Question i7-3820 questions about my overcloaking, and satefy of it

Testkill

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Sep 3, 2016
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Hi, i have a i7-3820, (believe it or not it's still very good at handling games)

it's rated at 3.6 ghz with turbo to 3.8, after a while (5+years of updates etc, it only turbo'd to 3.67 something like that (why is that btw?) , it had nothing to do with cooling (btw my cooling is 100% stable, runs at 35- 45 in non gaming, (60 in gaming) handles stress test with no throttle for an unlimited amount of time)

I might add i noticed the cpu doesn't go above 95 W under stress test, i saw the main page says it does up to 130W? did i mess a config up?

Few months ago i went into the bios and manually set the clock speed to 3.8ghz, i noticed recently that that the clock speed doesn't throttle down a bit anymore when idle
(yes min proc was speed set 100%, but before overcloak it still throttled a bit down idle) will this eventually lead to failure? being constantly technically overcloaked

I now changed the perf mode to allow a minimum of 10% instead of 100% in order to make it throttle down when not needed is this a good idea/'fix'? not sure about the instel speedstep tech of 2011

so tldr

  1. why does my cpu not go to 3.8 ghz turbo anymore ?
  2. will i brick my precious cpu by doing what i did?
  3. is my fix (lowering min cpu %) the way to go?
 

Phaaze88

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1)Clock speed depends on how many cores are being used: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i7/Intel-Core i7-3820.html
It says there, "3.7ghz with 3 or 4 cores, and 3.8 with 1 or 2." Your 3.67 is close enough that they'd consider 3.7.
Also, keep in mind that this is some BS by Intel regarding the TDP rating. It's more of a worst case scenario with base clocks. The power draw is going to be a fair bit higher when all 8 threads are being used to the fullest.

2)It IS possible to kill the cpu if you only change the cpu frequency - BUT! Not at that low of a setting. You would have to be a bit more ambitious with the clocks, like say, 4.7ghz? That would probably kill it.
Reason being, if you only change the clock speed, that means other important settings like Cpu Vcore and LLC(load line calibration) have been left on auto. By default, these board are set to provide more voltage than necessary.
If you were to attempt that 4.7(changing nothing else), the motherboard - due to the auto settings - would likely crank critical levels of voltage to the cpu, thus frying it.
I will say, it's fine to use the auto settings for light to moderate(depends on cooling solution)OCs. High OCs should be done manually.

3)You could've just left that one alone. It already does this by default. Leave Intel Speed Shift(?) enabled in the bios. Windows power plan left on balanced.
 
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