12V rail is reading 11.79 in bios. Should I increase the voltage?

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acrh2

Weaksauce
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Sep 29, 2004
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I just got a PC Power and Cooling Turbo-cool 510 Deluxe. The bios is reading the 12V rail volatage at 11.73-11.79. I'm overclocking quite a bit: p4 3.4E @ 3.8 GHz, 4 sticks of ddr-500 ram, Epox 4pca3+ mobo. Should I increase the voltage? I know this PS has 2 holes to adjust those voltages but I have no idea on how to procede.
Please help.
 
Get a cheap multimeter to test the rails....the motherboard's voltage sensors are always off. I dunno why, but that's just how it is...my board will say it's 11.92 but directly from a molex it reads 12.01.
 
you are seeing the loss in voltage because the voltage is being carried through all of the parts of the motherboard it's loosing steam. Kinda like vcore or almost anything other voltage setting. The motherboard will loose voltage, i would adjust the rails but do it in small increments, watch your temps on everything, and consult your manual.
 
Ran 2 instances of prime95 and ATI tool (to load the video).
One of the instances got an error after 2 hours, while the other one kept going for another hour, until I stopped it.
Is it stable? Unstable? Stable enough?

I will also get a multimeter. Thanks.
 
If prime95 fails, your pc is unstable. Though you'll probably be utterly fine in any game you play.

but you still have a problem. Ram plays an important part in prime95, even if you're just doing the cpu stress test.
 
acrh2 said:
I just got a PC Power and Cooling Turbo-cool 510 Deluxe. The bios is reading the 12V rail volatage at 11.73-11.79. I'm overclocking quite a bit: p4 3.4E @ 3.8 GHz, 4 sticks of ddr-500 ram, Epox 4pca3+ mobo. Should I increase the voltage? I know this PS has 2 holes to adjust those voltages but I have no idea on how to procede.
Please help.
Click to expand...
ARCH2 that is very common readings for the PC Power and Cooling 510 models. I have the 510 SLI and have spoken to quite a few owners of the variants of the 510, all of them have 11.77ish V on the 12v rail using this PSU. Having tested with a DMM myself, I havent seen it drop one bit even when the SLI kicks in.

I think you're fine.
 
This begs me to ask the question. If the board reports the readings after its gone through the board, would it not be better to try to keep it at 12V with onboard readings so that even at the lowest point the board still gets 12V? What about overvolting it a little, like 12.25 or something. Would that add any stability to it? I haven't tweaked my OCZ because all voltages were in spec but if I could increase my OC or stability with a little more voltage, pretty easy to turn a screw driver!
 
Personally, I don't trust the motherboard readings, as (usually) the 3.3v reading on the boards are usually spot on, whereas the 5v and 12v leave something to be desired...electric currents don't diminish that quickly, as it's not one big ass circle (for the most part). I'm not plugging my multimeter into the front of a supposed "loop", I actually put it after other parts and check more than one plug...they all read the same, which are higher than what the motherboard says.

More or less, you can't really trust any motherboard sensors anymore. :p
 
tsuehpsyde said:
Personally, I don't trust the motherboard readings, as (usually) the 3.3v reading on the boards are usually spot on, whereas the 5v and 12v leave something to be desired...electric currents don't diminish that quickly, as it's not one big ass circle (for the most part). I'm not plugging my multimeter into the front of a supposed "loop", I actually put it after other parts and check more than one plug...they all read the same, which are higher than what the motherboard says.

More or less, you can't really trust any motherboard sensors anymore. :p
Click to expand...


i agree... but i dont think it should matter where u plug the multimeter into... its all theoretically the same spot, or node... all the devices are connected to their respective rails in parallel... regardless of what it looks like... basic circuit fundamentals show that the voltage should be the same across all those devices... so i dont think itll matter where you probe your psu... if the devices are drawing that much current, then you will see a volt drop at every place you measure the voltage, and they should all be the same.. but if you did get different readings im interested to know.
 
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