r/overclocking

I’m in the home stretch of a full PC overclock campaign; 1% lows are up 20%, and Cinebench R26 is up 1300 to over 10900.
The final sweep I’m in the middle of entails testing different frequencies and temperatures, tweaking the curve shaper, and looking for cores that are struggling more than others to target their CO particularly.
That said, I am using a few metrics to make the per-core CO decisions, one of them being stretch. I am wondering how much stretching is acceptable without errors. I’ve been shooting for a median of >-50 and a max >-300, but frankly, those thresholds have no meaning, Ive just noticed that cores that stretch a ton are the ones to throw a coeff or checksum in VT3. So I’m wondering what the true impacts of stretching are. For instance, let’s say one core’s eff_clk=5600 and core_clk=5650, would that core perform better than a core that is running eff_clk=5600 and core_clk=5800? Also in contrast, is a positive stretch a GOOD thing, or bad for a different reason?
I’m on an x870e, 9950x3d, FCLK 2200, cl26-34-32-48 6000MTs if that matters. Per-core CO between -26 and -30, curve shaper regions between +8 and -12, 3x scalar, and +50MHz BO.

TL;DR I'm overclocking a 9950x3d and am wondering how much stretching is acceptable, and whether stretching itself harms performance or if average effective clock is all that matters.

PS: this config took weeks. I read the rules and thought I should mention that these settings are not guaranteed to be safe.