Speedstep and Overclocking

[Drakcol]

I'm sure most have heard about the P55 Foxconn socket problem. As far I can tell this problem only affects systems that are overclocked and are running with a voltage bump. I believe in the article Anandtech has about this issue they say voltages up to 1.4 are relatively safe. In order to get my system overclocked to 4ghz I'm right under this mark. This has me a little worried.

SO I was wondering if enabling speedstep would help solve the voltage issue (my system wouldn't always be running with the 1.39 voltage) after all I really only need the speed increase when I'm gaming. So if I were to have the voltage offset to reach 1.39v under a multiplier of 20 and a bclk of 200 would Speedstep introduce more problems then it would potentially solve when it clocks down the processor? Basically I'd like to know in your opinion would leaving Speedstep on while overclocking introduce system instability?

 

[Arkaign]

Most mobos from decent manufacturers have windows-accessible controls for clock frequency and so on. You could see if that might be what you want. The default Intel power control seems to indeed downclock when things aren't being fully used, unless you disable these features.

 

[Drakcol]

Sadly my P7P55d only supplies a windows tool to edit voltages and blck for multiplier scaling I'd have to rely on the built-in speedstep or find a tool that can edit the speedstep multipliers. I've tried making a "stock" config with the bclk editing tool they gave but I can not switch between the stock and overclocked configs without my PC freezing. It seems when I tried to change the bclk frequency more than 15mhz the PC freezes up. I've also tried scaling down the bclk 10mhz at a time using the tool and after 30 or so mhz it freezes .. so it seems the only reliable solution would be to change the multiplier somehow.

Currently I have Speedstep enabled and am testing each multiplier the best I can. You can actually control the Speedstep multiplier using win 7's power tool, you just have to change the min and max processor state. Unfortunately it uses percentages so it's kinda hard to figure out which multiplier it will correspond to but at least it changes it.

I'm still unsure whether using Speedstep will make things unstable hopefully after a good set of benches with prime95 I'll have a better idea.