Turbo boost

Aight, when I built my self a new PC a little less than a year ago, I did the clever thing of purchasing a Corsair H110 watercooler for my processor and then got an Intel i7 3820 that I can't really OC. I got the 3.6GHz processor run at 4.6GHz with turbo boost though. In BIOS there's this Asus EZ mode with a few presets and the "power" preset gets me to 4.6GHz while the "normal" gets me 3.7GHz. My motherboard is an Asus P9X79.

The only problem is that if I run it at 4.6GHz I get random crashes, one just happened while I was reading a wikipedia article and sometimes it can happen while gaming. Black screens and blue screens, and every time I reboot my PC it says overclocking has failed. I came to this conclusion after a long period of 3.7GHz and no crashes and after I recently switched back to 4.6GHz I've had two.

The temperatures stay relatively fine, I think 50-60 celcius is the hottest I've ever gotten to and with casual gaming it stays around 40 and 50c.


I really don't know much about these things except that it's not good if the computer shuts itself down to prevent hardware damage >.> Any ideas what it might be? I don't really need to run it at 4.6GHz but I'd still like to know what's causing it.

Not enough voltage to maintain 4.6GHz without internal problems in the CPU. I'm running my i7-3770k at 4.5GHz with a miniscule voltage increase and I believe I got an extremely high binned chip.

To put it simply, increase your voltage in small increments until the crashing stops. Make sure temperatures remain cool during testing.


Important note: increasing your voltage will likely reduce the lifespan of your hardware. A small increase won't hurt it that much but a large increase could fry it right there. If you don't -need- the extra performance, I wouldn't bother. Not much will stress an i7 as is.

Yeah, I probably won't change anything as I can do well enough without. What would be a miniscule increase though? 0,00x to 0,00y?

It's odd though, I can run the clock for possibly even a week without any problems and then out of a sudden BSOD. God damn computers, why can't anything be simple.

A miniscule increase would be on the order of 0.0xx. Just enough to get stable without overdoing it.

For example, stock voltage for my processor is 1.1v or so, and I'm running at 1.192v to get a stable 4.5GHz.

Excellent, I will refer to this in the future most likely.

Thank you.

I'd like to open this again, probably for personal notekeeping but I might want to ask some questions as well. I decided to ramp up the clocks of my CPU again, after suffering horribad FPS in Arma 3 (I'm fairly certain it's my CPU but don't really care) in order to see if it changes anything so I did some googlin' and got my self Prime95 which I ran for around 14 minutes on 4,6GHz which used to crash occasionally and didn't run into any problems. If I start having bluescreens again I'll just up the voltage a bit and try out these tests.

I think my temperatures stayed pretty nice as well, considering my cooling setup is kinda ****, the fans are sucking air through the radiator from the inside of the PC, and one of the fans is missing 3 blades 

You won't be able to do much about Arma. An overclock is only going to get you a few more frames at most.

Well it did actually give me enough frames to up my settings from lowest of low to high. When hosting a server that is. Feels good.jpg

Now that I mentioned, I'll really have to spend some time to get a dedicated server running.

I simply increased the speeds of the cores to max allowed without adjusting voltages and it runs rock stable that way. I also left other options on so cpu still runs at 3.6 GHz when speed is not needed.

SkyTime said:

Well it did actually give me enough frames to up my settings from lowest of low to high. When hosting a server that is. Feels good.jpg

Now that I mentioned, I'll really have to spend some time to get a dedicated server running.

Click to expand...

Well increasing your settings for the most part won't affect FPS in a CPU bound environment, except settings like Object Detail and Shadows and view distance. Everything else is handled by your GPU (which has plenty of time for the fancy effects since your CPU is going comparatively slow).

I would not bother spending time overclocking above what you're already at since the reward is going to be quite small. Set up a dedicated server, split your processor cores evenly, and enjoy the smooth ride.

Yeah, I suppose you have a point there.

But my "overclocking" literally is me going into the bios, enabling turbo boost and choosing the performance preset, behold, 4,6GHz Also from what I read these things usually run at 1,45 volts or something so I'll just have to up that a little if the crashes come back. Not a big deal really.

So far so good though, no hiccups or BSODs.

Except if you keep increasing the voltage you're going to fry the whole thing.

Really, voltage increasing is not something to just do because you have to to make it stable. It reduces the lifetime of the CPU regardless of how small.

Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm willing to take the risk though, may not be for much but to heck with it.

Besides it works for other people, naturally nothing can go wrong  and I think a pretty small increase will do the trick considering the crashes are so infrequent, so I probably won't have to go much beyond 1,4v. And that is if the crashes still occur, who knows. PC's are weird.


I appreciate the advice.