Hi, when overclocking is it possible to achieve an overclock and still have speedstep enabled, so that you can save on power when your computer isn't under load? I'm only interested in achieving a mild overclock - say 3.0Ghz to 3.2Ghz max. I've got a Gigabyte EX58-UD4 and i7 920, with 6GB of 1333Mhz OCZ RAM. I'm an overclocking noob, so please bear with! Thanks
Yes. I have a 3.8GHz overclock with speedstep enabled. See the post below. http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1998350&postcount=6 Shots are of a P6T, but I'm sure you'll translate that to the Gigabyte BIOS easily enough. On the P6T you need CPU divider to AUTO to enable speedstep.. no idea if its the same on yours.
I've not got an I7 setup, only an old Q6600 here but i have had speedstep enable since the day i bought it. Its always been stable and saves me money on my elec bills, hate to think about the cost of running at 3.6GHz all day!!! Such a waste of CPU horsepower when only surfing the net aswell sometimes.
Good to hear - what does your CPU throttle back to when in speedstep? Same question to you, mate...what does your CPU throttle back to from the 3.6Ghz when speedstep is doing its thing? Thanks
Well with speedstep enabled all it dose is drop to its lowest multiplier, mine being x6 so when idling or performing low power tasks it drops to 2.4GHz as the FSB dosen't change its speed. What is handy is if you manually setup or voltages to be stable at your overclock speed it'll bounce up and down during use and never go wrong, only when there is an unstable overclock would you be presented with problems.
At idle it falls back to 12x multi, so with my 190 BCLK that equates to 2280GHz.. drawing just 43 watts. Which beats running at 3.8 @ 140 watts all day long. Burnout is correct, speedstep only becomes an issue when you're right on the limit with low voltages. Get a stable overclock without speedstep, then just raise the V a little more. Mine's stable at 1.3v, but I run at 1.35 in order for it to jump multipliers without it falling over. I pay a bit of a temp premium for that (85 at full load under a Linpack test) but worth it. 85 degrees is fine.
How do you figure out how much wattage your cpu is chewing through? 85 sounds pretty high - doesn't leave much headroom. What cooler do you have? Also, what voltage does it run at when it's running at x12.5 multiplier? Or doesn't the voltage change? Apologies, noob q's.
