Too much?

So I've been playing with my 3700+ SD again, my results so far are...

11 x 250 = 2.75GHz @ 1.425v
11 x 260 = 2.86GHZ @ 1.5v

I plan on running it at 2.75GHz for standard day to day use as I've no need for more and with the voltage so low, I'm pretty confident the core will last for many years to come, however...

In the interests of science (*shifty eyes*) I wanna see how high this thing can go (within reason - I don't wanna risk damaging anything) sooo:

What's the max voltage I should put through the CPU WITHOUT risking anything??

1.6v is probably fine for every day use provided its below 50c or so load.

1.65v is the most you would want every day on water and for a limited time on air.

1.7v and above is suicide shot only territory and shouldn't really be done unless you have more money that sense. It probably won't kill your chip immediately but it won't do it much good in the long run. Saying that it could randomly instantly kill your chip if you're really unlucky...

Older processors (socket A etc) could handle a much higher voltage as they were build on a larger scale, 130nm and above compare to todays 90nm. I once benched a 2500+ mobile at 2.9ghz amd 2.1v on air. Crazy **** and I only did it once. It would happily sit at 2700mhz at 1.8v but the gains after that we negligible.

The problem is that the voltages you give your processor in the bios are different to the ones it actually recieves. At 3ghz mine is at 1.4*113% in the bios to give 1.582 volts. MBM measures 1.55v and a dmm measures 1.63v....

Same as above, but I once put my Opty all the way up to 1.72v, it's still running. But anything above 1.65 will give you horrendous temp unless you have some state of the art cooler, water wont do, gotta have TEC at least.

Alright thanks a lot guys! I'll keep an eye on temperatures and see what I can get out of this baby at 1.6v. :mrgreen:

I found with my chip that getting above 2.86Ghz (260x11) was very hard, though I haven't tried relaxing my memory or anything like that.

So what's the best source for a realistic Vcore reading? CPU-z? Everest? BIOS? Or something else?

Very good question, I wanna do it to an actual 1.6 volts...

The only "real" best way is to use a multimeter. The rest are just approximations and its pretty much impossible to guess which one is right. Bios or MBM5 are usually ok but they all use the same sensor chip so there isn't a big difference in the readings you will get from the board itself.

But you have to be really careful sticking a multimeter in, think there's pretty high chance of screwing things up ?

*Evil laugh*...

Using the very sensual Akasa Evo 33 and running (according to the BIOS) 1.55v through it.