kind of a dumb question - what exactly does bumping up voltage do?

[Luxiou]

ok...so i just read some articles on overclocking...i got the whole fsb * multiplier dealy down, but im wondering, what kind of direct/indirect relationship is there between voltage and clock speed?

thanks

 

[jchu14]

increasing the voltage will make the CPU run more stable at higher speed overclocks. But you have you have to watch the temp carefully since increasing the voltage also increases the temperature.

 

[Wind]

jchu14 is right. But it is not neccessary to increase the vcore straight away when O/Cing. Bump up the FSB & multiplier first. If the system won't POST, bump up the vcore at 0.5V & test again. The rules is try to use as little power as possible to keep the heat down.

 

[Pabster]

more voltages allows the transistors to "work" faster. Gates can open and close more rapidly with more voltage. The caveat, of course, is that as voltage increases, so does heat dissipation.

 

[WarCon]

I was under the impression that heat causes junction resistance to increase, which throws the signal timing off. Voltage puts the timing back in sync.

The real signals are more sawtooth shaped versus square and extra resistance (caused by heat buildup from increased power cycles-overclocking) lengthens the ramp of the tooth(maybe even past the next falling edge so it never reaches the voltage necessary to be consider a high signal or rising edge), while extra voltage causes the ramp to be steeper which causes the next junction to trigger sooner, which puts the signal timing back in sync. Or something like that.