'Safe' Vcore measured idle or under load?

northun_munky

northun_munky

northun_munky

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When I hear people talking about 'safe' voltages to put through their cpu are they meaning voltages under load or when the Cpu is Idle. For example, I have a Q6600 which I've heard people mention on these forums are 'Safe' at about 1.45v. Mine is currently running at 3.6ghz (400 X 9) and idle, CPU-z reports 1.46v. This drops to about 1.41-1.42v under load in Prime95. Its not quite stable yet. If its the load volts i should be worrying about then I've got a bit of headroom left (temps are still below 60c at the moment) to try to get it stable. Sorry if this is a daft question.
 
would keep you load temps under 75c in prime... really wouldnt worry to much about vcore.. if your under air or water you will hit the temperature limit before you start getting to much vcore
 
MooMoo444 said:
Doubt that tbh.. you're basically saying you can chuck 1.7v+ through a good watercooled system and not have to worry about the cpu? :s
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pretty much. I've not heard of anyone killing a core 2 65nm chip. have you?
 
Appreciate the advice. I think I'm there now with 1.44v under load and 1.51v idle. Back to my initial question though, If someone said 'I've @3.7ghz with 1.5v' for example, do they they mean under load? The only reason I ask is because of the massive difference in idle and load volts. to get 1.5v under load they might be at 1.55v idle or above.
 
northun_munky said:
Appreciate the advice. I think I'm there now with 1.44v under load and 1.51v idle. Back to my initial question though, If someone said 'I've @3.7ghz with 1.5v' for example, do they they mean under load? The only reason I ask is because of the massive difference in idle and load volts. to get 1.5v under load they might be at 1.55v idle or above.
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Most people tend to quote either windows idle or load. Reason been is there is so much differential between mobos in how much vdroop and vdrop you get.


For example under load I can see as much as 0.1v drop from bios settings whereas some people with Asus boards for example might only see 0.01v or 0.02v drop.

Hence if I said my system was 1.55v stable at 3.8Ghz which is really 1.65v in bios it would mislead people and if they tried 1.55v in bios, they might get nowhere.

Hence the quad overclocking database on here is vcore under load. Makes it easy to compare cpus.
 
northun_munky said:
I have a Q6600 [snip] Mine is currently running at 3.6ghz (400 X 9) and idle, CPU-z reports 1.46v
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Ben M said:
chuck as many volts as you need to at 65nm chips
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northun_munky do you pay for your own electricty bill?

Do you have any idea how much electricity a 65nm Quad Core running at 3600MHz/1.46v uses! :eek:

400wattsjl9.jpg
 
Big.Wayne said:
northun_munky do you pay for your own electricty bill?

Do you have any idea how much electricity a 65nm Quad Core running at 3600MHz/1.46v uses! :eek:

400wattsjl9.jpg
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Overclocked quads use about 100W. An ordinary one maybe 70W. One with speedstep and the other thing enableb maybe 40W.

SO 10 hours use will cost you about 6 units of electric so maybe about 50 pence a day so 10 hours per day, all year round will cost you about £180.

So what. If you can afford it why not? If you were environmentally green you never would have bought a computer in the first place.
 
MooMoo444 said:
Do you have speedstep enabled on your 3.8 Greebo?
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Yes and no. Not on the 3.8Ghz as only used for setting benchmark results. Plus to be fair I have 5 bios setups which I can load from a menu in bios on my mobo and if I am just going to be surfing the internet I have my system boot up at stock of 2.4Ghz with all energy saving features on.

Boot at 3.8Ghz if I want to benchmark. Boot at 3.4Ghz if I want to game with speedstep switched off (no point since I am gaming and it would just go up to max straight away)

Was just making the point that overclocking comes with an electric bill penalty but so did me buying a watercooling setup - my water pump consumes 24W every hour my machine is on.

Lob into the mix loads of 120mm fans etc and an overclocked 4870 and you might see where I am coming from. High end overclockers do not take account of the electric used or the size of their bill.

If people did, you wouldn't see them with two 4870x2 or three GTX280 in SLI.
 
:) sounds just like mine.. have a 3.2ghz setup with all the energy saving features for day-to-day and then a benching setup (or well at present my last stable overclock).. no need to run at a monster clock day-to-day
 
Well I have a Q6600 at 3.42 1.44v(Speedstep enabled goes to 2.28 1.32v-ish when not gaming)

2x Overclocked 8800GT 700/1000
4 antec 900 case fans on high
4gb RAM

So I probably use more electricity than I expect?

Also probably wrong section to ask, but when you disable SLI technology, is the 2nd card still using a lot of power?
 
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