Is it normal for a CPU to lose overclocking potential after some years of use?

sram

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
Messages
1,699
Hi to all,

I'm talking about the rig you see in my sig. I downclock my cpu during summer because of the relatively high ambient temps I have where I live. Last time, I just didn't bother to go back to my original max overclock. I just kept it at 4.6 GHz which is the auto overclock present in my mobo. Now that I'm building a new kabylake rig soon, I thought it would be a good practice to recover my max overclock specially that it is winter time here. And man I'm surprised, I can barely reach 4.7 GHz fully stable. That's it. I lost the saved BIOS profile which I achieved 5 GHz with, and I don't really remember the exact settings I used.

I know CPU's degrade over time and same goes for overclock-ability, but to this extent? Upping Vcore has no effect. I went as far as 1.41v to make 4.8 GHz stable but no go. Loadline calibration didn't help either. I don't want to go higher. I'm still watercooling my 2700K sandybridge with the same kit you see in my sig. Temps are perfectly okay. Max is 70 C @ full load with 4.7 GHz.

Is this normal??? Is there is anything you recommend me to do??

I don't really care much since this will be a secondary build for the kids, but I'm interested to know and want to keep trying.

Thanks in advance...

Edit: The build is 5 years old.
 
You said you used an auto-overclock for 4.6, did you check what voltage it set the CPU to? They tend to dump way too much voltage.
 
yes this is quite common usually as killer said due to too much voltage for a prolonged period of time. there are other ppl around here saying that they have lost max oc on sb chips and from everything ive seen 1.35v is the max recommended for 24/7 use.
 
PSUs, onboard VRMs, and CPUs can all degrade with temperature and time...so yes, the older the components are, the more slop will appear in their voltage, current and clock regulation, so the less likely you'll be to get good overclocks. How much they will degrade over what time span is a HUGE variable that can't really be predicted, but it will happen.
 
You said you used an auto-overclock for 4.6, did you check what voltage it set the CPU to? They tend to dump way too much voltage.
Now that you mentioned, yes it was pretty high. Like 1.376 if I remember correctly !

That should be it then. I'm killing my own processor :eek:
 
High voltage, high heat, high clocks and amount of time used affect the wear rate.
PSU and motherboard quality/settings can also affect the max overclock and wear rate.

It is expected that the max overclock will deteriorate if your PC has seen lots of use, especially if pushed hard.
Better to think of it as lucky if it can still clock the same.

Start off by changing the heatsink paste, it may have reduced its effectiveness.
 
it looks like I am on auto voltage with the asus auto overclock thing. It boots voltage way too high I think.

Whats the solution, adjust in bios? It looks their windows app isnt displaying the proper voltage adjustment.
 
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