I7 4Ghz OC Stability...

Soldato
Joined
12 Jul 2009
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4,878
My 4Ghz OC is stable with 12hrs small fft prime95. Is also stable on IBT 10passes at vhigh stress and is also stable with 2 hours linpack. max temps are 75c load.

Why then will it not pass OCCT, I get an error after about 30mins. Its very frustrating, how stable is stable and is occt a better indicator or not..?
 
I've been having problems with blend, but have had to change to different memory timings and 191x21 instead of 200x20. upshot is vcore is lower.

I've got a bit more tweaking to do then I'll go for the 6 hour blend.
 
Yeah that is what I found, I tested right up to 1.35v for 20 x 200 and it still wasn't stable, but when I tried 21 x 191 I got the Vcore down to 1.264v and it was perfectly stable..

But now I have a brand new processor, so I will have to go through all that tweaking again to find stable settings.. oh the joys of o/cing!!! :D

My 200x20 was stable on everything except blend with a vcore of 1.25v

ibt, smallfft, linpack the lot, but p95blend would fail on one or more cores after 15mins.

aaaagggggghhhhh, makes me mental.
 
Still cant seem to get prime blend stable for more than about 4 hours. Passes occt test now but prime95 blend crashes after 4-5 hours.

Bulldog, I wont get a stable OC with that low a vcore at 4Ghz, and I notice your memory is massively underclocked. 191x19..?, isnt that 3.8Ghz with turbo on.
 
Make sure your motherboard (gigabyte ex58-ud5) got 5 blue lights (next to memory ram) and nothing elses (no yellow, green or red light) as it mean stable overclocked and stable voltages.

I got the five blue lights on for the overclock, 1 green for the memory voltage which is 1.64v, and there is 1 green by the cpu.
 
Finally passed OCCT with flying colours, seems it was a memory timing problem and qpi/vtt volts. vcore is set at 1.216 and it all seems cool. My VID is 1.1625 by the way so not quite as good as 1.14 of bulldog, lucky chap.
 
Got a nice stable OC now thankx to Bulldog explaining the motherboard lights.
Passed OCCT, Linpack, IBT on maximum 16threads, and 2 hours Prime95 Blend. Used 191x19 and got the memory timings down to 8,8,8,24,2T with only 1.5v, and you can see the rest in the pic.......



stableblend.jpg
 
@Gaidin, 2 hours of Prime Blend test isn't enough imo... I like to leave the Blend Test running overnight to make sure I have a stable o/c, as I have seen it run for several hours before it decides to crash...

It's still going, 10 hours and counting. It's stable enough.
 
Did you look at the link? LLC forces a steady voltage regardless of load, attempting to emulate a perfect voltage source. However it does not have a perfect voltage source available, so when the load changes, the voltage stays 'constant' but rings around the mean value.

The voltage set in the bios is never meant to be a 'target' voltage, it's the voltage intended when completely idle. When drawing more current, the voltage across the processor decreases much like any other circuit component. Intel expect and design for this. By enabling llc you are forcing the voltage to run out of intels spec for the comfort of being able to type in a lower number, the penalty is that the ringing drives far higher voltages through the chip when transitioning from idle to load. I believe you can even watch the voltage doing this using everest, the resolution is sufficient to guess at how high the voltage spikes.

If you were really keen, I believe fourier analysis would allow you to model this. If you'd rather put your fingers in your ears and sing loudly, happy in the knowledge that you've set a lower number in the bios, then do so.


As a more intuitive way of looking at it, in case the graphs are not immediately obvious by themselves. Heat and low voltage combined kill processors, either by itself doesn't matter much. So with llc disabled, you get a higher voltage when idle. However with it enabled or disabled, you need the same voltage under load to maintain stabilty.

So all llc permits is a lower idle voltage, which is when the chip is cool and the voltage doesn't matter anyway. The penalty is driving large transient voltages through the chip, and presumably working the motherboard power circuitry a lot harder. The former is dangerous, the latter surely hurts stabilty rather than helps.

So what your saying is that when I just disabled the LLC in my bios that my cpu didnt use the same 1.232v idle regardless, and then drop under load to 1.8v and then to 1.2v to make my OC completely unstable.
And when I re-enabled it, funnily enough the cpu still uses 1.232v idle, but drops to 1.216v under load making my OC stable again.
Oh, and I must misunderstood my motherboard manual when it says it controls vdroop to keep the voltage more constant. No spikes in other words.


within the passage quoted is this

" Finally, let's take one last real-world look at the consequences of removing Vdroop. ASUS' implementation of this feature, labeled as Load Line Calibration and included with their latest line of motherboards, is particularly worthy of our attention for a number of reasons. The first is that setting lower voltages with this option enabled actually results in a condition in which the CPU voltage under load is higher than the idle voltage."

LLC as implemented by the Gigabyte UD5 mobo doesnt do this, it allows vdroop, it doesnt eliminate it. It also doesnt raise the cpu voltage under load, in fact the opposite is true and it keeps that voltage at a stable voltage depending upon the load on the cpu, dont use LLC and then leave the vcore on auto or anything silly like that and it will help your OC and will not damage your cpu as you suggest. Although it would seem that ASUS's implementation gives a constant voltage no matter what load is going through the cpu which seems strange.
 
Well, no, they wouldn't be. Cpu-z wont spot it either, nor will a dmm. An oscilloscope would do it beautifully, or everest takes a fair shot at it.

If I've encouraged you to try it, I'm pleased. The links in my last post may be persuasive even if I'm not. Good luck!


Well, it seems that I only had to increase the vcore to 1.275 (was 1.25) in the bios to
get the same voltages under load that made my system stable with LLC enabled. I think I'm starting to see what is happening, With LLC enabled the voltage when under load is constant even though the load may not be, whereas with it disabled the voltage matches the load thus eliminating the spike when going from contant load to constant idle voltages and as all this happens in milliseconds cpuz or mobo warnings cant pick up the spike quickly enough.

If you do a prime95 cool down test, I think you can see this happening as the different loads give different voltages as the load decreases, yet with LLC enabled the voltage stays the same until the cpu is completely idle and then increases.

Also an offshot of this is lower temps at load by a few degrees, or so preliminary tests show. Will have to do a 6hr Prime95 blend to see for sure, but I'm confident it will be fine.

Am I correct in my assumptions...?
 
Thanx for the advice Jon, I'll leave the LLC disabled and see what happens. Almost completed an hour OCCT with no problems. Normally if there is a problem that fails with about 30mins max.
 
Did you read the review in the link. They put a dmm on it and found no spiking either. I understand the concept now, but if you are using low voltages then spikes are not going to be such a problem. I7 intel specs are 0.8v to 1.375v vid range and a maximum voltage of 1.55v. So with x58 mobo's using better caps and voltage regulation than before the spiking should be only within a 0.2v range under the worst circumstances. I'm still researching this, but pretty much everyone seems to enable LLC with i7 chips but not 45nm quads. Which could be something to do with the way I7's are put together or interact with the voltage etc.
 
Not a chance that the ringing is less than 0.2V. Where do you get the 1.55V maximum from?

A dmm won't detect it. If you've ever used one you'd know they don't exactly update thousands of times a second. The voltage regulation circuitry is improved on x58 boards, but this in no way changes that the voltage accross the processor will drop with load, and that llc forces it not so, so forcing an increase in the voltage fed to the processor which is what causes the ringing which puts me off using it.

There may very well be thousands and thousands of people out there using llc with i7. They can still all be wrong, especially so on these boards where a hell of a lot of them bought it preoverclocked.

The arguement is whether or not the ringing is harmful enough to matter, not whether or not it exists. And the arguement against llc is that just setting higher voltages at idle solves the same problem but doesn't introduce the ringing



Straight from the intel spec sheets......

vid.jpg


transientlimits.jpg


Next door chap had a look at the anand graph and said it used arbitary figures not real world ones and that transients are unpredictable and you get them whenever electrical load changes whether you use vdroop or not. Oh and he says that he does know how quickly a cpu changes it voltage as he works for a semicondutor company. He said the amount of voltage in the chip will limit the transient spike and it is extremely unlikely that it would exceed the limits of the cpu and if you are using voltages which are well below the spec maximum you have nothing to worry about. Its only if you are overvolting or close to the maximum that it would cause a problem.

But anyway he also agreed that if you can get low voltages/temps anyway there is no reason to enable it. I now have a stable 4Ghz OC with 1.275v with LLC off so am pretty happy.
 
That's what I concludes as well. I have found that my stable load voltage is actually lower without LLC enabled thus temps are a degree or so lower under load. I ran IBT 16threads 20 passes on vhigh and occt and had no problems. So it's LLC off unless someone can prove it's better on.
 
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