High volts but good temps

[adamjosiah]

So I've embarked on my first overclock adventure. I have an i5 4690k that I'm overclocking on an Asus Z97E.

Here's the thing, I'm aiming for a stable 4.4 GHz overclock, but I've found that I will consistently crash on all different kinds of stress tests unless I give it 1.3 Vcore.

I've heard from various places that one should avoid using voltage above 1.250 - 1.275 because anything above that stresses the CPU.

However, looking at my temps at 1.3V, they're fine... they never go above 60C under load. So really, is there any reason why I should have an issue with letting my Vcore go to 1.3? I have it set to adaptive using the Asus software so it will only stay at 1.3 for as long as I need to hold 4.4 GHz.

Does anyone else have a similar set up to this?

 

[1LiquidPC]

It's always argued what a "safe" voltage is, but I've always heard 1.3v for Haswell. Any voltage over stock could potentially shorten the work life of you CPU even w/ low temps. Be aware though, even on 1.3 adaptive, it will spike to around 1.4v in certain games and even general use/Web browsing. I've seen and recorded this behavior myself using hwmonitor pro and my X99 build.

 

[adamjosiah]

It's always argued what a "safe" voltage is, but I've always heard 1.3v for Haswell. Any voltage over stock could potentially shorten the work life of you CPU even w/ low temps. Be aware though, even on 1.3 adaptive, it will spike to around 1.4v in certain games and even general use/Web browsing. I've seen and recorded this behavior myself using hwmonitor pro and my X99 build.

I brought it down to 1.275 adaptive and so far so good. The question is though, is manual better than adaptive? On one hand, when I'm not doing anything on my computer I only need .750 to keep the CPU going. On the other hand, forcing 1.275-1.3 all the time would avoid such spikes. For everyone's "overclocking expertise", I still haven't found anyone who can really explain which is better for the CPU.

 

[1LiquidPC]

I had to decide this myself w/ my new system. I ended up going w/ manual, as my "spikes" using adaptive were approaching 1.41v or so, and I wasn't comfortable w/ that. Also, up until this upgrade, I've always used manual voltage and have been OC'ing since about 2003. My last CPU (3930k) I ran manual voltage through it from launch (Dec. 2011 I believe) until December 2014 w/ no ill effects. This was the longest CPU I used however without upgrading. All my other CPU's that I "retired" from OCing(except 2 systems that were thrown out from age) are still in service today in various systems. For your actual question, short of talking w/ an electrical engineer making the CPU's, I'm not sure you'll get a true answer on which way to go.

 

[adamjosiah]

You definitely raise a good point. Although, I've seen a lot disagreements between software even on temps. One program will tell me my cpu is at 70c, another will say 50c. Same a voltages, I've heard hwmonitor is rough as well. No easy answer I guess

 

[1LiquidPC]

Some motherboard have voltage points you can connect a multimeter to to get actual readings. I believe some motherboard reviews will show this reading compared to UEFI. I use RealTemp for my CPU temp readings. My voltages in UEFI vs. HWmonitor are pretty much the same.

 

[adamjosiah]

Well, next time I'm putting a decent load on the CPU I'll leave HWmonitor open and see what it shows for a max. So far it's not going above 1.276 V.

 

[1LiquidPC]

Ok. I would set it to record a logfile, and try general use, Web browsing, and loading the CPU to look for spikes. For example, for me I would get spikes in Metro Last Light, but not BF4.