Voltage Fluctuation

[retardude48]

Hi,
These are my specs for my computer.
- ASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz
- XCLIO STABLEPOWER 460W ATX V2.2 460W Power Supply
- Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
- EVGA 256-P2-N516-RX GeForce 7800GT 256MB
- Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

My concern right now is that I am overclocking the my cpu from stock 2.4GHz to 3.1GHz and the voltage reported by CPU-Z says its ranging from ~1.36V - 1.424V. From what I know, I have not changed or messed with any voltage controls in the bios. It seems to me that the voltage reported is a big fluctuation. Note that the higher voltage occurs during slight load, (like running Firefox). Also the temperature reported is not hot. It ranges from 32C to 35C. Should I be worried by the fluctuation in voltage or is this normal?

 

[Mithent]

It's generally a good idea to set a voltage in the BIOS rather than letting the motherboard handle it automatically; motherboards have a habit of overvolting on automatic (once at 2.6Ghz on my Q6600 my P5E started putting 1.35V into the CPU, which it really didn't need).

Without knowing what your board is trying to use it's hard to say. There are two potential factors which will lead to a drop in voltage: you have SpeedStep (EIST) turned on, which drops the voltage and multiplier when idle to save power/heat, and/or you're experiencing Vdroop, a decrease in voltage supplied to the CPU while under load (which is normal and fine). This could explain why your highest voltages are at slight load, when it's not stepped down but there's not a strong Vdroop effect?

The overall fluctuation is higher than my Q6600's range, though. I'm not sure how good that PSU is, though. My feeling is that if it's stable then nothing can be too wrong, but I'd try bringing the voltage down a bit by setting it manually.