What counts as a stable overclock

Zairs

Zairs

Zairs

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Trying to get my I5 760 stable, seems to keep crashing around the 3 and a half hour mark on prime.
I'm doing a custom test using 3600 ram.
The setting I'm testing at the moment are
21 x 199
1.375v v core
1.16875 imc
Ram is unclocked to 1200mhz
2.15hrs on testing so far
 
If you can use the PC as you normally would, with no stability issues including BSODs and other crashes, that's your stable overclock. You dont need to spend hours testing in prime, you're just torching the chip needlessly. A quick 10 mins blast will be fine, but the best way to know is to just us it.
 
I did have a higher clock will lower voltage for about 6 months and it never crashed, but I think I'm testing it more this time round
 
A stable overclock is one that runs as stable as stock. This means no errors, crashes or BSOD. If you can run prime 95 for 8 hours and there is no errors then you can say it stable enough (its the error checking part of this real world application that is useful). Run programs like crysis 2 and 3 to test graphics and memtest to test ram. Rmember data corruption is a slow death like a cancer. Handbrake is also good for finding BSOD at high CPU loads. Games that like to crash, BSOD or red screen, payday 2, 2033 last light, crysis 2 and 3. Also check temps are they normal? Run CPUID HWMonitor, what is your max, your min or the average? Are these safe?
 
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Personally i use OCCT with AV Linpack on, i've had stable overclock with Prime 95 and went to use OCCT with Linpack and had a BSOD so i tend to judge a stable overclock on that!
 
Doing everything that it can do at stock without the introduction of issues, if it errors, crashes, overheats, throttles then it's an unstable overclock imo. If a game or something regularly has problems then the best thing to do is set your overclock back to stock and see if it fixes it.
 
MorleySA said:
Personally i use OCCT with AV Linpack on, i've had stable overclock with Prime 95 and went to use OCCT with Linpack and had a BSOD so i tend to judge a stable overclock on that!
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New Prime95 supports AVX and I would go for a prolonged period (at least 12 hours, preferably 24) of Blend test and then OCCT Linpack + AVX for 6-8 hours and it should be more than enough. I have found memory errors are trickier to catch though.
zx128k said:
A stable overclock is one that runs as stable as stock.
Click to expand...

This is more or less impossible. Chips are tested so they can operate for a certain uptime and will fail from time to time even on stock frequencies. Overclocking a chip brings this uptime down but if it is say 3 months without overclock and falls down to month and a half (which in percentage is 50% lower, wow), you will not notice if you restart more frequently than that. :) It does not mean it's not stable, just the "rock solid" term a lot of people use is quite a fiasco. :)
 
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Stock is where most if not all the cpu's intel manufactures will be stable. Some of those cpu's can go higher and still be stable. Its a sample of what most of the cpu's can run at with acceptable wastage levels.

If 95% do 3.5Ghz at a say 1.2 volts and could last 5 years at normal running levels then that is what intel will run at. The CPU's that cannot meet the grade are sold at a lower price as a different product. This does not mean that some will not run at much high frequency and still be stable. We may find that a smaller and smaler percentage will run stable at higher and higher frequencies. It is indeed possible but not for every cpu. With testing intel may sell the parts that run at 4Ghz say 20% of the told amount produced for a higher price, indeed some of these may run at much higher frequencies but because intel needs enough stock to meet demand they cannot sell faster parts. So intel bases the max frequency they sell based on how likely they will be able to meet the demand and keep prices stable. A price to high and they will lose market share and to low in price means they lose money.
This is were overclocking starts, we get the most out of the chips that can go higher.
 
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