PII X4 965BE temp/voltage question

[Tullphan]

I'm in the process of overclocking my 965BE, but being new to AMD, I'm not sure of what voltages/temps are safe.
As it stands right now (with P95 running small fft's), my core voltage is 1.44 & temps on all 4 cores is 52c. Currently running @ 3.825Ghz.
Is that acceptable?
Is the small fft's the test to use w/AMD processors for stability check or should I use "blend"?
Thanks.

 

[BD231]

Absolutely, cut off point is 65c but you really want to stay in the fifties because the reported temps are typically lower than they actually are. Technically speaking you have some headroom but if it takes more than 1.5v to get past 3800 I would definitely back track and get your build comfortable in the 1.4v range.

1.4XX V-Core is as close to default voltage as you're going to get OC'd at those speeds so definitely be happy you don't need 1.5 to do so. Blend mode in P95 means you stress not only the cpu but memory as well (? ... at least that's how I remember it) so if you feel like testing your overclocked northbridge (if you oc'd that as well) the blend test is a good option.

 

[WildW]

I had the 965 Black until recently. My long-term overclock (ran for about a year without issues) was 3.8GHz at 1.475V. I think mine would peak at about 52C too. I think with these chips they say not to go over 1.5V, and not to let the temps go over about 55 to 60C. Apparently they are quite sensitive to temperature, and will become unstable at higher temps regardless of how many more volts you give them. I'd say you have nothing to worry about with what you've got there.

As for stability testing, small fft's is the usual test for CPU stability. Blend gives a more balanced system test that includes more memory access, but if you're not overclocking the memory too then it's not so important.

As well as Prime, I'm finding that Linx is a very good stability test. It will often show instability in a few minutes that Prime95 can take hours to find. It really heats up Intel chips even more than Prime95, but it doesn't seem to be quite so hard on AMD ones in my experience.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=201670

 

[Tullphan]

OK...I ran the LinX test 20 times using 1/2 of my memory (2048).
Temps got as high as 54c, but it finished without errors.
Haven't really used LinX before, so the memory was the only thing I changed besides the # of times to run the test.

 

[WildW]

If you pass a full 20 runs of LinX, you have nothing to worry about.