Thursday, October 21st 2021
Intel Alder Lake Doesn't Look Like an Overclockers Dream
Another day, another Intel Alder Lake leak, although this time it seems to be the same Core i9-12900K retail CPU that is being tested in China. Some additional details have been provided on its ability to overclock and although it's perfectly possible to overclock these upcoming CPUs from Intel, it's going to be hard to cool them, even for very small gains in clock speeds.
An all core P-core overclock, with the E-cores at default requires quite the Voltage bump as well, since according to the leaked information, going from 4.9 GHz and a power draw of 233 Watts, with a CPU Voltage of 1.275 V to 5.2 GHz, sees a jump of almost 100 Watts. The CPU Voltage also has to be bumped to 1.38 V in the sample used. However, pushing the CPU to 5.3 GHz requires 1.44 V and pushes the CPU power to a massive 400 W, which is high-end GPU territory. That said, we're hearing that not all CPUs need this high Voltage to hit 5.2 GHz, although we also understand that 5.3 GHz is not a speed that will be easily attained. Apparently the best way to get the most performance out of these news CPUs will be to tune the turbo settings, rather than to try and overclock them.
Source:
@OneRaichu
An all core P-core overclock, with the E-cores at default requires quite the Voltage bump as well, since according to the leaked information, going from 4.9 GHz and a power draw of 233 Watts, with a CPU Voltage of 1.275 V to 5.2 GHz, sees a jump of almost 100 Watts. The CPU Voltage also has to be bumped to 1.38 V in the sample used. However, pushing the CPU to 5.3 GHz requires 1.44 V and pushes the CPU power to a massive 400 W, which is high-end GPU territory. That said, we're hearing that not all CPUs need this high Voltage to hit 5.2 GHz, although we also understand that 5.3 GHz is not a speed that will be easily attained. Apparently the best way to get the most performance out of these news CPUs will be to tune the turbo settings, rather than to try and overclock them.
62 Comments on Intel Alder Lake Doesn't Look Like an Overclockers Dream
Then I made a big mistake...Windows 11
Even with today's fixes from MSFT and AMD I cant get the clocks or the scores back to happy no matter how much tweaking I do.
Don't touch any new products from M$ in the very first year after launch.
We have had enough lessons ( Vista / 7 / 8 / 10 ) for that...
Honestly with 250-350W, just buy a threadripper system
Intel and AMD both abandoned the specced TDP as a number we rely on. All marketing is directed at it, and in reality, peak usage far exceeds that and is then managed on a different metric: thermals and power consumed per X time. They push the burden on to the quality of the cooling to hide the lack of quality improvements on chip efficiency at high frequencies. So now you're left there spending 3-4x the cash on cooling for a hundred or two mhz, so we undervolt :)
Intel has been the worst offender though, what with all their misty turbo limits these days. The turbo used to have some headroom, now you're lucky if you even see it fully. The result of many generational baby steps to hide lack of progress since Skylake.Sure but a bit more up front about what's really happening would be good too. We've all been discovering the hard way how these CPUs behave.