My E8500 ran Prime for an hour but failed 3d mark 06 at the same voltage.

These Wolfdales are much harder to get stable than the old Conroe, and are very sensitive to things like gtl voltage and even NB voltage.

Another thing with these cpu's is that it's windows that errors out rather than the actual program.

For example, running SuperPi at the edge of stability with a Conroe showed error messages like "not exact in round" and another error message i don't recall it's name but with this cpu i get errors like superpi shutting down completely or windows shows an error like: "SuperPi has encountered an error and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Prime and Orthos behave the same.

The coretemp reading is annoying as well, in my case core 0 is 33ºC idle where core 1 idles at 48ºC, now which one is right?

If it wasn't for the better performance this 8500 gives i would happily put my E6600 Conroe back in and get rid of all this strange behaviour.

I don't know if these problems are bios/motherboard related or if it just the Wolfdale's nature but i liked Conroe better when i first tried.

This cpu degration is another thing that bothers me, i hope i won't have to deal with that by keeping the 24/7 voltage as low as possible.

Another strange occurence that stood out is that Asus P35 boards seem to need more Vcore to get Wolfdale cpu's stable and with Asus Maximus motherboards it's very hard to go over 500fsb.

I still like my E8500 but i hate the downsides it has i tend to forget when i complete 3d mark at 4.6GHz.