2500k @ 4.6GHz, Vcore min showing as 0.38v

branana

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 10, 2004
Messages
366
My setup is fairly vanilla here
- Maximums IV Gen-Z/Gen 3
- i5 2500k
- Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 Vengeance 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600 CL9-9-9-24
- Corsair H80,
- Silverstone TJ08-E,
- PSU is a Seasonic X660.
- video card is a 6970 MSI.
I'm assuming the Seasonic is more than capable of supplying enough juice to all of this. My Vcore is set to 1.325v, VCCI 1.1v up from 1.05v default, OC is at 100x4.6=4.6ghz.

When I play battlefield 3 extensively, after an hour or two it would blue screen. (twice now, haven't had this computer for long). Granted the crashes were when I had the Vcore at 1.275 and 1.3.

I just ran prime95 last night for about 7.5 hrs with Vcore at 1.325. I ran it for an hour at 1.3 before, there doens't seem to be any problem sides. I was doing the "Blend" test. I kept HWMonitor up, when I got up this morning I saw that it was showing that my Vcore-min at some point was 0.38V, and max was 1.34V.

Is there a setting I missed, is my PSU faulty or is HWMonitor showing something glitchy. Note: prime95 was still going strong at this point despite the V-core dip.
 
Run 20 passes of lynx or Intel burn test and see if it holds up. Keep an eye on your temps because they are more stressful than Prime. Finally make sure you click on max memory usage.
 
The 0.38 was probably just a reporting error. The lowest it should go (idle) is around 1 volt (0.95 or so).
 
Here is a screen cap of 7.5 hrs of prime95

Image%202012-01-16%20at%207.20.22%20PM.png

http://cl.ly/DNqu
 
Yeah, it just lost the signal at some point in there - all the mins went to essentially zero. You can also monitor temps with CoreTemp or RealTemp.
 
With HWInfo it doesn't seem to be showing those "zeros" as Minimums. My Min seems normal definitely above the 1.325V I've set it to aim for. Core temps hover around 60-62Celsius during stretches of prime95 blend.

Since it seems like it's prime95 stable, were my crashes more related to the video card drawing power in addition to the CPU (as my 2 crashes came from playing battlefield 3 for a couple of hours). My 6970 came pre-OC'ed at 940MHz.
 
Could be power related, or it could be heat related - a long gaming session where both the CPU and GPUs are running at max is going to generate a lot more heat inside the case - so that could have caused the crash. Or it could just be a software/driver error that is unrelated to the hardware. I've had occasional crashes in BF3, even though I've never had a crash anywhere else.
 
It was full on BSOD crashes, not just BF3 crashing. Another possibility is heat, in this silverstone case the video card ends up facing a stupid way

This is the airflow setup I got, maybe the video card ended up in the most airflow-awkward spot?
Image%202012-01-16%20at%2011.08.46%20PM.png
 
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