Recommanded voltages for OCs on Intel boards MSI and ASRock

[Yanta]

Just starting out. Looking to get a feel for how voltage settings work. Don't want to try increasing voltages as I'm worried about damaging CPUs, but lowering them should be ok, right?

My 10940X on an MSI Creator X299 is running with VCore of 1.154v and VCCIN of 1.914v @ 4.2GHZ and runs hot. In summer I have to drop the CPU back to 3.9 or 4.0 as the idle temps are in mid 40's (Celsius). In winter @ 4.2 idle temp is 30c. I have a H115i RGB Pro cooler.

Are those voltages too high? I've OC'd by setting all core to 42 but haven't tweaked anything else. RAM is F4-3600C16Q-32GTZN (16-16-16-36)

I have 8600K's also running @ 4.2ghz on MSI Z370 SLI Plus boards. A 9700KF running on an ASRock Z390 Phantom gaming 6, a 7900X delidded on an MSI X299 Xpower Gaming AC, a 7820X running on an X299 XPower Gaming AC and a 9600K on an ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 9.

All PCs run Corsair liquid coolers, either H110i V2, H110i or H115i. All cases except for 1 are full tower with lots of fans (side, front, rear, in mosts cases a bottom fan too). My case has 12 fans + radiator fans. It has negative airflow.

What would be the recommended voltages for those all @ 4.2ghz with either 32gb or 16gb of DDR4-3200 C16 (Either Corsair or G.Skill) if say I wanted to run them @ 4.5ghz or leave them @ 4.2ghz?

I'm sort of torn between trying to get higher over clocks on some PCs, and cutting power consumption. Given I've done nothing more than set all clock ratios to 42 all my settings are probably too high, if the comments about motherboard vendors setting things too high is valid.

One PC, running Runescape, Discord, Fortnite and Firefox with a GTX 1660 Ti is being hammered something shocking and I suspect sucking more power than any other PC here. I'm going to buy a power meter just to see how much, but in the mean time, would dropping the frequency help?

Can anyone point me to some good guides for my combination of hardware, or offer some suggestions on recommended voltages.

Please and thank you.

 

[Woomack]

For games, I would leave them at 4.2GHz as the difference is not so visible. On average, all these chips should run at about 1.15-1.20V at 4.2GHz and depends on luck up to 4.5GHz 1.20-1.25V. As long as you keep them near ~1.2V then temps should be reasonable on AIO coolers but probably still high.
X299 runs hot no matter what so for these chips I would recommend 1.10-1.15V and even 4.0GHz. I have 7900X in one PC and it runs at 4GHz even though in the PC are 2x 360 rads. Since it runs 24/7 then I wanted to limit power draw and heat. I also had 7800X but replaced it with AMD. 6 core 7800X at 4.2GHz has about the same power draw and generates as much heat as 12 core Ryzen 3900X. I guess it says enough.

 

[Yanta]

Thanks for your reply.

After posting the above I did some tweaking. I noticed that on idle HWMonitor says CPU VCore is between 0.974 and 0.986v. I dropped VCore in bios to 1.120 from 1.154. So far no issues, but I haven;t tested x264/x265 yet. What confuses me is that HWMonitor shows two VCORE readings. CPU VCore and VCore. I don't know what the difference is. The latter is around 0.680v

I dropped VCCIN from 1.914 to 1.850. I'm assuming HWMonitor's VCC is VCCIN. It's running between 1.658 and 1.662

Neither of the changes made any difference to temps. Sitting at mid 30s with ambient at 20c. Is there any value to upgrading my 280mm cooler to a 360mm cooler? The fans are Noctua iPPC 2000RPM PWM fans. I believe they perform much better than the stock SP140L fans. Much higher airflow and static pressure. If I upgraded my rad I would probably also replace the stock fans.

I'll start looking at the Non-HEDT shortly.

 

[Woomack]

If you won't set fixed voltage and higher LLC then CPU voltage will be always going down to ~0.9V. However, I found that most processors are not stable under 1.05V when the CPU clock is around 3.5GHz or more. The lowest stable seems something around 1.1V and this was enough for some of my CPUs to run at 4GHz. So it's better to set 4GHz 1.1V than 3.2GHz 1.0V.

VCCIN highly depends on the CPU. Lower may help to reduce temps but also will lower the maximum memory clock. Some CPUs work fine at 1.5-1.7V, some need 1.8-1.9V.

280 (2x140mm) radiators are not much worse than 360 (3x120mm). The difference in temps is barely visible. There is a higher difference if you use CPU+GPU in a loop.
Noctua fans are great. They're not so great looking if anyone likes RGB and other things like that but for the pure performance, they're the top choice. The best is actually https://noctua.at/en/nf-a12x25-pwm, PWM, or flex, which is less noisy at max speed and has higher air pressure... but is also expensive. I got some of those from Noctua so I can't complain and in general, their performance is close to popular 140mm fans.

 

[Yanta]

Is it better to set fixed voltages, or use auto/variable voltages so that when the system is not under load one would save power? So, if it's 0.9v that's because the CPU is stepped down? Looking at task manager, at idle, it reports my CPU is running at 1.13ghz. That seems like what I would want - no need to waste power and run the system full throttle all the time. Or am I not understanding?

For VCCIN I have it set in the middle at 1.850v. Is this a CPU specific thing, or a motherboard or a combination of both? I guess the only way to find out for sure it to try different values and run prime95 or something to see how it goes, yes?

I'm not a fan of RGB (forgive the pun). It does nothing for performance and only serves to distract. And just helps to inflate already overpriced components. My case fans are Notua's too, the grey redux 1500 RPM PWM models. Counting radiator fans, a total of 12 with an overall negative airflow.

I'll play around some more with various values (only in the downward direction), and will report back soon after.

After I've tuned the CPU I'l be looking at my RAM which is F4-3600C16Q-32GTZN 16-16-16-36.