I recently overclocked my Core i7 920 to 4.4GHz, and now when I play Mass Effect, the game stutters severely during the cut scenes and during game play right after the cut scenes. This did not happen when I played ME with my 920 a stock speeds, and I have not changed any graphics settings in the game. In addition, all of my other games are unaffected by this stuttering. Is this a software problem or am I looking at something hardware related? My overclock tested stable with Intel Burn Test. The only thing I could think of was I disabled HT, but can ME really use all 8 threads?
It could be that when you install ME it does a burst test of the CPU to see how the cores and cache are timing together. You might have to re-install the game.
try bringing the overclock to about 3.8ghz and try then and see if it stutters i have had same problem with my q6600 i thought it was stable at 3.9 it passed the intel burn test but in games it was rubbish so i took it down to 3.8 and it was fine
I forgot to ask, have you've turned off the turbo boost in the BIOS as that might be causing sudden increase then decrease in core switching?
yes it does, but not as much of a boost as the p55 chips. it does 133mhz tops i think, compared to 266mhz for the p55 ones.
Nope, definitely won't be that. The CPU wouldn't throttle under load. I think the problem will go away if you lower your overclock a little. Make sure Turbo boost is disabled too.
Wierd. The problem seems to have corrected itself. Thanks for all the advice; I will be sure to check here if I encounter the problem again.
Not really sure I understand... I'd say if there was any throttling at all it'd happen under load. Good to hear that things are back to normal.
This. To be honest 4.4GHz is pushing it very hard. We've semi-regularly seen situations where a CPU will overclock and burn in OK, but the test results will come out slower because of errors.