(Perhaps) noobish overclocking questions... (i7 860)

[ZeroRift]

I recently applied a 10% blck overclock to my i7 860, while leaving EIST, Turbo, and c-states enabled without adjusting any voltages away from stock.

The overclock appears to be stable under occt, though the nature of a multithreaded burn-in makes it hard to measure stability under turbo.... But I have done a few nights of gaming on it and so far so good.

I was watching my core voltage in cpu-z while gaming to verify that turbo wasn't going to exceed Intel's max voltage at 3.8Ghz (which it didn't - w00t) and I noticed that my bclk was swinging between 145 and 147.5 when the multiplier (and vCore) increased...

Is this typical behavior for cpu-z on an OC'd i7, or do I need to look at some other voltage rails (PLL comes to mind....) to stabilize the bclk?

Also, does anyone know of a good way to burn test an OC'd processor with turbo enabled?

Thanks in advance.

 

[GLeeM]

without adjusting any voltages away from stock.

Sorry I can't answer any of your questions but ...
The previous gen i7 920 mobos automatically increased voltage when OCed (not sure if yours does) so we had to change from auto vcore by entering stock voltage number.

 

[soccerballtux]

I recently applied a 10% blck overclock to my i7 860, while leaving EIST, Turbo, and c-states enabled without adjusting any voltages away from stock.

The overclock appears to be stable under occt, though the nature of a multithreaded burn-in makes it hard to measure stability under turbo.... But I have done a few nights of gaming on it and so far so good.

I was watching my core voltage in cpu-z while gaming to verify that turbo wasn't going to exceed Intel's max voltage at 3.8Ghz (which it didn't - w00t) and I noticed that my bclk was swinging between 145 and 147.5 when the multiplier (and vCore) increased...

Is this typical behavior for cpu-z on an OC'd i7, or do I need to look at some other voltage rails (PLL comes to mind....) to stabilize the bclk?

Also, does anyone know of a good way to burn test an OC'd processor with turbo enabled?

Thanks in advance.

multithreaded burn in? Huh?

 

[ZeroRift]

As I understand it, as long as turbo and c-states are enabled on an i7, the chip will choose what core voltage it needs based off of logic involving core temp, target frequency and I think a few other items...

What I meant to say was that I had not made any manual changes to the voltage settings in the BIOS, leaving it up to the chip to decide what core voltage it needed.

By "multithreaded burn-in" I mean that OCCT will use either 4 or 8 threads (depending on settings) to stress-test your processor. However, this will set all of the cores in an i7 to active, so the turbo feature will select a lower cpu multiplier in order to run all of the cores at once.

I'm looking for a tool that will run with a variable number of threads so that I can test my cpu when it turbos up to 3.8GHz with only 2 cores active. So far I've only been able to do this by letting the processor turbo in games, since 2 cores will usually stay parked.

Having that tool would be helpful, but what I really hope to find out is:

1) Has anyone noticed bclk swing on an i7 with these features enabled (OC'd or not) in excess of 1.5MHz?
2) Does anyone know how to stabilize it, or if it even matters?