offset X hard set voltage

[tomr]

Hello, I´ve got 2500K CPU + P8P67 PRO motherboard and I cannot decide, when I overclock, if I should set voltage manually or if I should let offset option enabled to let system itself manage the voltage.

What do you think? If I would let offset enabled, OC would seems unbelievably easy to me... Man just change ratio of all cores to demanded frequency and everything else would take care about itself! Do I miss something? Is there any hitch?

Thank you for your replies!

 

[Tortuga]

If you take off the voltage restrictions, it will choose the voltages it needs to achieve the overclock. Once you find a good overclock, I would start knocking some voltage off little by little till it becomes unstable, then add a little. Sometimes a board can give it too much voltage, more than it needs, and thats not good. So just tweak with it, to hopefully make it run cooler, less power. Also are you trying to overclock just the turbo mode? Pretty much everything does sort of take care of itself.

 

[tomr]

Thank you Tortuga for your reply. Well, thing like that...

I OCked CPU manualy, but it was stable (testing with Int.burn test and Prime95) only at 1.345V! Problem was, that when I did set it hard, voltage was still on 1.345 V, even if frequency drop to 1.6 GHz (most of time), because of ASUS + Intel automatic power management.

Now I test Prime95 on offset mode more than 10 hours, it is stable and voltage didn´t exceeded 1.335 V (most of time it is on 1.32 V). So it seems to me, that offset mode is much more gentle to CPU than hard setting, or do you thing that hard setting is really better?

I experienced only 2 problems, which I don´t know why appeared... Would you have any explanation for me...?

1) when I did set voltage to 1.345 V and ran Prime95, the max temp. was 56°C. But now, max temp. is 63°C (most of time under 60°C, but still higher than the first time), which is weird, because now is voltage just 1.32 most of time!). Do you know, why is that? (when voltage is lower, temperature should be lower as well, isn´t it?)

2) I monitor voltage and the recorder shows me also some "+3.3V" and "+5V" and "+12V" (anyone knows, what this is??) Anyway... two times these voltage dropped down like crazy => +5V dropped from 5V to 0V at 3h30min of running Prime95 and +3.3V dropped to 0.1 V at 9h00min of the running. What does this mean? Is anything wrong?

Thank you for possible explanation!

 

[Tortuga]

Hmm, that is interesting. For overclocking purposes I would make sure to disable the speedstep in bios. There are different reasons for the voltage fluctuations. Disabling speedstep will take one off the table. Also turbo mode might have something to do with the voltage flux. Are you adjusting the main cpu multiplier, or does the bios have the turbo multiplier option?

 

[tomr]

Well, I opened all four cores and set multiplier for all (= each of them) to 45. Of course turbo is on and as well CPU frequency may drop to 1.6 GHz, if CPU is not stressed. But I think these things are irrelevant since I run Prime95 and CPU is stressed nonstop now. I use CPU-Z as monitoring tool and it shows me 4500 MHz constantly. So these two drops are real mystery to me. However, system didn´t crash and RealTemp monitoring tool shows, that max temperature of CPU was 63°C.

Well, just you tell me, what happened...!?

PS: and why is temperature higher with lower voltage (in offset mode) then it was when I set it hard to 1.345 V? Don´t you have any explanation?