[SOLVED] Why does my CPU lower it’s speed and voltage while stress testing?

[Fl1cks]

After a few seconds of stress testing the clock speed gets lowered from 5.0Ghz to 3.9-4.0Ghz, the temperatures from 90˚C to 70C˚, the voltage from around 1.400-1.550 to 1.250-1.300.

I have set the CPU Over Temperature Protection to 100˚C and the CPU Thermal Monitor to Disabled but this has not solved this. I then went a head and lowered voltages and settings such as LLC to lower temperatures so that I am able to stress test the system to see wether or not everything’s stable with the CPU. I reduced the CPU voltage from 1.500 to 1.370, CPU VCCIO from 1.350 to 1.200, CPU System Agent Voltage from 1.300 to 1.250, LLC from Turbo to Medium. I still get a reduction for things such as the clock speeds, voltages, and temperatures while stress testing with RealBench or Prime95. When I run a benchmark everything seems normal. Also, the voltages seem to be higher than what I’ve set them to according to HWMonitor. I have the voltage set to 1.370V with an offset of 0.030+ but it goes up to 1.500-1.512V during stress tests before everything gets lowered/thermal throttled or whatever is happening.

 

[Unolocogringo]

Looks like you are running a Ryzen processor with PBO enabled.
PBO will overide bios settings so dissable it when overclocking.

 

[Fl1cks]

Looks like you are running a Ryzen processor with PBO enabled.
PBO will overide bios settings so dissable it when overclocking.

Sorry. Forgot to mention the specs that I’m using. Here are the specs:
CPU: Intel i7-11700K
GPU: Asus RTX 3060 12GB Rog Strix OC
RAM: G.Skill Ballistix 4x32GB (128GB)
PSU: Corsair RM850X 850W
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z590 UD AC
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15
Drives: 3 x M.2 NVME Drives, 1 x SATA SSD Drive, 1 SATA HDD Drive

 

[MeanMachine41]

Depending on the CPU your processor is throttling due to an overheating condition to protect itself. Sudden spikes in voltage or heat can cause this.

You are Overclocking maybe without fully understanding what your doing. Stress testing without understanding the results.

Prime95 is an aggressive tester and should not be used if you do not understand the algorithms. It will push your thermals beyond TjMAX even using small FFTs and what's worse it wont tell you why when workers stop.

Realbench is an excellent real world tester to test for absolute stability once thermals and rail voltages are proven to be correct.

LLC (Load Line Calibration) (when Overclocked) is used to increase voltage during peak demand to prevent voltage droop and raising it will increase temps not lower them.
For better Overclocking advice please list your system specs.

 

[TerryLaze]

You are running an intel processor with default settings, at default the CPU will run extremely heavy workloads (like AVX 512 stress tests) for 56 seconds until it will drop back to the default 125W.
If you want it to stick to max settings all the time you need to overclock your CPU.

 

[Fl1cks]

You are running an intel processor with default settings, at default the CPU will run extremely heavy workloads (like AVX 512 stress tests) for 56 seconds until it will drop back to the default 125W.
If you want it to stick to max settings all the time you need to overclock your CPU.

I spent the whole day yesterday learning about overclocking and trying to overclock my CPU and was awake till 5AM. I woke up at 9AM today and keep working hard on this. Having real trouble here so that’s why I do really appreciate any kind of help at this point! There’s no option in the Turbo Power Limit section to hit Disabled for the Gigabyte BIOS but do I have to set that to auto instead like it was in the beginning as default or should it be set to POR?

Current Power Limit settings:

https://imgur.com/a/oF7bfhp

View: https://imgur.com/a/oF7bfhp


All other settings:

https://imgur.com/a/09nuMde

View: https://imgur.com/a/09nuMde

 

[Fl1cks]

Depending on the CPU your processor is throttling due to an overheating condition to protect itself. Sudden spikes in voltage or heat can cause this.

You are Overclocking maybe without fully understanding what your doing. Stress testing without understanding the results.

Prime95 is an aggressive tester and should not be used if you do not understand the algorithms. It will push your thermals beyond TjMAX even using small FFTs and what's worse it wont tell you why when workers stop.

Realbench is an excellent real world tester to test for absolute stability once thermals and rail voltages are proven to be correct.

LLC (Load Line Calibration) (when Overclocked) is used to increase voltage during peak demand to prevent voltage droop and raising it will increase temps not lower them.
For better Overclocking advice please list your system specs.

I don’t have much knowledge about Prime95 and have decided to not look deep into that program as there is much to go through there. This is why I am using RealBench for stress testing. The reason I tried Prime95 was to check wether or not the same thing would happen, which did. When rendering in Adobe After Effects / Media Encoder or loading a game in Star Wars Battlefront II this reduction in everything doesn’t seem to happen. When any of these programs run, the temperatures are at around 55-70˚C with the current BIOS settings and the clock speed for the cores is at 5.0Ghz which the cores have been set to.

 

[Fl1cks]

Most of my time has been spent into trying to get the CPU to 5.1Ghz but it hasn’t gotten there for me although I’ve played around with some settings inside the BIOS and set the voltages and the LLC setting to high numbers that make the processor reach 100˚C.

 

[MeanMachine41]

I don’t have much knowledge about Prime95 and have decided to not look deep into that program as there is much to go through there. This is why I am using RealBench for stress testing. The reason I tried Prime95 was to check wether or not the same thing would happen, which did.

There is a much more advance program for stress testing and that is AIDA64 which is free and less aggressive. AIDA64 will also test your FPU, CPU, Cache, RAM, GPU and disk with decent graphs to monitor during the test.

Now I know your system I can offer a few words of advice.

• Do Not jump to 5GHz in one hit rather in 200Mhz steps and stress testing in between checking voltages and thermals along the way.
• Disable Cstates as this is a power saving feature and can spoil a decent overclock.
• Use your multiplier only to Overclock.
• Do not make arbitrary changes in Bios without knowing the consequences.
• Keep it simple till you learn your Bios.
• Follow a decent Overclocking Guide.

You can get a decent Overclock by choosing to disable Turbo mode and have an all core Overclock.

Here is a vid as a start and although not exactly the same as your setup the principles are the same:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXMNgxM8RLE

 

[Bazzy 505]

You do realize your you cpu isn't i9-11900K ?

i7-11700K/KF is 3.6 base , 4,6 all core boost 5.0 (2 cores) . 11700K does not even feature ABT

You 're really trying hard to cook that new cpu. ;-)

 

[Fl1cks]

There is a much more advance program for stress testing and that is AIDA64 which is free and less aggressive. AIDA64 will also test your FPU, CPU, Cache, RAM, GPU and disk with decent graphs to monitor during the test.

Now I know your system I can offer a few words of advice.

• Do Not jump to 5GHz in one hit rather in 200Mhz steps and stress testing in between checking voltages and thermals along the way.
• Disable Cstates as this is a power saving feature and can spoil a decent overclock.
• Use your multiplier only to Overclock.
• Do not make arbitrary changes in Bios without knowing the consequences.
• Keep it simple till you learn your Bios.
• Follow a decent Overclocking Guide.

You can get a decent Overclock by choosing to disable Turbo mode and have an all core Overclock.

Here is a vid as a start and although not exactly the same as your setup the principles are the same:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXMNgxM8RLE

Thanks. I’ll have a look at the settings and things you’ve written about. Also, I watched this video and followed everything yesterday but it did not really work for me.

 

[Fl1cks]

You do realize your you cpu isn't i9-11900K ?

i7-11700K/KF is 3.6 base , 4,6 all core boost 5.0 (2 cores) . 11700K does not even feature ABT

You 're really trying hard to cook that new cpu. ;-)

So 5.0Ghz isn’t the turbo boost for all of the cores on this processor and what I’m doing currently already gives me a 0.4Ghz boost for 6 of the cores?

 

[MeanMachine41]

Thanks. I’ll have a look at the settings and things you’ve written about. Also, I watched this video and followed everything yesterday but it did not really work for me.

Did not work for you? Then watch it again till you understand. There are other vids for basic Overclocking and google is your friend when looking for guides.

 

[dorsai]

After a few seconds of stress testing the clock speed gets lowered from 5.0Ghz to 3.9-4.0Ghz, the temperatures from 90˚C to 70C˚, the voltage from around 1.400-1.550 to 1.250-1.300.

I have set the CPU Over Temperature Protection to 100˚C and the CPU Thermal Monitor to Disabled but this has not solved this. I then went a head and lowered voltages and settings such as LLC to lower temperatures so that I am able to stress test the system to see wether or not everything’s stable with the CPU. I reduced the CPU voltage from 1.500 to 1.370, CPU VCCIO from 1.350 to 1.200, CPU System Agent Voltage from 1.300 to 1.250, LLC from Turbo to Medium. I still get a reduction for things such as the clock speeds, voltages, and temperatures while stress testing with RealBench or Prime95. When I run a benchmark everything seems normal. Also, the voltages seem to be higher than what I’ve set them to according to HWMonitor. I have the voltage set to 1.370V with an offset of 0.030+ but it goes up to 1.500-1.512V during stress tests before everything gets lowered/thermal throttled or whatever is happening.

Any modern CPU will lower clock speeds and voltages to protect itself from burning up....that's expected behavior and a very good thing otherwise there would be inexperienced people all over letting the magic smoke out of their cpus.

 

[Bazzy 505]

So 5.0Ghz isn’t the turbo boost for all of the cores on this processor and what I’m doing currently already gives me a 0.4Ghz boost for 6 of the cores?

What i'm trying to tell you is that you are running that cpu way beyond specification. And unless you really know what you are doing, and have adequately overprovisioned cooling and power solution to match, you are running at serious risk of damaging your hardware. Moreover you must bear in mind that not all CPUs are created equal ( even if it's the same model ). CPU's cut from the center of a wafer are generally the highest grade. The further towards the outer edge, the more imperfections the particular die will have and will end up being used for the slower grade cpu. Sometimes you may get lucky and get a piece that performs beyond the guaranteed spec, but it is a lottery and it takes more than a youtube video to know where you stand with your particular piece.

 

[Fl1cks]

Any modern CPU will lower clock speeds and voltages to protect itself from burning up....that's expected behavior and a very good thing otherwise there would be inexperienced people all over letting the magic smoke out of their cpus.

This happens although I’ve reduced the voltages by a big amount and changed some settings that affect the voltages and/or temperatures. I’m receiving about 90C˚ with the current settings during a stress test with Realbench and if I remember correctly, watching SkatterBencher’s video yesterday, he received 95˚C with his I7-11700K, stress testing with Prime95. I don’t believe this should have to do with the temperatures at least unless there’s a setting affecting this.

 

[Fl1cks]

What i'm trying to tell you is that you are running that cpu way beyond specification. And unless you really know what you are doing, and have adequately overprovisioned cooling and power solution to match, you are running at serious risk of damaging your hardware. Moreover you must bear in mind that not all CPUs are created equal ( even if it's the same model ). CPU's cut from the center of a wafer are generally the highest grade. The further towards the outer edge, the more imperfections the particular die will have and will end up being used for the slower grade cpu. Sometimes you may get lucky and get a piece that performs beyond the guaranteed spec, but it is a lottery and it takes more than a youtube video to know where you stand with your particular piece.

I am running the CPU at 1.370V right now, I don’t believe that this is out of the specification. I don’t think the voltage matters for me that much unless it’s a bit too high which I think it was when running a stress test with 1.370V set for the CPU, and received between 1.500V and 1.520V instead.
Right now, my main focus has been and is to find a core clock speed to use for either all cores or each core which I’ve been trying to do the entire day yesterday and am continuing to work on today. I do and have always understood that there’s silicon lottery involved for processors like this one and I definitely looked up information about this yesterday and still learn more about it today while learning more about how I can overclock a processor. I am interested in knowing how high the core clock speed can get on my processor and decide what I’ll use from there when looking at things such as temperatures and voltages. If I’d hit a fairly high clock speed for the cores I might not use it at all in the end.
The Youtuber in the video above used 1.450V for his i7-11700K and yesterday I browsed through the internet to find out what voltage levels other were using for this processor as well. That’s how I decided that 1.450-1.500V would be the limit for me during this period of finding out what CPU core clock speeds I’ll be running. Now, I did not think it would take this long time for me to find a CPU core clock speed to use. I thought it would take hours, not days. This is a reason to why I’m really looking for some assistance here. When I’m done overclocking I want the voltage to run as low as possible, preferably at 0.1V or something which would be amazing, right? I’ll be happy with something below 1.450V. I’ll most likely have this CPU for less than two or three years before an upgrade wil be made.

 

[geofelt]

What is your purpose in overclocking?
It is no longer a means to get something for nothing.
Modern processors are binned and sold to perform at max by default.
If you are just a tinkerer then by all means experiment.
To keep from damaging your processor. 1.5v seems too high.
Your expectations are too high.
Silicon lottery bins processors and sells the better chips for a premium.
Even the i9-9900KF maxes at 5.0 with a vcore around 1.46

What kinds of workloads do you plan on running?
In the normal course of events, it is best to have the bios load "optimized settings" and leave the rest alone.
What this means differs by motherboard.
Such a setting will allow maximum turbo on a few cores when workload and cooling capabilities permit. The i7-11700K specs says turbo of 5.0 max.
These new processors are so capable, that as a practical matter overclocking is not very productive.
Overclocking might be useful if you app can load all 16 threads at 100%
Then a good overclock on all cores might gain you something.
Normally, though, apps such as games depend on the fast performance of a few cores where turbo on a few cores is what you need.