Who to trust - BIOS vCore setting or CPU-Z?

[Blouge]

What's important, the BIOS setting for vCore or what CPU-Z reports??

CPU-Z always reports voltages about 0.06 less than whatever I set in the BIOS (e.g. 1.3875 => 1.32 load 1.36 idle).

I heard the max official voltage is 1.375. Does this mean that I'm actually within the official range? I want my CPU to last about 10 years. Core Temp says the cores range from 25 - 51 (Orthos), a bit higher with TAT.

I have the following:

E6600 (2.4 GHz=266x9) P5B Deluxe (P965) OCZ DDR2-800 PC6400 4-4-4-12
Overclocked to 3.3 GHz = 413x8 with a CPU voltage of 1.3875, stable with 6 hours Orthos

 

[Shimmishim]

what motherboard?

 

[Blouge]

ASUS P5B Deluxe

 

[Shimmishim]

the asus boards do something called vdroop on load. meaning that when you put stress on the cpu, the voltage will go below what you set in the bios.

so what you are seeing is perfectly normal.

 

[Noubourne]

Originally posted by: Shimmishim
the asus boards do something called vdroop on load. meaning that when you put stress on the cpu, the voltage will go below what you set in the bios.

so what you are seeing is perfectly normal.

He didn't say under load though, he made it sound like always.

And the answer is neither btw. You need a Digital Multimeter to really accurately measure what voltage you're pushing.

 

[Shimmishim]

Originally posted by: Noubourne

Originally posted by: Shimmishim
the asus boards do something called vdroop on load. meaning that when you put stress on the cpu, the voltage will go below what you set in the bios.

so what you are seeing is perfectly normal.

He didn't say under load though, he made it sound like always.

And the answer is neither btw. You need a Digital Multimeter to really accurately measure what voltage you're pushing.

fine. even at idle, the voltage isn't exactly what you set.

 

[tersome]

Get a DMM and measure the voltage from one of the coils around the cpu socket.

 

[Noubourne]

You are at 3.3Ghz and under 1.4v. That is fine. You'll get a long time out of it. It will be obsolete before it burns out.

Nobody can say how long your CPU will last. 10 years is a ridiculous amount of time to desire the product to be used. Even 5 years from now it will be considered a dinosaur, and probably a power-hungry one at that. How much would you pay for an Athlon 500Mhz CPU today? That chip came out in 1999, and it was top dog (next to the P3 500). It is now worth maybe $10. Shipping it costs more. Would you even try to run any of today's software on it? It would be silly to, when a modern $50 chip from a year or two ago would blow it out of the water for performance, and $50 is pretty much pocket change.

Heck, I have a Venice 3000 that does 2.6Ghz stable with 1.475v. How much would you pay me for it? I would be lucky to get $50 for it. It will make a great HTPC chip though. And even for that use I don't need it to last 10 yrs.

 

[MS]

Voltage always droops under load and that is a bad thing because especially under load you want the voltage to stay up where it is supposed to be. However, the droop is also a simple side effect of Ohm's law and so there is nothing that can be done about it. Most VRMs have one or the other droop compensation to counterbalance the droop by raising the supply voltage at the front end as a function of the current output.

That has still nothing to do with the ASUS board at hand. We have looked at some 50 ASUS boards in the past and hardly ever found one that actually kept any voltage where it was set. In most cases the measured voltages were higher than those set in the BIOS or those reported by any utility ... for that kind of stuff you will need a voltmeter, though as mentioned in one of the posts above.

Whatever it is, your voltages are within a safe range.

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