Varies but 1.5 max. 1.479 or less average The board seems very accurate on auto volts. At 4.5 the volts 1.3 on auto.
It's ok for liquid. Extreme liquid at that. It is a monster liquid cooling system that scares the crap out of me to be honest.
cooling isnt the problem. that high voltage will prematurely end your chips life even if temps are kept in check. with sandy bridge, temperature is no longer the limiting factor for overclocking, its the voltage and/or cycles.
According to what I read, the upper limit was just over 1.5 Do you have a different upper limit? Since the voltage was on Auto it was 1.479 or less on average. I usually run manual settings with my overclocks. I wouldn't stay at 5ghz or 1.5 but am impressed by the motherboard's overclocking. Shame the SLI doesn't work.
the 1.52v thing has been thrown around forums left and right. the simple fact is its the max VID as stated by intel. please note that "max VID" does not equal "max Vcore/Vcc". AFAIK intel has never released an official max Vcore for these chips. smaller transistors take less power to switch and so each reduction in transistor size has been accompanied by a drop in max Vcore. thats the reason you could stuff 1.5+ volts through your old C2D all day long. but sandy bridge is made with a process less then half that size. its generally accepted that on 32nm gulftown CPUs, anything over 1.4v will start to cause degradation, so 32nm sandy bridge chips should be safe at the same levels. all of this is not to say that at soon as you hit 1.41v your chip will die (obviously thats not the case). chip degradation is the key term here. pushing excessive voltage through the CPU will shorten its life. by how much will vary from CPU to CPU. but anyway, if i were you i would just turn off the auto settings and overclock it manually. the auto settings are a good way to get a general idea of a chips performance but they are rarely ideal. im sure you could lower that Vcore without loosing any speed.
I'd be scared of pumping that trough my C2Q... It's like kettle cable, they're think for a reason, they're usually rated to 3000w ish. So at the other end of the spectrum, having conductive material only 32nm wide and firing milltings of electrons will cause any flaw to become a chip killer. Even LN2 chips can only just take that, and thats for 12 hours tops!
your C2Q is a 45nm chip, i was thinking more along the lines of a QX6800 or any other 65nm chip really. they can take a heck of a lot more abuse than modern, smaller chips. but my point was: 1.5v through a 2500k is bad news bears.
Calm down people... It's back on 4.4ghz now. I've always gone for manual overclocks but this is a new build so I am lazy for the first week. It was on 5ghz for about 15 minutes and not at 1.5 for that time but less on average. I will keep it way below 1.5 and below 1.4 I think as well. 1.3 something is fine for my needs. 4.4ghz is lightning fast especially since fitting the 16gb 1866mhz ram. At 4.4ghz voltage ranges from 1. to 1.3 on auto. It's funny but I took more or less an instant dislike to my old EVGA Cheesecake 657. Many times I regretted buying it and wished I'd gone x58 and another brand. This Asus I like from the start. Boots quickly, extremely stable, AI Suite II is the best motherboard utility I have seen.
This thread of mine reminds me of the kid who posted on EVGA forum a few years ago that he was running his 1st gen i7 on 1.5v with CPU VTT of 1.5 and that it was the only way he could get it to 4ghz. He said it was running fine and had been for some weeks. Then he disappeared offline and was never heard from again.
im glad you found a (sane!) setting your happy with. i didnt mean to come across as being worked up over the voltage. ultimately its your chip and you can do as youd like with it....its just that you wont catch me torturing one of my chips like that (except maybe for short-term benchmarking excursions).
The EVGA kid who fed his CPU 1.5 CPU VTT killed his motherboard and his cpu. I am going to err on the side of caution though. 1.5+ may have been ok for Q6600 but as you say things have changed. I pushed my i7 860 a lot in the 3 years I had it. Probably went over 1.5 a few times but not long term. My CPU VTT on that was 1.4 sometimes. I will be more cautious with the 2500k. I estimate it's been 4 or 5 years since I had an Asus board. Impressed so far.
ive been considering jumping ship to an asus board for my fiancees 2500k. the gigabyte board shes on, granted its a cheap model, doesnt seem to be a very strong overclocker at all. on top of that ive had repeated problems with the BIOS becoming corrupt and OC settings not staying locked in. how do you like the EFI BIOS?
I have built quite a few computers for people using cheap Gigabyte boards in the region of 50 to 60 pounds. Pretty reliable but overclock settings prone to disappear sometimes. It would suddenly boot at default speed. You'd go into the bios and see your overclock settings there but it would have booted default speed because it didn't like something. I bought a P45 Gigabyte board for myself at about £135 4 years ago. It was incredible overclocker and it would take the Q6600 FSB to 500mhz. My previous board was the Asus ROG Max extreme and apart from loading windows at twice the speed of a normal motherboard it was a crap overclocker and wouldn't even run the ram at it's rated 1600mhz. The gigabyte had a bios bug which meant it would suddenly report fan as disconnected sometimes in windows (you had to reboot or disable the fan alarm in bios) and it had a cold bug. It would lock up on first boot into windows each morning. 3 years ago I bought the EVGA Cheesecake 657 P55 and i7 860. That was a love/hate relationship. Many times I wished I'd gone X58 but then I'd get to like the EVGA for a while until u updated the bios and it would go into D4 error loop for a day. The EVGA board was pretty stupid. No auto crash recovery. Once the D4 loop came it would stay for many hours and force you to clear cmos to get the system to boot. Once you got rid of the D4 error it would stay away for many months or until you flashed a new bios or made a change it didn't like. Towards the end of it's 3 year warranty it died and EVGA sent a replacement. I didn't even take it out of the box. Sold it on eBay along with the i7 cpu. EVGA are rather slow to catch up with Asus and the other big companies and I didn't want another board with zero crash recovery. I wanted GEN3 PCIe which isn't even on the cards for EVGA. Also the EVGA was not an easy overclocker and I spent a lot of time at EVGA forums helping people stabilise their boards. It took me a year to get my 4ghz overclock stable and I know for a fact that people with some of the Asus boards were overclocking effortlessly 3 years ago. I wouldn't touch Gigabyte now because of the various bugs and their fake PCIe 3. My choices came down to MSI or Asus and I was put off MSI because I knew the EUFI bios wasn't as good. Very happy with the Asus. Never seen a board overclock so easily and be so stable even with 16gb plugged in! I took to the EUFI on Asus within an hour and find it really easy to navigate using mouse (g9x). I would say the Asrock boards have the most advanced fan control but the Asus is acceptable in that area. I like the bios a lot.
my P55 board is pretty far down on the line and its been an absolutely wonderful board. extremely stable with excellent voltage control (almost no Vdroop). its been ticking away at 4.0ghz for 2 years now. i just havnt had great luck with the P67. reading through the reviews on newegg it seems the problems im having with it are pretty common. pretty disappointing really since ive always had good luck with GB. if it werent for the dual-bios and automatic bios recovery that board would have bricked itself several times over by now
