AMD has been demonstrating of late that it is possible to tailor the silicon more based on internal metrics. Either our samples are flukes, or Intel is doing something similar here.
With power consumption in mind, let’s move on to Overclocking, and watch some sand burn a hole in a PCB (hopefully not).
Overclocking
At this point I’ll assume that as an AnandTech reader, you are au fait with the core concepts of overclocking, the reason why people do it, and potentially how to do it yourself. The core enthusiast community always loves something for nothing, so Intel has put its high-end SKUs up as unlocked for people to play with. As a result, we still see a lot of users running a Sandy Bridge i7-2600K heavily overclocked for a daily system, as the performance they get from it is still highly competitive.
Despite that, the i7-7700K has somewhat of an uphill battle. As a part with a 4.5 GHz turbo frequency, if users are expecting a 20-30% increase for a daily system then we will be pushing 5.4-5.8 GHz, which for daily use with recent processors has not happened.
There’s also a new feature worth mentioning before we get into the meat: AVX Offset. We go into this more in our bigger overclocking piece, but the crux is that AVX instructions are power hungry and hurt stability when overclocked.
The new Kaby Lake processors come with BIOS options to implement an offset for these instructions in the form of a negative multiplier. As a result, a user can stick on a high main overclock with a reduced AVX frequency for when the odd instruction comes along that would have previously caused the system to crash.
Because of this, we took our overclocking methods in two ways. First, we left the AVX Offset alone, meaning our OCCT mixed-AVX stability test got the full brunt of AVX power and the increased temperature/power reading there in. We then applied a second set of overclocks with a -10 offset, meaning that at 4.5 GHz the AVX instructions were at 3.5 GHz. This did screw up some of our usual numbers that rely on the AVX part to measure power, but here are our results:
At stock, our Core i7-7700K ran at 1.248 volts at load, drawing 90 watts (the column marked ‘delta’), and saw a temperature of 79C using our 2kg copper cooling.
After this, we put the CPU on a 20x multiplier, set it to 1.
000 volt (which didn’t work, so 1.100 volts instead), gave the load-line calibration setting to Level 1 (constant voltage on ASRock boards), and slowly went up in 100 MHz jumps. Every time the POV-Ray/OCCT stability tests failed, the voltage was raised 0.025V.
This gives a few interesting metrics. For a long time, we did not need a voltage increase: 1.100 volts worked as a setting all the way up to 4.2 GHz, which is what we’ve been expecting for a 14nm processor at such a frequency. From there the voltage starts increasing, but at 4.5 GHz we needed more voltage in a manual overclock to achieve stability than the CPU gave itself at stock frequency. So much for overclocking! It wasn’t until that 4.3-4.5 GHz set of results that the CPU started to get warm, as shown by the OCCT temperature values.
At 4.8 GHz, the Core i7-7700K passed POV-Ray with ease, however the 1.400 volts needed at that point were pushing the processor up to 95C during OCCT and its mixed AVX workload. At that point I decided to call an end to it, where the CPU was now drawing 122W from idle to load.
The fact that it is only 122W is surprisingly low – I would have thought we would be nearing 160W at this point, other i7 overclockable processors at this level in the past.
The second set of results is with the AVX offset. This afforded stability at 4.8 GHz and 4.9 GHz, however at 5.0 GHz and 1.425 volts the CPU was clearly going into thermal recovery modes, as given by the lower scores in POV-Ray.
Based on what we’ve heard out in the ether, our CPU sample is somewhat average to poor in terms of overclocking performance. Some colleagues at the motherboard manufacturers are seeing 5.0 GHz at 1.3 volts (with AVX offset) although I’m sure they’re not talking in terms of a serious reasonable stability.
Gaming: Shadow of Mordor
Conclusions: The New Champion
The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) ReviewTest Bed and SetupOffice and Web PerformanceProfessional Performance on WindowsLegacy TestsGaming: Alien IsolationGaming: Total War AttilaGaming: Grand Theft Auto VGaming: GRID AutosportGaming: Shadow of MordorPower and Overclocking Conclusions: The New Champion
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Core i7-7700K First Reviews: Overclocking to 5.
1 GHz with LSS
Only a few weeks left before the official announcement of the 7th generation Intel Core desktop processors (Kaby Lake-S), and more and more reviewers, and even ordinary users, get access to test and production samples of the Core i7-7700K, Core i5-7600K and other CPUs of the new series. We recently wrote about the appearance on the Web of screenshots, in which the quad-core flagship of the Kaby Lake-S family with an index of 7700K reached 4.9GHz without using extreme cooling. A few days later, Internet publications with a name got down to business, and it is worth noting that they generally managed to confirm the good (by today’s times) overclocking potential of the Core i7-7700K.
The most modest result — a little less than 4.8 GHz — showed a copy received by the Tom’s Hardware resource. The voltage on the processor cores increased to 1.3 V. Details about the cooling system remained a secret, but, judging by the final 4783-4794 MHz, anything more serious than an average efficiency LSS was not used.
The base frequency (BCLK) reached 176 MHz. Testing was conducted on Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming and MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon motherboards.
Specialists from the British online publication Hexus managed to squeeze a little more out of the Core i7-7700K — 4850 MHz at the same Vcore voltage (1.3 V). The Noctua NH-D15S «supercooler» with one fan worked on the processor. He managed to keep the CPU temperature within 75 °C. For tests, the ASUS Z170 Pro matpace with the UEFI 2202 firmware was used.
under the same Core i7-6700K, senior chip of the Skylake-S family, and stabillene was stabilized at frequency 4 .6 GHz.
The authoritative Chinese hardware resource Expreview was one of the first to overclock the Core i7-7700K to 5 GHz, accompanying the dry numbers with a screenshot and a photo of a test bench with a Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboard and a Prolimatech Megahalems CPU cooler.
002
Acceleration was reached at a voltage of 1.
296 V. The Stability of the System was carried out through the AIDA64 utility (stress fest fpu). Under load, the processor warmed up to 91 ° C, so the tradition of CPU scalping by enthusiasts will certainly continue.
Bit-tech.net testers went one step further by installing a factory Corsair Hydro h205 coolant system with a 240mm radiator on their Core i7-7700K. The overclocking result was an impressive 5.1 GHz at 1.44 V and a CPU temperature of more than 90°C.
Frequencies by 900 MHz (from nominal 4.2 GHz, without taking into account the Boost-resort) reflected performance in all applications. So, in the Battlefield 1 shooter, the minimum fps increased by only 1 fps (from 85 to 86 fps), but the rendering of the scene in Terragen 3 was almost 10% faster (360 s versus 393 s).
Sources:
- Bit-Tech
- Expreview.
com - Tom’s Hardware
- hexus.net
Intel says Core i7-7700K should not be overclocked
Red Barels
News
Intel processors with the suffix K in the name are designed for overclockers — today every enthusiast knows this. Only these chips have an unlocked multiplier, and overclocking by increasing the bus frequency has become useless for a long time and now it is rarely possible to achieve a BCLK result exceeding 103‒105 MHz. The corresponding processor models are quite expensive, but at least they guarantee the freedom of overclocking — more precisely, this was the official state of affairs until today. Recall that in the Kaby Lake series of consumer processors, Intel did not dare to return to the solder under the heat spreader cover, and the material used as a thermal interface still has dubious characteristics, which was proved by numerous reviews of enthusiasts around the world.
The perpetrator of the scandal
It is not surprising that the company’s official form is flooded with reports of frustrated users telling sad stories about numerous cases of overheating of processors. It is not uncommon for the Core i7-7700K, the top model in Intel’s consumer series, to heat up to 90 degrees Celsius or more even with light computing loads, and sometimes, according to the owners of this model, overheating is observed even when the system is at rest. Some enthusiasts say there is a problem even with “scalped” Core i7-7700K instances cooled by powerful cooling systems. At the same time, the temperature can rise in jumps, which leads to a constant change in the speed of the fans controlled by the motherboard automation, and this is very uncomfortable from an acoustic point of view.
The main cause of overheating is a thick layer of not very efficient material between the die and the processor cover.
Intel’s reaction, however, turned out to be not very friendly to overclockers.
