I just set up a new rig with an i7 950. When I first booted up with auto settings, the VCore got set to 1.2875. This was after I enabled XMP for my RAM, which set it to run at its 1600 freq/timings.
Based on what I had seen in the various threads for overclocking an i7 950, I saw VCores when overclocked at 1.20/1.21, and even less sometimes. Since I was running stock right now, I decided to drop it down to 1.2375V. Later on in windows had svchost.exe die on me with an access violation error, suspected bad RAM. I ran Prime and got errors immediately in blend and small fft. When it failed that quickly on small fft, I was worried I had a bad CPU when I remembered I had lowered the voltage, so I went back and set it to Auto again.
I booted back up with Vcore=1.2875 and ran Prime95 for 15 minutes on Blend and Small FFT and got no errors.
I had built two identical rigs (One for me one for wife), and the other machine seems stable at 1.2375 in Prime. Granted, I only tested for 10 minutes on her machine, but mine was erroring instantly at that voltage.
Load temps are about 58/54/58/54 fully loaded with the 1.2875 VCore (Using a Venomous X).
Now what I'm wondering is, is it actually possible that a VCore of 1.2375 on a stock i7 950 (23x multi 133 BCLK), with a slightly OC'd NB (3184) to support the RAM, would be unstable like that? Or is the chip actually bad and needs to be replaced?
Here are the other voltages (all auto currently):
VDIMM 1.6
QPI PLL 1.1
CPU PLL 1.8
IOH Vcore 1.1
CPU VTT 1.3
IOH/ICH 1.5
ICH/VCore 1.1
Based on what I had seen in the various threads for overclocking an i7 950, I saw VCores when overclocked at 1.20/1.21, and even less sometimes. Since I was running stock right now, I decided to drop it down to 1.2375V. Later on in windows had svchost.exe die on me with an access violation error, suspected bad RAM. I ran Prime and got errors immediately in blend and small fft. When it failed that quickly on small fft, I was worried I had a bad CPU when I remembered I had lowered the voltage, so I went back and set it to Auto again.
I booted back up with Vcore=1.2875 and ran Prime95 for 15 minutes on Blend and Small FFT and got no errors.
I had built two identical rigs (One for me one for wife), and the other machine seems stable at 1.2375 in Prime. Granted, I only tested for 10 minutes on her machine, but mine was erroring instantly at that voltage.
Load temps are about 58/54/58/54 fully loaded with the 1.2875 VCore (Using a Venomous X).
Now what I'm wondering is, is it actually possible that a VCore of 1.2375 on a stock i7 950 (23x multi 133 BCLK), with a slightly OC'd NB (3184) to support the RAM, would be unstable like that? Or is the chip actually bad and needs to be replaced?
Here are the other voltages (all auto currently):
VDIMM 1.6
QPI PLL 1.1
CPU PLL 1.8
IOH Vcore 1.1
CPU VTT 1.3
IOH/ICH 1.5
ICH/VCore 1.1
Last edited:
