- [Linus] Hey there, buddies.
We're gonna take this cheap CPU
and overclock it 25%, guy.
At least that's how it used to be.
When I built my first gaming pc,
I didn't have a lot of money
but thanks to a vibrant over clocking community,
it was possible to save $50 or even $100
on your CPU without feeling like you were totally
missing out compared to your wealthier friends.
That's what Intel took away from us when they restricted
over clocking to their more expensive K series CPUs
and their premium chips and motherboards.
I mean, it's not really tuning if they
only allow it on the factory tuned models, is it?
But nothing's more enticing
to tuners than an artificial restriction
and I have got something pretty cool to show you.
This is a Core I5-12500, a $210 chip
that we've got running at a whopping 25% faster.
Now Intel doesn't want you to have this, but I do.
So, let's take a closer look at it, shall we?
After we take a closer look at our sponsor.
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If you wanna play by their rules,
Intel requires specific CPU
and motherboard pairings to over clock your pc.
But whatever you might think of MSI,
they've done us a huge solid going
against Intel's wishes and sending
over their MAG B660M Mortar Max motherboard.
It's got all the usual goodies.
PCI-Gen5, dual Gen 4M., two slots,
a beefy 60 amp VRM,
and it's got one unusual goody, the star of the show.
It's very own external clock generator.
The one the only, Renasas RC26008.
Doesn't have a sexy name, but it's right here
on the board and we're gonna talk a little bit more
about how it works later.
For now though, we overclock.
For today's experiment, we went with the core I5-12500.
It's not necessarily the best bang for the buck,
assuming that we're gonna over clock
the snot out of it, that might be the 12400
because they both have six cores and 12 threads.
But what's cool about this one is that it's
the lowest end Intel chip that I would consider
to be feature complete because it supports ECC memory.
It's also available for about $210 US,
and while I could pay $50 more for the 12600K,
which is the entry level over clocking chip,
with this puppy I don't need to.
To ensure that we're not gonna
run up against a thermal wall,
we've gone straight to the top of the line
for our cooling with an NH-D15 from Noctua.
That might seem like kind of a wacky choice
when we're so focused on saving a buck.
But a cooler like this one can actually
be thought of as a long term investment.
One that you can carry forward to future systems
with only a cheap mounting adapter bracket.
The frequency or clock speed
of the various components of your system, CPU,
the memory even the PCI express slots is derived
from your system's B clock,
or base clock times some multiplier.
So, the safer way to overclock your CPU
without risking running anything else out
of spec is to simply adjust the CPU multiplier
and leave that base clock alone.
Unfortunately, that's the method
that's behind the Intel paywall
and there is nothing that we can do about it.
So, we are gonna use that special clock generator chip
to enable base clock over clocking
and then we can tune it by adjusting our core ratios.
So, step one is to adjust our base clock from 100 to 125.
Ah, yes, this is fun, to enable CPU over clocking,
MSI is actually using a specific micro code,
an older version that wasn't
successfully locked down by Intel.
Now we set our P core ratio or our multiplier to 40.
That is a value that is enabled for this particular CPU.
It's just not supposed to be times 125,
putting us at five gigahertz.
And then to make sure that our poor memory
is not going completely outta whack here,
we wanna find the closest thing
to 3200 and this is amazing.
It does all the math for you. Look at that.
For that, we might need a little bit more voltage
and this is a very, very quick and dirty,
quick and dirty overclock.
We'll see what happens. Well, that's disappointing.
It looks like it didn't take,
we're only running at four gigahertz,
which if we do the math is our multiplier
of 40 times 100 base clock, not 125.
Unless task manager is not the best system monitoring tool.
Hey, whoa, wait, look at this. It's doing it.
Yeah, this chip's not supposed
to draw over 120 watts, is it?
We're hitting 82, 83 degrees
on an NH-D15 with a six core chip.
She's spicy.
Anyway, the point is we're running at five gigahertz.
Look at this. That's fricking awesome.
I was so busy trying to get my hardware info windows
sorted out here that I didn't even think
about that this is not crashing.
Five flipping gigahertz.
And look at these scores, we're getting like 15,000,
nearly 16,000 points in Cinebench.
That's not that far off a flipping like 16 core first gen
thread ripper with six cores, I freaking love this.
Over clocking on Intel hasn't been
this much fun in over a decade.
AMD, meanwhile has been much more permissive,
a little bit more on that later.
On both sides, realistically,
we have had a similar issue where most
of their products are running so close to the red line
out of the box that even if you can keep them cool,
there just isn't a ton of headroom
and it's these budget chips where you really feel
like you're getting a lot more bang for your buck
and there's no doubt that this thing bangs.
Off camera, we pushed it even further to a stable over clock
of 5.25 gigahertz on all cores with 1.2 volts of juice
and we saw our performance improved by leaps and bounds.
Cinebench is up 25% compared
to stock speed and still under 85 degrees.
Like what? Yeah, you heard me.
That score is almost as good as a core I9
from just last generation out of the box,
giving you enough money left over to pick up both new colors
of our waffle long sleeve shirts, lttstore.com,
and we found the same thing across
the rest of our productivity benchmark suite.
Over a minute saved in Blender, major improvements
in 7Zip and an extra 4,000 points in CPU PassMark.
I mean, it is entirely possible
that we won the silicon lottery here in
that your 12500 wouldn't go this far without instability
but that's also half the fun of it, isn't it?
Which makes me kinda wonder then our AMD's days
of being the budget friendly king coming to an end
if we can squeeze this much performance out of a $200 chip?
No, for a number of reasons.
First up is that unlike Intel, AMD allows you
to do basically whatever you want with your CPU as long
as your mother board's power delivery can handle it.
And because they remove arbitrary lockdowns,
except in certain cases, 5800X 3D,
their product lineup is simpler as well.
You want graphics, grab a G series chip,
want anything else well pick the CPU that's right
for you based on the core count, clock speed and cash.
If you wanna overclock it just about any board outside
of their very budget, A series boards is going to allow it.
Just your mileage may vary and unfortunately
for the Intel fans out there,
Intel fans you in the house?
- Woo hoo! - Hey, there you are.
Unfortunately for you guys, the same can't
be said for y'all even with this motherboard.
Why? Well, because you can't get this motherboard.
I mean it's on the MSI website
and you can get the non max version
which does not have the RC26008 chip.
But for us to get our hands on this thing,
we had to whip out our press credentials
and get them to send it to us.
And it's not that it's like too new or anything.
They showed this thing off months ago
and we actually did find a couple
of Ali Express listings for it.
But the problem is that they've got additional markups
on them to the point where they're 230 US dollars.
It's not a great deal for a B660 board,
plus you're now adding 30 bucks for international shipping,
plus maybe customs are import fees when it shows up
which means that it doesn't really make a ton of sense.
For reference the non max version
of this board without the base clock chip
which honestly can't add that much, is only 180 US dollars.
So, if you're gonna be spending so much more
while it gets to the point where you might
as well just look at a cheaper Z690 board, and also,
since you're such a baller, you can throw some money our way
for a Flow Plane subscription where you can find
all the latest extra content like an hour
of bonus footage from the recent build with my sister.
And there's another problem with all of this.
I alluded to it before
but it needs to be really highlighted here.
That base clock over clocking can be a much worse
kind of unstable than CPU multiplier over clocking.
When you're adjusting your CPU multi, the odds
of anything worse than a blue screen are pretty low.
So, you go back into your bios,
set it a little bit lower and boom,
you're back in your game in a couple of minutes.
But with base clock over clocking,
when they say base, they mean it, CPU, memory,
PCI express lane, storage, even peripherals
can be affected when you're adjusting this value.
And those are components that are
not designed to run outside of spec.
So, you are gonna wanna run a battery of stability tests,
disc tests, you get your Fur Mark, your MEM Test,
and you gotta check and make sure that everything
is stable or you could run into crashes or worse,
even things like data corruption during
real world use and it gets even worse.
While our gaming performance did improve
in CPU bound games like CS:GO
where we gained 50 frames per second,
we were already getting 460 frames per second.
So, unless you're a pro player,
no offense, you're probably not.
You are not gonna benefit from that difference.
Then we transitioned over to modern triple A gains
where we really could use another 50 fps and well,
the sad story there is that the 12500 is already
fast enough that your modern GPU is probably
gonna be the bottleneck anyway.
So, at best we got a couple more FPS,
maybe over clocking is still dead then?
I've already talked a lot
about how even top tier tier coolers
like the NH-D15 can hardly tame a boosting 12900 K.
So, good luck over clocking it,
unless you have custom loop liquid cooling
or something much more exotic.
And then even over on the AMD side, as permissive
as they are, if you enable PBO on your 5950x,
it's gonna get pretty darn close to its final form
without requiring any additional fiddling in the bios.
Something we explored recently with pro over clocker,
Splave, is the advantages of under volting
these higher end chips so that they can boost
in a stable manner but without cooking themselves.
But then the performance gains from under volting,
they're pretty pedestrian compared
to what we showed you guys today
which makes over clocking top tier chips boring,
kind of pointless, and expensive.
So, the most frustrating thing about this MSI board,
I mean cool product to be clear, really like it,
is that it puts us face to face with what we've lost.
These lower tier CPUs, man, these things could totally rip
if you were just allowed to give them a little bit
of extra juice at the expense of nice
to haves like low operating temperatures and a warranty.
Intel just won't allow us to do it.
Now, MSI didn't respond by the time
that we filmed this when we asked why
this thing isn't broadly available.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
check out another of Intel's arbitrary lockdowns
where we looked at ECC memory support
on Alder Lake 12th gen chips.
It's also frustrating, but worth a watch.