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does voltage matter if temps are low?

hawtdawg

hawtdawg

Golden Member
I have an alienware laptop with a qx9300 (quadcore, 2.53ghz) that i just got. The stock voltage is 1.165, i can overclock it to 3.33 by bumping the voltage to 1.325. The temps are good, only one core broke 50c after playing SC2 for about an hour. I know that upping the voltage can reduce the life of a CPU, but I didn't know if this was due to increased voltage by itself, or due to temps. Should i be good to run it like this regularly?
 
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Upping the voltage will decrease life, no matter the temps. But you've made on a small change, so don't expect it to die anytime soon. You've maybe reduced the life from 10 years to 5, and it's more than likely you'll update before then.
 
just keep it under 1.4 V, for a yorkfield, and you should be fine. Keep in mind, you may be able to go farther with that vcore. Keep pushing that fsb! Or multi, I believe you have an unlocked chip.
 
with A laptop you have to be careful. Normally cooling isn't the greatest. If you NEVER do anything more intense than SC2 (which isn't that demanding of a game due to only using 2 cores) you should be fine. Otherwise, you might want to see what happens when you run something like Prime 95 or OCCT which will stress all 4 cores to the max at once.
 
Yeah, overclocking on a laptop is rather futile, because it is designed to cool a certain TDP, and by increasing your TDP, your cooling fails under load, causing laptop failure.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Yeah, overclocking on a laptop is rather futile, because it is designed to cool a certain TDP, and by increasing your TDP, your cooling fails under load, causing laptop failure.
Click to expand...

Temps are fine. This thing has 3 fans in it. GPU's don't even break 75C overvolted and overclocked in furmark. at 3.33 Prime95 tops out at 85C, I rarely see anything in the 70's under normal use. They had OCing in mind when they made these. I can change the FSB/mem/multi in the bios.

I replaced a t9600 that ran rock-solid at 3.4ghz, rarely breaking 70c for over a year.

The newer m17x's with 5870's see GPU temps in the 80's without even overclocking. I'm not too worried about temps.

I also have a program called Throttlestop that can set the multi/vcore on the fly, i have different profiles setup depending on what im doing. For internet browsing i keep it at 1.6ghz and 1.05vcore.
 
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I have a old Opteron Denmark 165 clocked at 2.8 at 1.44 vcore since 2005, still running in my spare PC. My stepdad still uses my X2-3800+ that is clocked at 2.4Ghz with 1.475V. I wouldnt worry about killing it before you wish it would die anyways due to how slow it seemingly becomes compared to what is coming out. 🙂
 
raising the vcore will shorten the life of a cpu due to electromigration. however, typically you are ok for a reasonable life for the cpu if you keep the oc to 10% or less as long as cooling is sufficient. I remember reading many long threads after buying my first c2q, I seem to recall that the 10% number was likely to give you 5-10 years cpu life (vs likely 20+ years at stock settings) but that was by no means unanimous. 10% for you is 1.27875. It's not a hard rule but rather a good quick and dirty estimate. better cooling (like in an alienware system) means that you'll likely not have to worry about excess heat, so you can PROBABLY go with something higher like 1.33, just be aware that you could get only 3-4 years instead of 5-10 by doing that.
 
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