ASUS Voltage Offset experience?

[Frank Jeagar]

I'm about to overclock my 3960x and would like to use speedstep and voltage offset to help keep my idle power and temps down. I have an x79 Sabertooth motherboard and 8gb of DDR3 2133MHz RAM.

Can I ask if anyone has experience with offsetting even on different CPUs and if they have found that it causes instability compared to constant voltage at all?

As I understand the voltage offset function essentially sets a voltage that the MoBo deems as correct for your clock speed and then you can adjust it using the offset value. Is this correct?

The advantage essentially being that your voltage lowers when speedstep lowers your clock speed, whereas with manual voltage input it is set and doesn't ever change?

For full disclosure I understand I will have to tinker with clock speeds and voltage offsets to get it right for my CPU

 

[wazza300]

offset has always worked fine for me,ever since x58 days

you have a default cpu voltage,that depends on each cpu at stock clocks,then offset adds extra voltage to become stable,it only applies that extra voltage at cpu load

loadline clabration also adds a certain percentage of cpu v to counter vdroop at load

so you have to balance the right loadline calibration level and offset to achieve a stable cpu voltage when stressing the cpu

best to start off with small amounts so maybe high loadline and +0.040v offset,then stress cpu and look in cpu-z to see what the load cpu voltage is,then adjust the offset amount to suit

 

[wam7]

Ironically enough I found using offset method to give me a higher and more stable overclock. The balance is also between your LLC; you don't want to set it too high but also you don't want the voltage dropping too low underload.

Make sure you have a very good air cooler (read D14/D15) or good AIO or custom water. I would also advise that you have a fan blowing directly on the VRM's even with the small fan cooling system on the Sabertooth.

If you enable your trust I would send you some bios screen shots to give you a template to get you started.