E8400 & EP35-DS3L Accidental Overvoltage

[h00ktup]

I was fiddling around in the BIOS and set the multiplier to 8x400 with the Vcore voltage set to auto. I rebooted and entered BIOS again and noticed that the Vcore was around 1.56 in the PC Health section. I know that the safest upper limit is around 1.4, did I cause any damage with this error?

 

[amenx]

Maybe, maybe not. If it was for a short while, maybe not. The wolfdales are a bit more sensitive to voltages than earlier chips. Some have complained of CPU degradation at much lower voltages (1.4-1.45) while others have applied insane voltages (1.7+) and come out OK. Its a crap shoot with the wolfdales. Big thread on e8xxx degradation at XS forums along with a poll on the issue.

Have you upgraded the bios? I know many motherboards are overly generous with autovoltage, but I thought newer mobos and bios revisions were made to be 'gentler' on account of the wolfdales. If you dont have latest bios, I advise you to get it.

 

[h00ktup]

I have the latest F5C bios.

 

[Idontcare]

DS3L's when Vcore is set to auto and you manually overclock the CPU by way of FSB increases will automatically raise the Vcore up to the highest allowed VID value per Intel for your chip.

Question here is why did the BIOS think that E8400 has an allowed VID range that extends to 1.56V?

Are you sure your measurement software is correct? Did you use CPUz to check Vcore?

 

[h00ktup]

I looked at the BIOS PC Health stats. How inaccurate can BIOS be?

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
DS3L's when Vcore is set to auto and you manually overclock the CPU by way of FSB increases will automatically raise the Vcore up to the highest allowed VID value per Intel for your chip.

Question here is why did the BIOS think that E8400 has an allowed VID range that extends to 1.56V?

Are you sure your measurement software is correct? Did you use CPUz to check Vcore?

if you just did it for a quick minute or two, you probably didnt any serious damage.

However as IDC says, i have no clue why bios thought 1.56V was safe.

To be honest, i killed a wolfdale @ 1.6 which translated to about 1.56Vcore. Lasted around 1 month b4 it went to the big silicon heaven in the sky.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: h00ktup
I looked at the BIOS PC Health stats. How inaccurate can BIOS be?

It's not inaccurate enough to justify throwing out the datum point you reported.

So yeah, good question then. To be sure you did accelerate the voltage-induced damage that 100% of all CMOS chips suffer from. The question really needed to be asked and answered is "how much did this reduce my chips lifetime by?".

I wouldn't sweat it given that you didn't run it like that for months or weeks.

But accelerated lifetime reduction brought on by elevated electric fields (which are proportional to the voltage) is nothing to be laughed off so I strongly recommend not repeating the experiment

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is why no-one recommends overclocking with voltages set to "auto".

 

[toadeater]

That reminds me, Auto set my RAM to 2.2v when overclocked, but the RAM is rated for 1.8v-2.0v. I don't recommend using that Auto feature when overclocking.