AIDA64 CPUID cpu/bus/mem clock huge drop while stress testing OCCT

[Roob]

Hey!

I've recently built a system with following parts: Intel i5 4670k with H80 cooler, Gigabyte Z87X-UD5H, 8GB RipjawsX 2400MHZ DDR3, GTX 760 and a XFX 700w PSU. Everything works great so far, but while doing OCCT stress test within the first minute (and sometimes after that too) I will always see my CPU clock, BUS clock and Memory clock drop to 1-10MHz speed and instantly go back up to the numbers it should show (4400, 100mhz & 1200mhz)

Same thing occurs in AIDA64 CPUID even with stock clocks and turbo at 3.8GHz. Is this normal behaviour? Im so confused. My overclocked CPU temps are around 60-65c while doing the OCCT test, and around 75c in IBT with very high setting. I flashed my bios from F5 to F6 and I've messed with every setting in the bios (disabled all c-states, thermal, EIST & changed my bus by hand to 100mhz) even tried to increase voltage and tried all the different load calibrations and VRM stuff. Also tried to change uncore mhz to different values and disabling turbo etc.

Do I have a defective motherboard or a CPU? Or is this supposed to happen while running OCCT stress test, or could it be a bug in AIDA64 CPUID? Please help guys, im clueless wether this is acceptable or not. It's a new system and I would need to pinpoint the issue to get this fixed.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

On a stable system there shouldn't be any throttling while running a stress test (100% consistency with saving power features turned off), I guess there's a chance AIDA is not reporting accurately, try to double verify it's reports with CPU-Z and maybe another program (hope some1 else provides another program to monitor values).

 

[Roob]

On a stable system there shouldn't be any throttling while running a stress test (100% consistency with saving power features turned off), I guess there's a chance AIDA is not reporting accurately, try to double verify it's reports with CPU-Z and maybe another program (hope some1 else provides another program to monitor values).

Thanks for the fast reply!

I've checked with CPU-Z and it doesn't show any fluctuation in voltage at ALL, load or not (I have extreme LLC calibration set, so that should be the case from my motherboards point of view). It just shows stable 1.2v vcore that I've set in BIOS. Meanwhile AIDA64 CPUID shows C3-state voltage drop aswell if enabled.

The reason I think AIDA is more reliable is simply because it seems to be superior in monitoring Haswell voltage within the CPU's own voltage controller - for example it shows that in linpack AVX load my voltage goes up to 1.212v while CPU-Z just shows the voltage sitting at 1.2.

But anyway... I cannot see this drop in clock speeds in any other monitoring program that I've tried. Not CPU-Z, not HWMonitor or RealTemp/CoreTemp. Should I trust CPU-Z that shows everything correct according to my bios settings? But Haswells do have their built in voltage controller, right? and AIDA seems to read those values somehow, so shouldn't that be more trustworthy then?

 

[RaDiKaL_]

It should indeed, but if those drops would be really happening you could try it on some heavy gaming, you should get some major FPS drop every time the CPU clock rate gets throttled as stated by AIDA, if no fps drop happens and you get your OCCT test pass with no errors for a few hours, I'd say AIDA is having some faulty reporting.

 

[Roob]

It should indeed, but if those drops would be really happening you could try it on some heavy gaming, you should get some major FPS drop every time the CPU clock rate gets throttled as stated by AIDA, if no fps drop happens and you get your OCCT test pass with no errors for a few hours, I'd say AIDA is having some faulty reporting.

Hey, I've spent my time doing some tests with other programs: IBT 2.54 with linpack (very high) for 30 runs and newest Prime95 (blend) for 1-2 hours without weird drops in clock speeds and I've concluded the only stress test that yields these weird drops in AIDA64 CPUID is the normal OCCT test - hence I would suggest people avoid judging clock speed reports while using this program if stress testing with Haswell, but I get a clear pass from the test itself with anyway.

Next I will play some games for a while and see if I get any clock speed drops in AIDA64 CPUID or major FPS drops as you suggested. I'll report back with the results!

 

[Roob]

I've tried several games now, including Metro: Last light, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota2, Skyrim, Battlefield 3 and 4. Everything worked without hickups, but BF4 has some choppiness when looking around in bigger conquest maps, FPS is decent - around ~100-200 on high settings but sometimes when moving mouse around 180 or 360 degrees some choppiness can be seen in the gameplay and fps drops to 80-90. This happens on certain areas in certain maps only. Other games run fine without any choppiness, could this be a problem with BF4 bad optimization since it's a new game or am I the only one having this kind of choppiness?

Well anyway, I would conclude AIDA64 readings in OCCT or the test makes weird things happen to my Haswell as I cannot reproduce the problem in any other test/game.