E8400 @ 4.5ghz I love this thing!!!

[soulesschild]

OCCT is no longer what I'd consider reliable. My original 1.296vcore for 4Ghz (fairly decent for C0's) passed 2hour OCCT easily (which means it passes Prime even easier).

Enter L4D - after 4hours continuous play, I'm treated to the first BSOD. Mind you I had been playing TF2 and CS:S for hours at a time since Feb 2008 on what I considered a stable overclock. After first I thought it was my RAM. Nope. Changed divider, discovered (lol) that this it does 500Mhz easily, so not the RAM getting flakey. Next was to test vcore. Bumped it up two steps.

Done I thought. Nope. Treated to a Windows file BSOD after 2 hours of L4D. Again, this is showing that CPU-based stress tools do nothing to prove 3D stable. Mind you, with the vcore bump I tested up to 2hours OCCT stable to 458FSB (4.122Ghz). L4D was failing at only 4Ghz!

Finally I figured the only thing left to bump was NB voltage. VTT, both in my past experience and notes (and retested again) does not help stability for the e8400's, particularly at such low clocks. Bumped my NB voltage 2 steps (1.37v to 1.42v). Haven't had a BSOD since. So yeah, OCCT 2 hours up to 9x458, but BSODing in L4D at 9x445 (4Ghz)?

CPU tools tell you jack about real world stability. 3D stable is the ONLY thing that matters if you actually want to use the damn thing. Forget about the e-peen, suicide shots of SuperPI. Ask them if it's 3D stable - I guarantee you 99% of those SS are bullshit for real-world use.

You do realize 2 hrs of OCCT is not enough right? A fully stable OC will pass the following:

8-12 hrs of OCCT
24hrs of Prime
25-50 passes of IBT

 

[fubar569]

You do realize 2 hrs of OCCT is not enough right? A fully stable OC will pass the following:

8-12 hrs of OCCT
24hrs of Prime
25-50 passes of IBT

It depends really...running any ONE of these utilities is not enough to test for stability...then again running all 3 perhaps is a waste of time in some cases...

i think it's agreed that you need to use multiple tools to test for stability...the problem is for how long?

25-50 passes of IBT clearly isn't enough as i had a machine that would pass well over 100 on some runs but still would BSOD/restart/crash...the problem was a bad memory module which IBT didn't clearly find...it took prime95 to make that one surface as it seems to be MUCH more memory dependent...and it surfaced within the hour every time...

so...a plethora of tools? yes...you ned to use multiple ones...
putting a set timeframe on them? thats the hard part...

 

[Riccochet]

Really, 48-96 hours of Prime, 24-48 hours of OCCT and 1-300 passes of IBT is what you need. LOL...j/k.

Honestly, you're not crunching data for NASA. Personally I give it 20 runs of IBT and a good 4-8 hours of Prime. If that passes, temps are acceptable and I don't get crashes in games/apps I use that's stable enough for me and my day-to-day use. Some people are too concerned about calling their system 100% stable, which, in theory, is unattainable anyways. Your 300 passes of IBT might not produce anything, but what if it would have on 301. Or if you left prime run for another hour. Personally, I don't have all week to wait for my PC. One day of testing and tweaking. If you want to call your system 100% rock solid stable, don't overclock. You never know, tomorrow someone could release a stress test that BSOD's your rig that's 5000 pass IBT, 2 month Prime stable, in a matter of seconds.

 

[Jared701]

Really, 48-96 hours of Prime, 24-48 hours of OCCT and 1-300 passes of IBT is what you need. LOL...j/k.

Honestly, you're not crunching data for NASA. Personally I give it 20 runs of IBT and a good 4-8 hours of Prime. If that passes, temps are acceptable and I don't get crashes in games/apps I use that's stable enough for me and my day-to-day use. Some people are too concerned about calling their system 100% stable, which, in theory, is unattainable anyways. Your 300 passes of IBT might not produce anything, but what if it would have on 301. Or if you left prime run for another hour. Personally, I don't have all week to wait for my PC. One day of testing and tweaking. If you want to call your system 100% rock solid stable, don't overclock. You never know, tomorrow someone could release a stress test that BSOD's your rig that's 5000 pass IBT, 2 month Prime stable, in a matter of seconds.

totally agree. I rarely will test over 6 hours on prime and if that comes out ok and I get no crashes in games then I'm fine with my system. Even your systems you claim are 100% solid can still BSOD. You are running software which will sometimes fuck up. Even stable hardware with unstable software can BSOD... You are never 100% certain that your system will NEVER crash.

 

[Mav451]

Yeah I learned the hard way.

I learned early on with P95 in 2003, that shit passed 24hours before a LAN. Guess what happens at the LAN? You wanna talk embarassment if front of your peers? And yeah, OCCT at 2 hours is probably only good for e-peen benchmarking, but still not enough for true 3D stability. You don't have to tell me that twice.

As for plethora of tools - I wouldn't mind seeing an all-in-one app take care of this. Though it seems OCCT's beta with GPU tools is starting to delve into the "3D stable" concept that I'm adamant about.

 

[Arcygenical]

Hah, we'll see what you think when you're in the middle of a 20 page page paper and your computer locks up in MSWord because your OC isn't completely stable.

Uhm, if you write 20 pages of a paper without saving every 100 words or so, you should run OCCT and IBT on your goddamned brain

 

[Hayden123]

Uhm, if you write 20 pages of a paper without saving every 100 words or so, you should run OCCT and IBT on your goddamned brain

ROTFLMFAO

Good point I didn't even think about that. The only way you would lose the info is if you didn't save your work.

Besides a 20 page paper should have been done not in one sitting (unless he waited till the night before).
Procrastination is a horible thing

Mr.Face kinda got a point though if he don't want to run tests so be it. It's his pc

(it will just piss him off when he playing crysis and all the sudden BSOD or something like that)

 

[MrFace]

ROTFLMFAO

Good point I didn't even think about that. The only way you would lose the info is if you didn't save your work.

Besides a 20 page paper should have been done not in one sitting (unless he waited till the night before).
Procrastination is a horible thing

Mr.Face kinda got a point though if he don't want to run tests so be it. It's his pc

(it will just piss him off when he playing crysis and all the sudden BSOD or something like that)

Maybe some people have different ideas of what is "stable"? My old system would actually crash when I was unstable. This new one is surprisingly sturdy even when it's not passing Prime for hours on end. I can GAME for hours on end, which is what I do with the computer.

I downclocked it though to 4.35, I dont need anything faster really and the heat is unnecessary. Hell I may put it back to 4.0ghz and tighten up the mem timings

 

[sirmonkey1985]

you should be able to take the memory off 1:1 cpu:ram timing and tighten the memory that way.. though i havent overclocked on an intel processor since the p2 300 days.. im not the best person to say this but from what ive read on intel overclocking it should be pretty close to the same as AMD overclocking.. though im sure some one will correct me if im wrong..

 

[MrFace]

you should be able to take the memory off 1:1 cpu:ram timing and tighten the memory that way.. though i havent overclocked on an intel processor since the p2 300 days.. im not the best person to say this but from what ive read on intel overclocking it should be pretty close to the same as AMD overclocking.. though im sure some one will correct me if im wrong..

You can't go lower than 1:1 so I can't downclock the memory to get tighter timings. I'm already below the FSB spec on my memory so I should be able to tighten it up as is.

 

[Khaydarin]

Is it easier to get a higher overclock with a lower multiplier and higher FSB....hence people wishing for more than DDR2-800 RAM?

 

[sirmonkey1985]

You can't go lower than 1:1 so I can't downclock the memory to get tighter timings. I'm already below the FSB spec on my memory so I should be able to tighten it up as is.

lol see.. told ya i havent overclocked with an intel processor in for ever.. things have changed a lot since the p2 days of intel processors.. i think ill just stick with my amd processors for now..