E8400/8500 degradation myth possibly busted?

[RunawayPrisoner]

Nope, It's 100% stock. 0 mods

That is hella weird. And I am having another theory:

It might not be that the spikes are degrading the chip... it might be that... the spikes are causing unstable moments, thus making it look like your CPU is failing, whereas it's actually stable! From my own experience, smooth graphs would be very stable, and those with slight distortions are more subject to instablity... even when the vCore is enough, a slight movement in 12V rail would cause the test to fail immediately.

[CrazyNutz]

That is hella weird. And I am having another theory:

It might not be that the spikes are degrading the chip... it might be that... the spikes are causing unstable moments, thus making it look like your CPU is failing, whereas it's actually stable! From my own experience, smooth graphs would be very stable, and those with slight distortions are more subject to instablity... even when the vCore is enough, a slight movement in 12V rail would cause the test to fail immediately.

Could be, however even with that huge spike/s, OCCT still ran a "Stable" test.

I would bet these spikes are occurring a lot more than what the graphs are showing. I'm going to try to barrow a oscilloscope so I can see the actual
frequency they are happening.