Lower your load temps: minimize your vcore

Sounds pretty simple, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know about how much vcore can affect your load temps. Temp and frequency (FSB) have a linear relationship whereas temp and voltage have an exponential relationship. Conclusion: minimize voltage.

Here is the Intel document that helps explain it, see page 31:

An increase in processor operating frequency not only increases system performance, but also increases the processor power dissipation. The relationship between frequency and power is generalized in the following equation: P = CV^2F (where P = power, C = capacitance, V = voltage, F = frequency). From this equation, it is evident that power increases linearly with frequency and with the square of voltage.

Click to expand...

Same thing holds true for speed in a car: energy = 0.5mv^2 where m is mass and v is velocity. This is the basis of the old expression, "speed kills." You generate way more energy driving 75 MPH than you do driving 55 MPH since energy and velocity have an exponential relationship.

Anyway, to test how low you can go, simply manually set your vcore for something low. I started @ 1.2375 for my Q6600 running @ 9x333. If you can boot into windows load up a couple instances of orthos. If you have a quad make sure you set the CPU affinity such that one of the orthos gets cores 0 and 1 and the other gets cores 2 and 3. Let em run for a while. If the vcore is too low, one or both will give an error message. Orthos checks e when for rounding errors that can occur when the system isn't stable due to vcore, or temp, etc. Using a vcore of 1.2375v for my system gave an error pretty quickly:



If you don't get an error after say, 30 min, lower the vcore in the BIOS and repeat until you do get an error, then start working your way up until you can run them with no errors for a good 6-8 hours. In a nutshell, that's it.

Enjoy.

Here are the results from a little experiment I just finished wherein I ran p95v2 with 4 threads doing large FFTs for ~1 h on a Q6600 @ 9x266 under two different vcores: 1.2625V in BIOS or 1.232V in CPU-Z and 1.1125V in BIOS or 1.080V in CPU-Z. I had the logging disabled so these aren't average temps, just "instant" temps although I they really did level out.

Results @ 1.232V:

Results @ 1.080V:

Result: 152mV in vcore can make a pretty big difference in temps. Oh, room temp for this was 75-76 °F throughout.

I actually wonder how my chips undervolts. It's an average overclocker, so maybe I'll get decent results.

(In my sig the only reason I have 1.264V listed is because of the large vdroop on my board and that's what "stock" actually is for me)

Yeah I was undervolted @ 2.8 (1.2something), now that its @ 3.2 I had to up the volts back to 1.35 or something.