E8400/8500 degradation myth possibly busted?

[dnottis]

Have you tried 8.5x495-500 and manually setting gtls? Reason I ask is that I had a much easier time getting stability with lower vcore using those settings vs. 9x4xx.

I think my 745a is a very good chip, one of the best I've seen looking at tons of results. Onepagebook at OCX and a few others with 743a have similar or better performance out of theirs.

Re: ambient temps, mine are pretty low - mid 60s.

I'm wondering if that is part of the falacy. Why should you be able to run lower volts with a higher FSB? Does that really make sense to anyone? I dunno but I wouldnt expect 500 x 8 to run stable at any less voltage than 9 x 445.

However - maybe at really low volts chip runs a stable orthos for 12 hours maybe out of pure luck or the motherboard is overvolting on that particular startup. Then it never does again.

Personally, I wouldnt expect 4Ghz from anything less than 1.3 volts though. The thought that 4Ghz at anything less just doesn't really seem feasible to me, in fact I started with 1.36v to get 4.050 stable and then moved back from there to see that 1.328v was stable. Any less and I fail Orthos after awhile though. Maybe starting low and working up is providing less than accurate results. Ambient temps will make a large difference too - if someone had their window opened to winter air or if the ambient is a few degrees different this can all affect stability...

I guess what it comes down to is expecting a 3.0Ghz chip to run 4.0Ghz at anything less than 1.3v is slightly foolish. I'm wondering if anyone with a chip that needed high volts to hit 4.0ghz experienced this degredation or not?


oh and to answer you question no I havent tried 800 x 5 because at 445 my Mushkin will run 5-4-4-12 still, at 500 I'd have to pump more volts into it and drop to 5-5-5-15.