Max safe CPU wattage?

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
Joined
26 Jun 2009
Posts
3,023
Location
Sheffield
Hey, according to this:

http://www.antec.outervision.com/

With my current CPU on my max overclock, my CPU Wattage is 185W, up from 140W stock.

It strikes me that this could be putting a large strain on my motherboard, seeing as I believe it's only designed to deliver up to 140w?

It's back to stock now because I haven't used it for anything taxing for a good while and couldn't see the point in running it at those higher voltages 24/7, but I've been considoring overclocking again and overclocking the HT link and maybe RAM aswell just to see the effect over stock.

Just worried really if it's risking my motherboard much?

This is my board by the way: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-366-AS&tool=3
 
That'll just give me a rough idea of the temperature though, I'm more worried about the motherboard having to deliver 45w more than it's supposed to?
 
It's the fets which would be struggling, and they're the part of the board likely to die if too much power is drawn. Since they have a heatsink this is probably not a concern. If you're stable at the overclock then that strongly suggests the motherboard is fine too.

I think the phenom 1 quad core was the famous one for killing motherboards when overclocked. Yours is probably ok.

If you can tell me stock voltage (vid/default/whatever it shows in cpu-z at defaults) and the overclocked voltage (what cpu-z shows during stress testing) I can offer an alternative estimate of power used for you.

TDP of your processor is 125W or 140W depending on which version of the 965 you've got. Assuming you've checked which,
power usage approximates 140 * 3.8/3.4 * (current vcore/vid)^2 in W.
 
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I might give it a go then, if I do then I plan on making two profiles, one stock and one overclock so I can flick between them.

The stock vcore is 1.45v, the highest I overclocked to was 1.55v, but on this OC profile it'll only be used every so often, so I'll probably go to 1.6v, will probably attempt to get to 4ghz with it.
 
I believe the phenom 2 is very temperature dependent, as more voltage makes it hotter you're likely to get much worse clock speeds at 1.6V than you would at 1.5V. Just something to bear in mind, try lower vcore as well as higher. 1.45V seems really high for stock.

Expect 140 * 3.8/3.4 * (1.55/1.45)^2=179W. TDP is a crude value, and likely to be a slight overestimate.
 
It's cool enough I reckon, at 1.55v it tops out at about 50C.

I just worked out with your formula, 4.0ghz at 1.65v would be 213w, so it will definately be a rarely used profile. :P
 
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