E8400/8500 degradation myth possibly busted?

[CrazyNutz]

On the subject of spikes and dips.

I changed my power supply, an older noisetaker enermax 495W to the Corsair HX Series 620W and guess what, not one spike or dip on OCCT. And Vcore 100% stable.

I do suspect the PSU, and I have a 550w in a server I am going to pull and try
out today. I'll post the results when I do. Also I did not score an oscilloscope
since my buddy who had one no longer has it. oh well!

I also left the speedfan vcore, and +12v monitor graphs running over night,
and no spikes were recorded.

[dnottis]

Back on topic - degradation.

Alrigh I've now played with an E8400 and Xeon E3110 and have a few things to add about degredation.

- After running higher volts then coming back to low volts it will fail prime at a previously stable OC. After a few days this seems to work itself out however and I can prime the lower volts I was before. (Im not even talking high volts, I'm talking 1.4v). I actually found that in a few cases resetting the CMOS and starting over fixed this.

- I had issues where orthos was actually crashing. I'd get Orthos has stopped responding errors but the log showed it running then it just stopped. The chip never gave an error the app just quit. I was pushing 4.3Ghz, so I went back to my previously orthos stable OC 4.1Ghz and same crashes. I scrapped my orthos folder, re-downloaded it, kept doing it. To fix this issue I reset the CMOS and started over. Problem solved.

Like most people I start low and start working up. Once I get a failure with prime things get inconsistent. Lately I just reset the CMOS, go back in and reload the profile that was previously stable. This has been working quite well and even after failing orthos on an overclock it will be fine at the previous setup again.

I don't think there is degradation, just some kind of goofiness that starts once you fail pushing an overclock. My suggestion would be to reset the CMOS and load a previously stable OC - if this still doesn't work, give it a day or two and Im sure you will be able to prime a lower volt OC like before.

[RunawayPrisoner]

Back on topic - degradation.

Alrigh I've now played with an E8400 and Xeon E3110 and have a few things to add about degredation.

- After running higher volts then coming back to low volts it will fail prime at a previously stable OC. After a few days this seems to work itself out however and I can prime the lower volts I was before. (Im not even talking high volts, I'm talking 1.4v). I actually found that in a few cases resetting the CMOS and starting over fixed this.

- I had issues where orthos was actually crashing. I'd get Orthos has stopped responding errors but the log showed it running then it just stopped. The chip never gave an error the app just quit. I was pushing 4.3Ghz, so I went back to my previously orthos stable OC 4.1Ghz and same crashes. I scrapped my orthos folder, re-downloaded it, kept doing it. To fix this issue I reset the CMOS and started over. Problem solved.

Like most people I start low and start working up. Once I get a failure with prime things get inconsistent. Lately I just reset the CMOS, go back in and reload the profile that was previously stable. This has been working quite well and even after failing orthos on an overclock it will be fine at the previous setup again.

I don't think there is degradation, just some kind of goofiness that starts once you fail pushing an overclock. My suggestion would be to reset the CMOS and load a previously stable OC - if this still doesn't work, give it a day or two and Im sure you will be able to prime a lower volt OC like before.

Sounds to me like it's the mobo's fault now... or maybe a bug in premature 45nm BIOSes. Which reminds me, my mainboard also gives different results with the same BIOS settings... after each CMOS reset. I've found some consistent or at least near perfect settings that wouldn't give much of a difference whatsoever, but +-.01v away from any of the voltage options, and I'd see the system acting funky.

[dnottis]

Sounds to me like it's the mobo's fault now... or maybe a bug in premature 45nm BIOSes. Which reminds me, my mainboard also gives different results with the same BIOS settings... after each CMOS reset. I've found some consistent or at least near perfect settings that wouldn't give much of a difference whatsoever, but +-.01v away from any of the voltage options, and I'd see the system acting funky.

The board has been rock solid. Using for awhile now with my Quad and had no issues. If anything I'd be more suspect of the 45nm bios. In any case I've had DFI boards in the past that would flake out and require a CMOS clearing so it's not a big deal to me. After all its electronics.

[KTE]

Back on topic - degradation.

Alrigh I've now played with an E8400 and Xeon E3110 and have a few things to add about degredation.

- After running higher volts then coming back to low volts it will fail prime at a previously stable OC. After a few days this seems to work itself out however and I can prime the lower volts I was before. (Im not even talking high volts, I'm talking 1.4v). I actually found that in a few cases resetting the CMOS and starting over fixed this.

I get the exact same behaviour but with E8400 and Q6600. I'm talking 4 MBs so far and around 16 BIOSes between them. It's the chips in my case not anything else.

I don't use Orthos, established buggy code on stabe platforms, just mucks everything up.