# ASRock Z77 Extreme4 & 3570K OC Settings With BIOS Screenshots



## Yankee495

Hello all,

First I was an AMD user for over 20 years and overclocking the 3570K is completely different than a Phenom and I wanted to use my sink. I'm using BIOS 2.50, the newest.

After reading the Official Ivy Bridge OC Guide and trying to sort through all the posts for someone with my board & chip I was so tired of reading. I had minor problems and couldn't find the answer. First you need a good cooler and I know the Hyper 212 is very popular so I am going to use that to compare to my cooler. I have a Sunbeamtech Core Contact Freezer 120mm (CCF-120) which is a clip on AMD cooler.

It has a Intel mount which sucks and that is why it was not popular with the Intel crowd. I used a Xigmatek ACK-U01 Crossbar 1155 Bracket to mount it and it turned out very nice. It cost $15 but was well worth it and much cheaper than a new sink. I think you could mount about any cooler with this bracket. For temp comparison I am linking to the 125W AMD chart because on the Intel chart it does not show the CCF-120 with the fan on high (don't know why). 125w is also about what the 3570K will draw at 1.150 to 1.160. The 212 EVO is sure to do better than the 212, but the CCF-120 is 4c cooler than the 212 on the chart. You can see here:

Temperature results listed for each heatsink were calculated by determining the rise over ambient temperatures at time of test.

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2271&page=4

Flip over to page one to see my sink.

I'm running 1.160 vCore with a temp of 70c @ 4.3 Ghz under P95. This is for my hottest core with the rest being 1-7c cooler. Highest temp will go 68 or 72 depending on ambient temp.

Here are my BIOS settings:

In this shot you will see that my Turbo is set to 0.004 which is the lowest it will go. I was trying to get my load vCore lower and this was no help so it is on the lowest setting. Also Spread Spectrum is on auto which they say to disable but it made me unstable when it was disabled. They advise to turn off Internal PLL Overvoltage and I did but don't think it made a difference on stability or temp.



In this shot you can see I used a XMP profile which is said to be the lazy way but it matched my memory so I used it. GT Overclocking Support for the IGPU is disabled as is Power Saving Mode. I'm also using offset mode with an offset of -0.060. This brought the load vCore down but also caused an idle vCore problem. With the -0.060 offset idle vCore was so low my side bar crashed and my anti-virus, and Chrome gave me Aw Snap!



In this shot you can see that I am using CPU Load Line Calibration Level 5. I couldn't get the high end vCore under load below 1.232 for the life of me. In the graph on the right it shows that under load vCore drops as you go up in levels. Level 1 is the highest and 5 is the lowest. So Level 5 brought my vCore down to 1.160, finally where I wanted it which did turn out to be stable under P95. If you are not stable under load raise the Turbo to from 0.004 to 0.008, this is where you adjust for more vCore under load. Bump the Turbo again until you are stable under load but as always don't go too high.



I couldn't believe I was stable under load but had idle problems. At idle vCore dropped to 0.992 and dipped below that to like 0.985 unless I raised the offset which also raised the high end and I didn't need more on the high end. Turns out that it is power saving letting it drop to save power. So, under Advanced/ CPU Configuration disable C3 & C6 State support. Instead of dropping to 9.5 watts (0.992 vCore) at idle it now only drops to 12.5 watts (1.008 vCore).



I'm posting this because everyone says my temps are 65c but don't say what kind of cooling they are using. Or they say I'm running 1.60 vCore but don't say how to get to that. I tried to include all the details so you can see how to get there and what temps to expect. If you have a stock cooler you can expect throttling and crashes...in other words, very hot and bad for your CPU. Don't overclock on stock!

I hope this helps some of you and saves you some time.

My final settings are:

OC Tweaker Menu
CPU Ratio = All Core
All Core = 43
Turbo = 0.004
Spread Spectrum = Auto
Internal PLL Overvoltage = Disabled
GT Overclocking Support = Disabled
Power Saving Mode = Disabled
CPU Voltage = Offset Mode
Offset = -0.060
CPU Load Line Calibration = Level 5

CPU PLL Voltage is set to 1.709 which doesn't seem to make a difference to stability or temp but that is where it is set.

Advanced/ CPU Configuration Menu

C3 State Support = Disabled
C6 State Support = Disabled

I had problems with it saying the Intel graphic driver stopped working and has recovered after bringing the monitors out of sleep. Go to Advanced/North Bridge and disable Render Standby. Seems to have fixed it.

If you then set the CPU Ratio to 42x you will have lower temps on the high end (under 70c) but idle temps are always going to be a bit higher because C3 and C6 are disabled letting the idle vCore run just a bit higher. Some of you may be able to run 44 or 45x. 43x seems to be my CPU's sweet spot. It just don't like 44 or 45 without more vCore and temps shoot up to 80c or so.

From here there are three ways to raise your high end (load) vCore. Raise your offset from -0.060 to -0.050 etc, or lower your load line from 5 to 4 etc, or raise your turbo from 0.004 to 0.008 etc. Any increase in the high end vCore is also going to raise the load temp. So will raising the CPU ratio, and raising both the CPU ratio and vCore will spike load temps considerably.


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## PatrickCrowely

Great guide, my daughter has one of these... She'll be reading this..


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## Shevek

Yankee495 - Thanks a ton for posting this. After sifting through innumerable useless forums on overclocking the i5-3570K, your settings were the first that actually worked for me. Very much appreciated!


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## dazzed

I just signed up to thank you...thought it was the GPU drivers all this time.


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## BiG StroOnZ

If you just used the ASRock overclocking guide, found here: http://www.overclock.net/t/1198504/complete-overclocking-guide-sandy-bridge-ivy-bridge-asrock-edition you would have better success without any of these complications. I see a decent amount of issues with your settings that if you just read through the ASRock guide, it would have straightened everything out for you.


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## Yankee495

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *PatrickCrowely*
> 
> Great guide, my daughter has one of these... She'll be reading this..


Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Shevek*
> 
> Yankee495 - Thanks a ton for posting this. After sifting through innumerable useless forums on overclocking the i5-3570K, your settings were the first that actually worked for me. Very much appreciated!


Quote:


> Originally Posted by *dazzed*
> 
> I just signed up to thank you...thought it was the GPU drivers all this time.


And it's still running like a champ today!

To all of you, you're welcome, thanks! To the other guy, I did read all of the guides. As I explained there is one tid bit of info in one post then 10 pages later a little more info etc. People say I'm running 1.60 vCore but don't say how to get to that.

And repeating myself again I put all of the settings here to save people from having to browse through tons of pages to find out why the video driver was crashing and it appears I saved dazzed a lot of working jacking with drivers all day.

I'm still running BIOS 2.50 so I'm off to see how 2.90 is. I'm glad someone got some use out of this info and I assume you searched for it. Search is your friend, sometimes.


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## moeron

Hey Yankee,
How did it go with the BIOS upgrade?


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## cupper24

Late to the game here, but I took on OC'ing this chip with this board a couple weeks ago.

It has run strong for the last 3-4 years, and I have always heard good things about the ability to OC these considerably. After a couple weekends working on this, I landed on a stable OC of 4.5 GHz (with 100MHz Bus Speed and Multiplier of 45).

I ended up with Offset of +0.005 and Turbo Voltage of +0.035 and CPU LLC at Level 2. I'm thinking about going to Level 3, and then also trying to step the Turbo Volts back to +0.032. This culminates in a reported vCore of 1.25V.

I was glad to hit 4.5GHz, but doing all this also called to my attention that it was time for a cooling upgrade in the form of better case fans, and a re-seat of my Corsair H100i. The temp on Core 1 (always 5-8 degrees C higher than the others) maxes out at 90C







.

I got this done on Saturday, and have run through some preliminary testing to make sure I didn't bork anything in the process.

I'm going to run Prime and OCCT again at these setting, and I hope to see my temps come down to the mid-70's to low-80s.

Just wanted to post my results and say "thanks" to Yankee for this guide!

cupper24


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## Yankee495

cupper24 said:


> Late to the game here, but I took on OC'ing this chip with this board a couple weeks ago.
> 
> Just wanted to post my results and say "thanks" to Yankee for this guide!
> 
> cupper24




Hello cupper24,

You're welcome and I'm glad I could help. All I really did was pick out the bits of info from the big thread and post it here in condensed form, after a lot of testing. I really spent a long time finding some of those details and thought others would like everything in a shorter post. It seems to have worked for those who tried it.

Mine is still running great but I did clock it down a little because my fan is getting old and wasn't cooling as good. In a few days I'm putting an i7-3770K in here along with new MX-2 sink grease and a new 103 CFM fan. That should make it run better than ever. It'll be fun to see how the i7 overclocks on this board and what settings it needs. Just doing it is the fun part you know.

I'll probably build a whole new system this year, around Black Friday. I'm hoping RAM prices come down because right now they're outrageous. On the other hand we've got a great many CPU's to chose from and with AMD back in the game with Ryzen, I really don't know which way I'm going to go.

I was surprised today to see how this board is holding value, besides the i5. This i5's value seems to have dropped like a rock in a market flooded with comparable CPU's and those Sandy/Ivy Bridge i7's, but a Z77 Extreme 4 sold for $115 on eBay today and I only paid $105 for mine new. 

I think part of it is the BIOS update to boot M2 devices with an adapter card, it sure didn't hurt. I'll probably not be investing in that for this machine but it may inherit something in the future. For general web/email use this computer will be a good machine for several more years and adding the i7 will prolong it's life that much more.

I don't follow the computer market too closely until I'm ready to build a machine and after taking a short look the other day, it's about time. Looking makes you want things so I just don't look too much. With 4K becoming standard etc, a little more speed would be nice, so I'm looking to build something that's about four times faster than this one.

It's a dollars and sense type of thing. Do I need it bad enough to spend the money and can I get enough speed to justify it? Right now it's hard to say, but I'll see what the BF sales bring and have a good time studying all of the new stuff until then. I do have a brand new 1151 DDR4 board but it's a Mini-ITX. Still, it's loaded pretty good for such a small board. I may build something with it someday but it will not replace this machine on my desk. It'll be more current than a 6th generation system, maybe 8th generation and possibly Ryzen. I love choices!

I hope all is well with everyone and I'll check back and see if anyone has replied. It'd be kind of cool if one of you has already switched to a i7-3770k and post what you're getting out of it. It's ok tough, I'll find out for myself in a few days when my grease and fan get here. I'm going to swap the CPU and redo everything on the same day. I'll post results when I get it done, maybe by next weekend.


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## Dan706

I know this thread is ancient but we picked up a 2nd hand 3570K and an unused Z77M recently to upgrade away from an 860K and after wasting hours spending time reading useless guides I found this one and it all came together perfectly. Thanks! <3


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## Yankee495

Dan706 said:


> I know this thread is ancient but we picked up a 2nd hand 3570K and an unused Z77M recently to upgrade away from an 860K and after wasting hours spending time reading useless guides I found this one and it all came together perfectly. Thanks! <3


You're very welcome. There is a lengthy thread here that has every detail you could possibly want, but when your'e trying to overclock a certain combination it's helpful to have a shorter guide. Like you, I was trying to sort through all the posts and make notes and was getting more confused by the minute. I'm so glad this worked for you. I've received a lot of help over the years and it's always nice to find exactly what you need.

I'm now running an i7-3770K on this same board and I found that I have a 4.2 GHz hump. I mean, both my i5 and my i7 just didn't want to go past 4.2 without a good bump in vcore and that raised the heat a good bit. It's still safe but I stayed at 4.2 because it's not worth the extra stress and heat to get 100-200 MHz more. I have a very small boost in vcore just in case but it's rock solid at 4.2, same with the i5. That crashing at idle problem was a real pain the first time around. I never seen one crash on the low end. But once I figured that out, I've been happy ever since. Good luck to you and I'm sure you'll find the 3570K is still a very worthy CPU, even though the newer ones are spanking it pretty good.

I'm going to build a big i7 or Ryzen, not sure which, and this one will go in another case as a complete system just the way it is, and be sold. Well, I'll keep the NVME SSD. Since I have more than one 16x PCIe slot...I was able to install a newer BIOS firmware and use a PCIe to NVMe 4x adapter to run a M.2 SSD. I'm getting 3300 MBs read and 1500 MBs write with a 256GB Samsung SM961 M.2 NVME SSD. It's really running great with a super fast SSD and it's just about a Z77 i7 dream machine. You just can't do better on this platform. If you're using onboard video there may be a Asrock BIOS for your board that will let you use the video slot for a NVMe adapter. If so, I'm using a JEYI SK9 Pro NVMe adapter in case you'd like to look into it. It's a very nice, solid, high quality device. The NVMe SSD could be used in your next build that has native M.2 slots too. Good luck!


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## skrparks

This is an older thread BUT still relevant in 2022. Milking the last of my 2011 rig before throwing my wallet at Win11 and building a new PC. This worked like a champ.! Significant improvement with XPlane 11...with settings a suggested, went from 3.4 GHz to roughly 4.2HGz.
Yankee495 - hope this finds you well, thanx for the assist. Most helpful!


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