How does excess voltage kill your chip?

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Hey guys, I've been looking at some of the awesome clocks that people are getting with their D0 i7s and I kinda feel a little gutted that I've got a crappy chip in comparison. Mine seems to perform on par with the C0 results that people have had. I'm on 186x21 at the moment and needing 1.30625V Vcore 1.315V QPI just to stay stable and even with Turbo off I'm finding it hard to get anywhere near 190 BCLK without throwing 1.35V at Vcore :<

My temps on the other hand are actually pretty good. I'm on air using a noctua and it's been pretty warm lately and I'm at 70*C prime95, and I'd be happy to go to about 80*C if needs be.

So is it just temperature that 'degrades' your CPU by going over 1.365V or is there some sort of electrical rape that goes on?

Cheers :)
 
your temps are fine and your overclock result is average, I noticed newer D0 chips use more vcore and most are stable at 4GHz with 1.28v ~ 1.30v

You can try 191x21 so you get the magic 4GHz, your max safe temp is 85c, don't exceed that, and you can bump vcore a little
 
You should use intel burn test to check true stability, it will get your cpu a good 10 degrees hotter than p95. To much voltage will cook your chip at load.

Sometimes you've just got to be happy with what you've got, a 3.9GHz i7 is nothing to be sniffed at, even if not an exception clock. Think of it this way, it's now a good 500MHz+ faster than an £800 cpu.
 
If you want a slightly scientific reason as to why you can do some substitution with ohms law and the power law (V=IR & P=IV) to get P=V^2/R, in words the power consumption grows with the square of voltage.
 
Longer scientific explanation. Solid state physics for the win.

It's not an ohmic conductor, so ohms law doesn't strictly apply. The power used is proportional to (speed in mhz/stock speed), and to (overclocked voltage/stock voltage)^2. Efficiency is near enough constant, so yes power consumption and therefore temperature are closely linked to voltage. However this is not the only thing that kills chips.

Heat kills chips by encouraging the lattice impurities to move around, if the carefully placed doping atoms shift too much you've rewired your processor and it doesn't work so well. This is a slow process, solid state diffusion at only 100 degrees takes a very long time. However the chip is fragile, and slightly rewiring it may prove fatal. Rather depends on luck.

There's a feature called electron migration. This is why a chip running at 1.8V will die however cold it is. Inside a processor are lots of little tracks, 45nm apart. Each time the chip is die shrunk, the tracks move closer together and efficiency increases, generally so do transister switching speeds. However, the closer they get, the more likely an electron will jump from one to another.

That there is insulation inbetween makes little difference, electrons will still jump across. It's quantum tunnelling, which is not popular in chips at present. This leads to currents and potentials in the wrong place. Now, this effect is strongly aggravated by voltage, and I'm personally certain by temperature as well. Both are forms of energy the electron can use to jump the gap, so both contribute. The common view in overclocking is that migration is independent of heat. Either the community is wrong, or temperature has no effect on electrons. Either way, the effect definitely does damage, and is tied to voltage.

It is also very strongly tied to (directly proportional to) current, as this is how many electrons you push through. That the D0 chips use less voltage and more current for a given clock speed then C1 suggests they will suffer more from this effect, and will particularly dislike being severely overvolted. However they're still too new for any data to be available.

So, yeah. Quantum tunnelling rapes your chip. However the consensus for a long time has been that it takes both temperature and voltage to kill a chip, and it'll tolerate much higher values of one if the other is kept low. It'll also need less power at lower temperatures for a given stable clock. Enter water, chilled water, thermoelectrics and phase.

The conclusion I think is that its not going faster unless you cool it more or feed it more volts. Bear in mind that you might manage to join the elite few who have managed to kill a processor if you go down this road, but then it'll probably still be good for a couple of years at which point the hex core chips will be out and hopefully affordable. If you can fund replacing it, thrash it :)
 
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Longer scientific explanation. Solid state physics for the win.

It's not an ohmic conductor, so ohms law doesn't strictly apply. The power used is proportional to (speed in mhz/stock speed), and to (overclocked voltage/stock voltage)^2. Efficiency is near enough constant, so yes power consumption and therefore temperature are closely linked to voltage. However this is not the only thing that kills chips.

Heat kills chips by encouraging the lattice impurities to move around, if the carefully placed doping atoms shift too much you've rewired your processor and it doesn't work so well. This is a slow process, solid state diffusion at only 100 degrees takes a very long time. However the chip is fragile, and slightly rewiring it may prove fatal. Rather depends on luck.

There's a feature called electron migration. This is why a chip running at 1.8V will die however cold it is. Inside a processor are lots of little tracks, 45nm apart. Each time the chip is die shrunk, the tracks move closer together and efficiency increases, generally so do transister switching speeds. However, the closer they get, the more likely an electron will jump from one to another.

That there is insulation inbetween makes little difference, electrons will still jump across. It's quantum tunnelling, which is not popular in chips at present. This leads to currents and potentials in the wrong place. Now, this effect is strongly aggravated by voltage, and I'm personally certain by temperature as well. Both are forms of energy the electron can use to jump the gap, so both contribute. The common view in overclocking is that migration is independent of heat. Either the community is wrong, or temperature has no effect on electrons. Either way, the effect definitely does damage, and is tied to voltage.

It is also very strongly tied to (directly proportional to) current, as this is how many electrons you push through. That the D0 chips use less voltage and more current for a given clock speed then C1 suggests they will suffer more from this effect, and will particularly dislike being severely overvolted. However they're still too new for any data to be available.

So, yeah. Quantum tunnelling rapes your chip. However the consensus for a long time has been that it takes both temperature and voltage to kill a chip, and it'll tolerate much higher values of one if the other is kept low. It'll also need less power at lower temperatures for a given stable clock. Enter water, chilled water, thermoelectrics and phase.

The conclusion I think is that its not going faster unless you cool it more or feed it more volts. Bear in mind that you might manage to join the elite few who have managed to kill a processor if you go down this road, but then it'll probably still be good for a couple of years at which point the hex core chips will be out and hopefully affordable. If you can fund replacing it, thrash it :)

I just tried reading that! Before 8am it makes no sense whats so ever!! im usre it probably wont make much differance after 8 either!! ;)
 
interesting indeed, i knew the basics just not in detail.. oh how I wish I was one of these crazy ******** who does physics/science haha, its immensely enticing to me but I dont think my brain could have taken it if I had actually tried to do maths/physics at college to move onto it at uni ^^
 
I'm getting there with it, there are certainly mistakes in the above passage. It's just the best I can currently offer for how voltage kills chips.

I tried to do physics at uni and failed :(
Engineering all the way now :D
 
Nice wordage, JonJ678! Enjoyed the explanation.

I thought I recognised you from the 8800/Quadro thread. Sterling work there! Engineers >> Physicists any day of the week (we actually get stuff done).
 
I'm getting there with it, there are certainly mistakes in the above passage. It's just the best I can currently offer for how voltage kills chips.

I tried to do physics at uni and failed :(
Engineering all the way now :D

I enjoyed reading it and also you put it into terms that's understandable, I have read it before by somone else and he put so muc math into it I couldn't understand it, but yours has done the job:D
 
Don't suppose you've got a link to the mathematical version do you? Would help me work out which parts I've missed the point on
 
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