Applicable Voltage: as set in BIOS or as measured under load

[Rellik]

Here's the question:

Because the power supply is under load when the PC is booted into the OS, the voltage supplied to the CPU will be significantly below that which you set in the BIOS (at least it is in my case, and I have C1E and EIST disabled - my motherboard monitoring utility is showing a 1.36 Vcore even though I have it set to 1.42, for instance).

So should we be setting up the Vcore to account for this? i.e. right now the highest stable I can get with my E6600 is 3.25 GHz or so, even though the temps are absolutely fine and the motherboard should be able to do considerably higher. Thus, the voltage should be raised, but only to a safe amount - is it ok to raise it to, say, 1.47V under the assumption it'll be reduced to a more reasonable 1.42V?

Thanks for any input 😀 ! I'd really like to be able to run 400MHz FSB / 3.6GHz on my E6600, and the cooling seems to be holding up great, but I'm hesitant about possibly raising the voltage too high.

 

[graysky]

What you're describing is referred to as 'vdroop' and is by design on a number of boards. If you can run 2x orthos for >5 or 6 h without errors, your vcore is fine. Raise it as your own risk. It'll probably work for a while... how long do you wanna keep the PC running? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? That's the question you wanna answer for yourself. If the answer is 10 years, I wouldn't o/c it. If the answer is 2 years, give it a shot. ...just be sure you have your key data backed-up.