Overclocking 4770k

[Ezekiah]

I am having a terrible time trying to reach 4.4, much less the dream of 4.5, on air. Now I know it's a real possibility that this might be impossible on air, but the thing is, I'm being throttled by something other than temps, and I can't identify what. I will immediately acknowledge that I am a bit of a noob at this.

Intel Core i7-4770K
Thermaltake NiC C5 120mm Untouchable
MSI Z87-G45


Now, I read about six thousand guides, and came to some conclusions. While 1.4 is the theoretical limit of Vcore on air, the realistic limit is going to be much lower, especially with my CPU. This was my expected bottleneck, but I never reached anything above 80c. The uncore (CPU Ring Voltage on my board) can be adjusted to improve stability, with most people shying away from anything above 1.25. The VCCIN (CPU Input Voltage) I've seen as high as 2.1, quite often.

Now with these in mind, I decided to use Prime95 and Aida64. After about 20 minutes I deleted Prime95 because fuck that thing, and am now just using Aida64. I'll do some other stress testing later, but for now I'm frustrated enough with Aida64 stress tests.

Here are my results.

I got 4.3 stable, after a lot of work, with 1.24 Vcore, 1.9 VCCIN, and still Auto on the CPU Ring.

Now I jump up to 4.4, and naturally have to start upping some things. At a Vcore of 1.28, 2.00 on the VCCIN and 1.25 on the CPU ring voltage, I still am not stable in Aida64 at 4.4. Nothing else has been touched. No XMP profile currently enabled, and I turned of Speedstep and Cstate for the moment, although I'm sure they aren't causing any problems.

Any ideas? I'm not seeing any temps above 80c, but I still feel like something's wrong here. Why the hell would I have to make such steep jumps for such a small increase?

[chazus]

There may be more tweaking involved, but it may be what they call the 'silicon lottery'. I've seen some Haswell's that simply can't break 4.1ghz, no matter the temps or voltage.

[Deleted]

I'm running a 4770k with a Noctua D-14 at 4.9Ghz and 1.39v

As chazus said, some are good, some are not.