cpu burn in

Greetings,

On occasion I have seen a few posts where "burning in" a cpu to improve stability at higher core frequencies has been discussed. I suspect the process is to either alter the electrical properties of the core, or to modify the physical properties of the unit. To a large degree, I find it perplexing.

I am very interested in any thoughts in the context of material or electrical engineering that supports "burning in" a cpu. Thanks,

Toast

Burning in, Myth of FACT???

Jay says
100% Voodoo Magic

I think burning in helps the thermal grease out as much as anything. It worked for me, but its really a hit or miss thing.

Well as current run thru' the components it slowly deteriorates. After enough of this has happened the components are "looser". Traces and such a widened a little. This lets you push a little more power thru' and in turn enabling you to run it a little faster.

Gosh I wish I could remember where I saw the explaination. But it's the same reason why you don't over-push a new car for the 1st 1000 miles. It needs to be broken in.

Speakers, need to be used for 10,000 hours before they get to their optimal sound quality.

Shoes should be stomped about in mud, kick, bent, and thrown every which way for it to feel comfortable.

Haha Dark Illusion, I love the explinations. No doubt, burning in the computer works good. Also burning in can be fun if you crunch Seti or Fold w/ Folding.

Yodums

This explains Dark Illusions post a little more in depth...is that the link, Dark?

Takiwa,

Thank you very much for the link !
The article provides the details I was hoping to understand.

Toast

hmm well I dont think you should burn in... I just burnt in my cpu and now I cant even overclock anymore at all.... before I burnt in I could overclock for 30mins but now it wont even last 1 minute, according to me burn in is still a myth

takiwa said:

This explains Dark Illusions post a little more in depth...is that the link, Dark?

Click to expand...

Sure=)

Actually I heard it talked about and the guy was some guru and gave me a lot of words I will never remember. I got the idea of it and thought it was enough=)

hmm well I dont think you should burn in... I just burnt in my cpu and now I cant even overclock anymore at all.... before I burnt in I could overclock for 30mins but now it wont even last 1 minute, according to me burn in is still a myth

Click to expand...

Try looking at your processor. Mayhaps the HS/F became unseated or the retention clip is loose. Being able to overclock for only 30minutes is not a good sign.

Here is a quote from the link referenced above. Based on the entire read and information gained through numerous threads, "burn in" is a forced aging of the core by maximizing the propensity for electromigration. Efectively it is a process to alter the electrical properties of the chip where the dominant factors are core voltage, system temperature, and interconnect type.

Toast

From the article:
"For normal users of microchips, electromigration is not an issue, especially with the new copper chips that are being released to the market. However, for people who are overclocking their chips, one thing becomes clear: The higher the temperature and voltage within the conductor, the faster the metal atoms will move, and the faster the chip will fail due to electromigration. There is not much we can do about this, as there is really only one factor we can change - the temperature.

If we lower the temperature for the chip, we lower the energy of the atoms within the interconnects of the chip. This means that it takes a lot more energy to get the metal atoms to move and hence the possibilities of electromigration to occur are significantly reduced. "

like i said
100% Voodoo magic

total voodoo magic!... and it's not my hs/fan cuz it's on there nice and tight and load temps are 38-41c

when after a burn-in I can get extra Mhz for less volts, voodoo magic or not I'm gonna do it b/c it works

here is another article http://people.freenet.de/s.urfer/conditioning.htm#what

12am, if you can't overclock and your temps are over 40 degrees at default voltage and FSB, then you're probably running too hot. What CPU cooler are you using and did you install it using a good thermal paste? Another thing I noticed is that you have a network card. Sometimes those ethernet cards don't like being overclocked much.

no bud it's 40c at my overclocked fsb which is 150 with 1.8vcore... I'm using a golden orb with artic silver... could be the network card but what I'm saying here is before I burnt in I could overclock my chip and play games for at least 30 mins... now after burning in my cpu I can only play any game for about 1 minute before it locks up on me... I've given up on overclocking this pos intel..

Gorb's just don't do the job... You need a better cooler. MBM maybe off a couple of degrees, and your internal diode maybe off a couple of degrees, so it maybe 45ºC or something.

I tried burning in a flipchip 600E which I could only get to 142-144 FSB on. Ran SETI at 600E settings (6x multiplier and 100 FSB) and 1.90 volts for 12 hours. Made no difference; can't get any higher.

Maybe I didn't burn in long enough?

My first post here!

I read this and couldn't resist registering. As a long time Anandtech forums member I've read a lot of posts. Some time ago we had a forum member that was actually an Intel Engineer that did all the cpu development. He said there is absolutely no such thing as "cpu burn in".

I do agree the thermal compound needs time to settle in, there's no doubt about that. But the cpu core it's self cannot be "burned in". However, I do believe in "burning in" the rest of the system for smoothing OC performance...I have seen systems that have run for a couple of days overclock better than in the first 5 minutes of operation.

Good to join you guys! I've been "stalking" here for a couple years.

Clevor said:

I tried burning in a flipchip 600E which I could only get to 142-144 FSB on. Ran SETI at 600E settings (6x multiplier and 100 FSB) and 1.90 volts for 12 hours. Made no difference; can't get any higher.

Maybe I didn't burn in long enough?

Click to expand...

142 to 144 FSB is going to be about your max with that chip which is a very nice overclock. Also it is possible that your RAM or another component could hold you back above that speed.

and WELCOME to the forum BAD THAD

Yeah Deez, I figured my overclock was decent too, except when you look at the Overclocker's Database, there are ALWAYS these guys who are getting 170, 166, 155 FSBs, no matter what CPU it is. And the chip is absolutely stable in 3D at 144. Heck it will run SETI no problem at 150 FSB, but the truck sequence of 3DMark2001 won't run. At 146 all the games run fine, including 3DMark2001 and QuakeIII, except the Serious Sam demo locks up. 'Stable' in SETI/Prime95 is different than 'stable' in 3D. I also noticed when I burned in the chip on SETI, CPU temps were 33 C, but when you run 3D apps, the temp runs 37-38 C. I found the IL-2 Sturmovik tracks are also real sensitive to overclocking, so I test on this too.

I agree a bit with BadThad in that on a P3C-E motherboard I tried, it would only do 138 FSB when the board was new. After a couple of weeks, it did 142-146 stable. That is an Intel 820 chipset with RDRAM. I had PC700 in there and who said RDRAM doesn't overclock well? It did the same overclock as the P3V4X board I'm using now. And I am running 7 ns Mushkin Rev. 3, which should do 160+ 2-2-2.

One problem with burning in, even for 12 hours (a week? Heaven forbid!), is that I got three 120 mm case fans and they suck in a lot of dust on the filters when you run them that long. Not sure it's worth it (expecially if you don't run filters on your fans). I usually run my computer maybe 2 hours a night.