OC Voltage questions

tecninja

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Feb 2, 2008
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Have some various questions about an OC i'm doing on a system, mainly about some of the voltages I can mess with.

General info:

C2Q Q9450 Processer (Normally 333 Mhz, 2.66 Ghz)
ASUS P5E X38 MB
Crucial Ballistix (2GB x2) RAM (Rated at 4-4-4-12 400Mhz)

I'm currently running the FSB at 400Mhz for a 3.2Ghz Processor.
RAM is running in 1:1 400Mhz 4-4-4-12

It seems to be stable for the most part, but I have run into random issues in the past, and i'm wondering if any of it is coming from my Voltage Settings. My RAM is speced for 2.2v I believe, but it seems to be running stable at the default 1.8v I wondered if there was any benefit for having this at the lowest setting, or if I should really just up the voltage to something higher because thats what the manufacturer recommends.

Also I'm a bit fuzzy on the North Bridge and what voltages I might need to push that up to. The Default seems to be 1.25v, I think I upped it to 1.27v just for the heck of it when I was OCing.

I think I have a pretty good Idea on the Vcore situation, but I've always wondered what the Rhyme and Reason to setting your North Bridge Voltage was. Also I wondered if higher settings might actually decrease stability in any of the areas if they seem to be running fine currently.

Also 2 other values in my BIOS that are set to "Auto" are CPU PLL Voltage, and FSB Termination Voltage. I kind of wondered if I should be Manually setting either of those to a value, and if so what value might be good.

So anyhow pardon all the random questions, just trying to get a handle on all these different voltages you can play with.

For sake of refrence I consider "Stable" to be 12+ hours (10 or more passes) of Memtest86+, and 12+ hours of Prime95 in each of the Small FFT and Blend tests. with 0 errors returned ever at a given set of settings.
 
Hi i too have been reading around about voltages and learned that when u leave the mobo to auto the voltages for u it puts them higher then needed, what i have done that seems to be a good starting point for someone as nooby as me :) is i set the cpu level up to Qx9770 i think (it was 400Fsb) then write down all the settings that the mobo chose and then i upped the FSB to 425 and ran prime95 for 12 hopurs and it was stable so i took a chance and upped it to 450 but this time i evan lowed all the voltages the mobo had chose for 400FSB and i've been running prime for 2hours and its stable so far, but still 10+hours to go atleast i might make it 24HRS just to be sure. my idle/load temps with mobo settings at 3.4 was 38c/58c but with my own settings and a highr FSB i'm getting 34c/53c
 
Oh, I rather thought that "Auto" usually meant it chose the lowest setting available. Also there are still a couple of voltages, like the FSB Termination Voltage and CPU PLL voltage, that I have no idea what they should be set to, so they have been left on auto.
 
Still Curious on my original Questions, as no one has really answered any of them. I'd also certainly be willing to look over a guide or some such that describes what each of the Voltage values does for purposes of OC and the like. If someone knows of such a document and could provide a link.