Less is more...

[CalVic]

Hey!


So, I haven't been around in a long while. According to the site "You last visited: 26-11-18 at 01:17 PM". Long story short, my life has been -turned upside down and my system has been powered off for over a year.



That was until Monday. Funnily enough, the system failed to boot. Had a few issues with the overclock that was applied but was able to get that sorted and reinstalled Windows.



However, I've had a major issue with cooling on this machine and I have been misdiagnosing it for years. Essentially, 4790k 4.6Ghz @ 1.23v was absolutely cooking at 100c on a H110i GTX under RealBench and no amount of thermal paste and re-mounting the block would sort it. The chip would crash every so often under gaming and I said to myself this chip is approx 5 years old and has been 'clocked since day one. I figured the TIM between the IHS and die had become crap and that I was to delid.



Until I decided to throw some reverse psychology in regards to the voltage. My nominal voltage under stock clocks is approximately 1.088v, with turbo adding around to a total of 1.12v give or take.



Decided to boot 4.6Ghz at 1.15v and temps under full load were 69 - 74c and funnily enough stable as for over 2 hours, compared to 1.23v insta BSOD.



I suspect that this chip was binned at a lower voltage to the average, and is why my temperatures do not align with those at a higher voltage. Here's me having instability issues and pumping more voltage into it and having major issues with cooling at circa 1.22v+ on a H110i GTX.



When in actual fact it needed way less!



Funny how multiple years of trying to work it out and then I leave it for a very long time and solve it shortly after.

[hotrob]

Gone are the days of "just keep dumping more voltage into it until it's stable", and that makes things a lot more interesting in some ways.