4Ghz Uncore on Gigabyte X99 Champion

For those of you unfamilar with Haswell and Haswell-E there are three basic frequencies you need to deal with when attempting to overclock.

• Core Frequency = which is Multiplier x Base Clock (BCLK)
• Base Clock = This is the speed of everything and defaults to 100Mhz (eg the PCI Express frequency)
• Uncore = This is the speed of the memory controller or you can call it the Northbridge frequency.

Question is, why are these important?  Let's start with Base Clock as this is the speed of everything.  Basically changing the BCLK will increase core frequency, memory frequency, Unicore and even PCI Express.  Depending on motherboard quality you can sometimes get a decent overclock from this or it can spell disaster.

For instance 30 x 105 = 3150Mhz (core) and 2133Mhz x 105 = 2239Mhz (mem).  Not bad for 5 extra mhz.

If you are running a non K edition processor adjusting the BLCK is your ONLY overclocking option.  However, K and X edition processors offer a multiplier adjustment which opens up a whole new world and is how you reach 4.5Ghz on air.

I have been messing around with the latest Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion motherboard and decided to do some memory overclocking to test out the new "OC" socket and was able to run my Core i7 5960X at 4Ghz Uncore by doing nothing more than locking some frequencies and adding some voltage.

Now before you say "that aint no big deal" on most X99 motherboards they come with a traditional LGA 2011v3 socket that doesn't allow voltage adjustments for Unicore.  Without voltage your memory overclocking options rather limited and often stop with setting XMP and rebooting.  With the X99 Champion you can enable the extra CPU pins and get some rather substantial gains in memory overclocking, like this simple 4Ghz run I have posted here.

Right now the system is running 4.5Ghz core with the memory clock set to 2200Mhz at 100Mhz BLCK.  I manually increased Uncore to 4Ghz and did some quick stability tests.  The Sandra results are shown above at 50GB/s and I got over 600fps in the Call of Duty benchmark.

I'm sure 4Ghz isn't the limit and with any luck I can match Uncore with CPU Core or at least get somewhere close.  Unfortunately, I have noticed that I cannot enable XMP with this method or run my memory modules anywhere near their rated speed.  This could be an issue of temperature or a sub voltage I have yet to discover so I'll have to keep testing.