Beginner - Adaptive Voltage? 4pin CPU power?

[BullHorn]

Hello everyone!

I just built a new PC for the first time. Everything runs great so I'm guessing I did it well.
The specs are:
Asus Z87-C
i5-4670K
Hyper 212 Evo
Crucial 2X8GB 1600MHz
770 GTX
Corsair CX750M

I never planned to OC but I want to try it now. Here are my questions:

1) In the Motherboards Overview thread, he noted that: "For those of you interested in overclocking, rest assured every model in the mainstream line-up above the Z87-C is capable of pushing Haswell to maximum operating frequencies for everyday use." -- Why? What is different between the -C model and all of the rest? I wish I knew this before buying the board, I would've obviously went for at least the -A model.

2) How can I properly use the Adaptive Voltage feature when OCing the CPU? I find that the CPU runs fine OC'd to 4.4GHz at 1.2V Manual setting however when I try to use the Adaptive setting, the voltage is unstable and fluctuates approximately 0.1V around the desired setting. I also noticed that when the multiplier goes up, the Core voltage also goes up automatically and that makes the Adaptive feature even more confusing.

Can't wait to learn from your answers. 🙂

[Praz]

BullHorn wrote:
The only worrying thing I can see in AIDA64 statistics is that during gameplay+video encoding (simultaneously), the voltage spikes up to 1.32V every 5-10 minutes for less than a second and then goes back to 1.195V. Max temperature on the cores never went above 70c.

Can I ignore this or is this a bad sign?

Personally I would ignore it. It might not even be real but assuming the reported values are correct a second or 2 every few minutes should not hurt anything.

socaldj wrote:
Even with the max turbo voltage set to 1.2 when I run OCCT to stress test it ramps up to 1.326 so I assume it uses AVX in the coding. Is thre any way to set the max AVX voltage to the same level as the max turbo? Ideally I'd like to have it running 1.2v even when running AVX...

No there isn't. The behavior of VCORE with AVX is how Intel has designed the processor. If using AVX enabled apps and the voltage increase is objectionable you will need to set the VCORE to manual mode.

[BullHorn]

What the guys told me a couple of pages ago was to do the stress testing with the voltage set to Manual 1.2V and if all that passes properly, just change it back to Adaptive and make sure you actually hit the 1.2V. This can be easily verified by doing a real test like running a game or encoding in Handbrake.

I avoid performing stress testing when I know AVX is involved and so far I've only seen AVX in one real-world application.

[socaldj]

@ Bullhorn - Yep that's what I did. Did some quick and dirty testing in manual @ 4.5 1.2v with Skyrim and the Intel Extreme Tweaking Software as Praz recommended. I'll be testing overall stability this weekend but 4.5 was my target and at this point i'll take it with the lowest voltage I can get.

@ Praz - Thanks for the response. Good to know there's no way around it for certain programs/applications. Is there a list out there of program/apps that use it so I can make sure to be cautious when they do?

[Raja]

Check out the MVI sereis guide for AVX info. No way of locking it down. If you reduce the Offset or Adaptive voltages to hit that target, you'll have insufficient voltage levels at other points in the VID stack (might not make it into the OS when BOOTing for example).

-Raja

[Praz]

socaldj wrote:
Is there a list out there of program/apps that use it so I can make sure to be cautious when they do?

None that I know of. Few consumer type programs use AVX at this time. Any that do will most likely advertise this as a feature. If using non-manual voltage modes one needs to keep this in mind and check the programs used to see if loaded voltage is objectionable.

Raja@ASUS wrote:
If you reduce the Offset or Adaptive voltages to hit that target, you'll have insufficient voltage levels at other points in the VID stack (might not make it into the OS when BOOTing for example).

If booting to the operating system is successful the system will not be stable with non-AVX loads.

[IIIdefconIII]

Can anyone help me please, manually voltage mode with my i7-6700k @ 4.6Ghz @ 1.37 V is running stable.

What number should i put when i wanne use adaptive mode?

By the way, in HWMonitor when i put windows power plan to balanced its shows 0.8V when i swap to high peformance it goes up to 1.4 V.
So isnt it already kind of adaptive? or should i still put it in adaptive mode in bios?

Thank You