Core #3 is the weakest link?

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prasvt

Gawd
Joined
Dec 8, 2005
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557
So whenever I try to run Prime95 @ 3.6 ghz, regardless of how much Vcore I throw at it (well say, 1.545 and below), Core #3 fails pretty quickly. Prime95 will show 100 errors (calls them warnings) real quick ("sumout" or something). At 3.5 ghz, 1.505 Vcore, 1.31Vtt, 1.52 NB, the machine is rock solid in prime95 for a couple of hours (ie. I stopped it just now). Is it just that the 3rd core hits the wall earlier than the other 3? I mean ...if I decided to watercool everything tomorrow, would that 3rd core still top out at 3.5?

I saw some discussion on another site and that seemed to be the general consensus...just wondering what you guys think.
 
What about temps? Was core3 the hottest? It might be uneven bases causing it to overheat earlier then others.
 
Most likely, if Core 3 hit its limit, then water cooling isn't going to help. Watercooling can lower your temps, but if temperature isn't your issue then it won't help much. You're already running some very high voltages and in order to get it stable at 3.6 you would likely have to add more, which I wouldn't recommend.
 
Yeah, temps are stable across the 4 cores - mid 60s using the small fft test in prime95 @ 3.6, varying by maybe 2 degrees each core max. But core 3 fails immediately while the other cores run. So for this chip, I think 3.5 is the limit (390 x 9). I just ran prime95 for 7 hours and it held up fine at 3.5. If nothing else, core 4 tends to vary 1 degree more than the others, (right now idle at 3.5, 34-35-33-37).

But yah, aethelwulf I kind of came to the same conclusion. If temperature isn't the issue, water cooling won't really do much. In any case, 3.5 is pretty fast so I can live with that. I can always get faster ram at some point. Right now, my ram is running at 778 - the next divider up is 936 and I was getting some random windows errors when I oc'd it. I do think the ram has some headroom (newegg reviewers have oc'd ocz vista upgrade ddr2 800 past 900) so I may try 437 x 8 or 350 x 10 .

Anyway thanks for the input. Alright, time to prepare for my CSC phone interview. peace.
 
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