Grabbed an old i5-3570K off Marketplace and decided to see just how far it could go before giving up.
The goal wasn’t stability — it was absolute voltage abuse for short benchmark runs only.
Setup:
- i5-3570K, delidded (repasted under IHS)
- Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420mm AIO
- Z77 board, basic tuning
- No AVX offset, no thermal limits, no guilt
Started by maxing multiplier and vcore, then worked backwards to see what wouldn’t instantly blue screen.
It’s not pretty — but it was fun.
Managed to hit 5GHz on a single core at 1.8V — not sustainable, but it posted and validated.
This is actually my first ever video, and I plan to make more as I learn — probably with even sketchier ice bucket setups and jank-tier cooling hacks later on.
Still figuring a lot of this out, so if you have any tips or advice (BIOS, safe-ish voltages, old-school binning tricks), I’m keen to learn.
📹 Here’s the run if anyone wants to see it in action:
👉 https://youtu.be/-6ZK341pW1g?si=7Nr7ow5lpspFr_TH
1 Comment
Jeez, I had a i5-3570K when it first came out and could do 4.8GHz* at around 1.40V (if I recall) That was on a 240mm AIO. The fact you now need some much voltage means either it’s heavily degraded or you got a crap chip! If I recall, running a higher LLC was needed on this to control the Vdroop at higher clocks.
Edit: I suppose diminishing returns on the V/F curve to get 5GZ could factor in.