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Ok i used simple maths to find his BLCK is 160 so its definetly OC'ed

I was curious as to how he gets good temps with that OC. So I decided to OC my i5 to BLCK 160 and see if it was stable. So far while running OCCT 3.1 im getting max temp of 68c with all 4 cores active @ 3.364Ghz. I must say that is a pretty nice OC. I also had to tone down my Ram speed to 1066Mhz due to the fact that it will go higher with the OC. I'm not sure if I am comfortable with these temps though.

(11-15-2009, 08:50 PM)Elwin Wrote: [ -> ]Ok i used simple maths to find his BLCK is 160 so its definetly OC'ed

I had already said I was running a blck of 160 x20 in that post. It seems like everyone missed that though.

Anyhow, turbo boost is really strange. I tested those settings using Prime95 for 4 hours on each thread setting (1-4). It also passed 4 runs of Memtest86+ and 50 runs of linx on each thread setting (1-4). You would think it would be pretty stable right? But my PC has frozen several times while doing non-stressful things like websurfing or watching videos. I can't move the mouse cursor and no keys respond.

I thought it might have something to do with the frequency being too high when it goes into x9 multiplier thus the processor is not receiving enough power to run at 1,440 mhz (where it should be at 1,170 mhz). So I went into the bios and turned up the vcore offset to +0.0500 so it could have more juice when in idle mode.

But then when I would stress test my vcore was going up to 1.40! I need this setup to last as I'm a full time student and will probably not have enough cash to buy another PC for a good 3-4 years. So I decided to forget about overclocking with turbo on. I'll just run at stock with turbo and set up an overclocked bios profile for running CPU intensive programs like PCSX2.

I was thinking of setting up my PCSX2 bios profile to have only 2 cores active and pushing those as high as I can. I just have one question about that. Is vcore the voltage supplied to the entire CPU or the voltage to each core? If it is voltage supplied to the entire CPU then I would have to drop the voltage since 2 cores are deactivated right?

The Vcore is for the whole CPU. Most mainboards (especially mine) are set to automatically adjust voltages. I have a few questions for you? What kind of mainboard, cooler, PSU, and memory you have? Did you manually set the memory voltages and timings? Also remember that if you OC the BLCK, you also OC the memory clock speed. You also have to be sure your PSU is supplying efficient and clean power to the system. You can try lowering the clock rate of your ram and see if that increases stability. I have read that a lot of people with the new socket 1156 Core i5/i7's are having compatibility issues with their boards and ram. They have random cold restarts and hangs. I think it has to do with the P55 Chipset and the memory used. You also should make sure that the ram you have is in the board's compatibility list. I set my BLCK to 160, but underclocked my ram to 1066Mhz. My Vcore went up to 1.2-V and my ram speed went up to 1280Mhz. Keep in mind my ram is only compatible with pc1333 or less.

(11-16-2009, 12:49 AM)decode1984 Wrote: [ -> ]The Vcore is for the whole CPU. Most mainboards (especially mine) are set to automatically adjust voltages. I have a few questions for you? What kind of mainboard, cooler, PSU, and memory you have? Did you manually set the memory voltages and timings? Also remember that if you OC the BLCK, you also OC the memory clock speed. You also have to be sure your PSU is supplying efficient and clean power to the system. You can try lowering the clock rate of your ram and see if that increases stability. I have read that a lot of people with the new socket 1156 Core i5/i7's are having compatibility issues with their boards and ram. They have random cold restarts and hangs. I think it has to do with the P55 Chipset and the memory used. You also should make sure that the ram you have is in the board's compatibility list. I set my BLCK to 160, but underclocked my ram to 1066Mhz. My Vcore went up to 1.2-V and my ram speed went up to 1280Mhz. Keep in mind my ram is only compatible with pc1333 or less.

I have a gigabyte p55-UD4P mobo, Coolermaster H212+, Antec 550w Basiq plus, and OCZ Obsidian RAM 4gb at DDR3 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 1.65v all manually set in bios. So my RAM was running at 160blkx10multi=1600mhz. Like I said I ran memtest86+ four times and had zero errors so it definitely is not the RAM.
It also never crashed when under heavy loads. Not even Linx (which is the most CPU intensive stress test out there for intel cpus. The only problem came when it was in idle mode. I did some googling and found this thread:
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=176882

As you can see the mobo will not set the voltage correctly on auto when you are overclocking with turbo on. So you need to increase the vcore offset by a ludicrous amount so it will not freeze when in idle mode. This leads to a very high voltage when under full load. This is probably why the general consensus withing OCing communities like overclock.net is to turn off turbo while overclocking. You just need way too much voltage to maintain stability that way.

It would have been awesome if Intel gave us the option of assigning custom voltages for each multiplier so I could add voltage only for x9 multiplier but maintain stock voltages at x21-x24.

Maybe it could be speedstep technology. I would try to disable it. But by doing that you will most likely turn off Turbo Boost.

yeah, turning off speedstep disables turbo.

The whole concept of intel's turboboost is pretty awesome If they added more options on setting the ranges on voltages, multipliers, and thresholds it would have been perfect for overclocking. I really do think we are getting a mere glimpse of the future of computing where cpus scale to meet the demand at hand. It's unfortunate I jumped in on the Beta.

I'm going to see how far I can push this with turbo and speedstep disabled. I'm pretty sure I can get 3.8ghz on all 4 cores with less than 1.35v.

edit: I have it at 191x21=4011mhz, 1.36vcore, RAM at 1528mhz. So far passed a half hour of Prime 95 set to 4 threads. My max temp was 77C though. Going to see if I can get it stable at a lower voltage.

(11-15-2009, 11:58 PM)trogoldito Wrote: [ -> ]Anyhow, turbo boost is really strange. I tested those settings using Prime95 for 4 hours on each thread setting (1-4). It also passed 4 runs of Memtest86+ and 50 runs of linx on each thread setting (1-4). You would think it would be pretty stable right? But my PC has frozen several times while doing non-stressful things like websurfing or watching videos. I can't move the mouse cursor and no keys respond.

If you're using Vista or Win7, this may be related to a common problem whose exact cause and solution has not been isolated yet (at least, 11 pages of googling has not provided any consistency with the information). Some people blame it on hardware/drivers while some blame it on windows itself.

I got those same problems before (hence the googling), wherein random freezes happen, even if you're not doing anything intensive, the hd led shows signs of activity, i can move the mouse, toggle numpad, but windows itself is frozen and I can't even open the task manager, after a few seconds or a minute, the pc will respond again and do almost everything I tried to do while it was frozen (including keystrokes on ym).

A clean reinstall fixes the problem but after a few days of 24/7 operation, the lockups will occur again. Have tried disabling aero, disabling multi threaded optimization with nvidia's drivers, have lowered my ram's timings, disabled automatic hard disk cache flushing, to no avail.

And then I saw some people blaming superfetch so i disabled superfetch on my PC and reenabled everything else I disabled (including the cache flushing) and i haven't had a random freeze for 3 days now (except real stalls caused by intel burntest). I guess superfetch doesn't know how to cache programs in a way that would suit my normal use. (am not saying it's broken, because other people have no problems with it)

I think it's a blessing to be the few to try the i5 early. It isn't really that early, but it's been out for a few months. When I first setup the machine, I was having issues with Hard reboots. It would happen a few times a day at random, even during a memtest. But memtest and seatools didn't flag any errors. I tried reseating ram, repositioning the ram and nothing worked. I underclocked the ram to pc1066 and I haven't had a reboot yet. Now, I set the BLCK to 160 which bumped up my ram to PC1280. So far there are no errors and it didn't reboot yet. Hopefully this is stable because my pc is running like a dream.

I HOPE that this works, because having my i5 clock at close to 3.4Ghz on 4 cores is really amazing. ^^ Now if I can just find a way to get temps lower than 70c on 100% load.... I did notice that my Vcore goes as little as 0.872 on 9x multiplier, but when on 21x CPU-Z reads 1.096.

Ok, here's my lowest voltage 4.0ghz OC after 35 minutes of Prime 95 (see attachment)

I'll save this CMOS setting in one of my slots in the bios and use it only when I'm running PCSX2 and the Dolphin emulator. Those are the only programs I've noticed a large performance gain over stock settings. My PC games seem to run the same at stock with turbo on as they do at 4ghz. Surfing the internet and using winrar also seem to gain no major benefit at 4ghz over stock.

All in all I'm very impressed with these results. The cost/performance ratio in the i5 series is pretty damn awesome. Definitely recommended, especially if there is a Microcenter within your area so you can get the i5-750 for $150. That deal ends on the 17th.

Here's the RAM and Mobo I got for $203 on a combo deal after $20.00 rebate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product