QPI Voltage the key to I7 overclocks?

L

lens pirate

Weaksauce
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Jan 1, 2009
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I have been struggling to get my PC built with top of the line parts to overclock to what everybody else seemed to be getting while keeping the tempuratures in a reasonable range.

Let me say that my CPU WILL run at 4GHZ and will do so at crazy high voltages and heat.
I ran some test were the CPU was still runing fine at over 90C when I stopped the test out of fear.

I tried every thing I could think of and read about. I finally settled in at 3.6GHz with the CPU voltage at 1.275. This allowed me to be all night stable running Linx and Prime95.

If I raised the CPU speed at all with out raiseing voltage from here it would fail every time.
if I dropped the voltage any from here it would fail everytime. It seemed I havd found my sweet spot in terms of Temp/voltage/Clockspeed ratio. I was sort of disappointed.

Then I read a thread were some guy mentions in passing that he was limited by QPI voltage!

As it turns out my QPI voltage which was set to auto was a limting factor!!!!!!!! Woot. I raised my set my QPI voltage to 1.39 and WHAM! all of a sudden
3.8 ghz at a cpu voltage of 1.268 was fine. This lets me run my memory at 1600 hundred and 1.64 volts. Temps stay perfect not going over 74c on the CPU under multiple passes with LINX or IBT and prime 95. Best of all this is all I have tested to so far. There may be more room on the CPU voltage. Which means there may be more room in the Overclock.

Its possible I may have a 4 GHZ cool running box yet! The moral of the story is don't give up...test test test!!!!

Man the I7 processors are amazing and will over clock like crazy but damn... It sure is more complicated than other chipsets of the past.
 
Yeah, OC'ing these i7's is a whole new ballgame. It used to be so simple back when I was clocking my socket A...lol

I caught hell trying to get my 920 to 4ghz and beyond. Once I stopped it from BSOD'ing, I would constantly get errors when running LinX. In my case I just had to up the VCORE 2 ticks.

41ghzstable.jpg
 
Yup, Heatkiller V3.0 Cu, 355 pump, and PA120.3. Temps are pretty good, aren't they?
 
LOL...yeah, these things do get hot. I'm just not looking forward to the summer (I live in the south). Hopefully I'm going to switch over to a xenon once there is a little more info on them/I sell some more of my old system off.
 
Whats the rest of your voltages and settings?

BTW I love Linx I think it is much better than Prime95. It detects and crashes the computer so much faster than Prime does.
 
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AFAIK, QPI/VTT voltage should not exceed 1.35v.

I reached 4.0 GHz when it was set to 1.30v.
 
QPI max is 1.4 at least according to the safety features built into the Asus mother boards. The number turn yellow when you hit max safe voltages.
I stayed under that. But adding some voltage there really helped my O/C
 
PC user you are mistaken some batches need more volts to get it done
mine needs more since i'm usingg the 19x mult to get my bclk up
 
d50man said:
PC user you are mistaken some batches need more volts to get it done
mine needs more since i'm usingg the 19x mult to get my bclk up
Click to expand...

Which voltage are you talking about? QPI/VTT? Vcore?
I'm at 3.8 GHz (19x200) with hyper-threading on. QPI/VTT is at 1.30v and Vcore is at 1.2750 in BIOS. I know that some CPUs need higher Vcores to reach higher clocks. You still should not exceed the recommended QPI/VTT voltage. I've read that that voltage is 1.35v but maybe it's a bit higher than that.
 
1.4v qpi/vtt for me on water with 216 bclk
got alot more in it but i run my box 24/7
 
You don't have a crap chip lol. I have a really bad one

Sitting at 190BLCK with x19 and 1.375 bios Vcore (1.360 in windows) and 1.4 QPI/VTT but it sits nice and very stable with load temps of 59 C on water running Linx and Prime95 simaltaneously.

This is with HT on as well.
 
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