I noticed I was getting severe stuttering in Skyrim, and slight hitching in others and then I checked my voltages while playing games.





It should be doing 1.334v all the time as it does in stress testing! But in games the voltages are not stable at all, it's as if they are dropping to performance mode. Now for my i5 2500k I used to have that running at 1.3v all the time, 24/7, is it related to a power setting in BIOS? Also why are stress tested voltages staying stable at 1.334v but in games they are not!

Here is a very short stress test... ( Stable voltage )

I assume it will be due to dynamic clock frequency scaling with cores not under load, so not using as much power. Therefore your overall VCore delivered is lower.

djtoltec said:

I assume it will be due to dynamic clock frequency scaling with cores not under load, so not using as much power. Therefore your overall VCore delivered is lower.

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Which is annoying when you are playing games like The Witcher 3 and Arma 3, I want max performance all the time inc voltages

How did you set your VCore? I know that on my Gigabyte motherboard it will vary, unless I set VCore to manual override instead of offset. Of course then it won't reduce voltage at idle even if the clock speed reduces.

Neil79 said:

Which is annoying when you are playing games like The Witcher 3 and Arma 3, I want max performance all the time inc voltages

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Disable turbo boost and set your clocks as cpu clock speed (not turbo) and set manual voltage? Unpark cpu cores, turn of any power saving states in bios and windows.

Also, check you're not thermal throttling. If you're stress testing the cpu, I'm assuming your gpu is idle. Maybe whilst gaming your gpu is dumping lots of heat into the case, making your cpu temps rise abit and then throttling. That's a pretty high overclock and voltage for a 4790k - they are toasty little buggers!

implosiveturnip said:

Disable turbo boost and set your clocks as cpu clock speed (not turbo) and set manual voltage? Unpark cpu cores, turn of any power saving states in bios and windows.

Also, check you're not thermal throttling. If you're stress testing the cpu, I'm assuming your gpu is idle. Maybe whilst gaming your gpu is dumping lots of heat into the case, making your cpu temps rise abit and then throttling. That's a pretty high overclock and voltage for a 4790k - they are toasty little buggers!

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As for thermal throttling no chance! Not at 53C in games, 28C idle

But anyway, I've got a success and it's down to the C-States in the MSI board, even with CPU-Volts set to override/manual.

When I went into performance set up in Windows, I originally had set a minimum of 5%, which was fine for dropping the core down to 800mhz and low volts when idle, however it was still dropping the volts, not the core in games. So at times I was getting only 1v if not less, even with my core clocks being high. I turned up the performance setting to 30% minimum, and although that caused my clocks to constantly run at 4.7ghz in windows, the volts were still only at idle volts -> 1v or less.

So my last try, I went into the BIOS and set my C-State option to DISABLED. There was no C6 or C7, just C-State.

Wollaa, perfect 4700mhz flat line in games 53-54C, 33-34C in windows with a perfect flat line of 1.334v! No drops, no core dropping and no volt dropping, games are super smooth.


The only down side is it runs slightly hotter in Windows by 5C and more power usage. However I don't have my computer on 24/7.

I just change my windows power options to high performance when gaming, otherwise I use power saver.

Use adaptive voltage