Played around with my voltages some more

[Elganja]

I did some on the fly stress testing / voltage changes today. I was able to drop my V from 1.35625 to 1.3000 (with Vdroop on)...

The result, temps are down to 60,62,62,60 running at full load WITH LinX. Pretty crazy how low they are for running my i7 920 @ 3.780Ghz...

On another interesting note, I finally decided to tackle overclocking my GPU. It was an interesting experience. Stock is 576/1242/1000... i did a mild overclock to 640/1380/1060. But to achieve this I had to upp my CPU VTT from +150 to +200 and my IOH from 1.15 to 1.30V

Overall I'm pretty happy with the i7... great overclocker!

 

[Rick James]

I7 is awesome. Just puts out too much damn heat.

 

[2March]

my 920 temps are very dependant on whats running. full load and full load are not the same.

When running without hyperthreading on prime95 temps go up to about 57. But fire up anything that that sets the videocard to 3d frequencies and it get 5 degrees higher. It has to do with the layout of my motherboard, I believe. The video card gets quite hot and is right under the NB which is right under the CPU socket. I noticed this with my GTX260 but with the 9800 GTX+ there was no such behavior. There is a lot more clearance between the 9800 and the chipset so I only encountered these problems when I installed the 260. It has this casette shape that almost touches the cooling block of the NB. And it gets hot enough not to want to touch it.

I checked by putting the 260 in the lower slot but while slightly better the effect still remained. Obviously the fact that the NB only serves the PCIE's had something to do with it as well. The 260 taxes the NB more then the 9800 did.

Temps went really nuts though when I enabled hyperthreading. With a cold NB it hit about 70 degrees but with a hot NB temps went over 80 degrees. Since I need hyperthreading for FSX I needed to fix that problem and as I couldnt decide on what cooler to get I mounted a 40mm fan on the NB. That NB used to get up to 80 degrees and although I had already checked whether it could handle this it still caused my CPU temps to get too high so the fan seemed to make sense. Now it no longer exceeds 65 degrees but CPU temps have dropped about 10 degrees. But the bottom line is that you cant judge temps on an I7 with benchmarking. FSX is still king as far as system temps are concerned. No prime95 or Futuremark will give you anyting like that. I tested my system several times with both running at the same time with no problems at all. But FSX brings the temp alarms to the desktop. Checked that out as well and temps of the NB are 10 degrees higher under FSX compared to Futuremark. That's added to the CPU temps and off goes the alarm.