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Vcore - what to believe

Vertigo

Vertigo

Vertigo

Soldato
Joined
28 Dec 2003
Posts
16,726
Firstly, Coretemp shows the VID of my chip at 1.3125, from what I can gather this means this is the nominal voltage the chip should run at - not quite as low as others are getting but hey ho.

Now in the BIOS the stock CPU voltage is also 1.3125 but I've raised this to 1.3725.

In Speedfan when under load the VCore is shown as 1.31 and when idling it drops to 1.13 - CPU-Z also shows the same. My first question is whether the voltage is dropped when Speedstep is active - if so then I never realised it did this - if not then why is the voltage dropping? Second question is whether the 1.31 load reading is accurate as it's quite a bit different from the 1.37 I've set in the BIOS - what to believe?
 
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Voltage does indeed drop with speedstep in action. Don't exactly use speedstep on my E6300, but my Pentium M drops to 0.98V idling and loads at 1.475V for example.

As for your second question, only way to be sure about a voltage is getting out a multimeter. However, 1.31V effective with 1.3725V set in bios indicates a VDroop under load. It's quite common so it's nothing to be particularly worried about.

Mul
 
I'd say it'd be nearer 1.31V, +/- 2% yes. You could disable speedstep and see whether idle voltage is any closer to 1.3725V than the load. If it is, then you do indeed have a Vdroop.

Mul
 
What motherboard is are you using? I have just done a very easy pencil mod on an evga 680i and it has cured both vdrop and vdroop. Took 1 minute lol.
 
It's an Abit IP35 which, having read up a bit, seem to all suffer from rather bad vdroop.

Just tried disabling speedstep and the voltage is about .035 higher at idle than under load. That doesn't account for all of the discrepancy so it's obviously partly down to vdroop and partly the BIOS just not reading right I think.

Basically running my E6850 at 3.6Ghz with the BIOS voltage set to 1.375 and the actual load voltage according to CPU-Z, Abit EQ and Speedfan is actually 1.312 which is actually around stock voltage.

I'm forced to wonder how the motherboard manufacturers get away with this. When this board is left at stock voltage in the BIOS, it's actually supplying lower than the required voltage to the processor when under load. Although most, including mine, won't have a problem with this, some processors undoubtedly will. If you bought such a board and it wouldn't run your processor at stock with all BIOS settings at default you'd be rightly narked.
 
Core Temp shows my Q6600 default vcore to be 1.2875 which seems pretty low to me?
 
Duke said:
Core Temp shows my Q6600 default vcore to be 1.2875 which seems pretty low to me?
Click to expand...

Stock VID of an individual CPU generally varies. For example, at stock speeds my CPU's VID is 1.2500V according to Core Temp. This is infact correct as my motherboard automatically set 1.25V in BIOS which was 1.24V idle and 1.21V load. To be honest, the lower the stock voltage, the better :D

Mul
 
VID should never be higher than 1.3125 as that's the standard rated voltage, if I'm not much mistaken. If it's lower then great - you have more headroom to play with.
 
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