E8400/8500 degradation myth possibly busted?

[tmatrix]

Prime81, I had a feeling it was along the lines of Loadline calibration. I didn't want to assume since we have different motherboards. Still, even without that turned on, I wouldn't feel right about leaving speedstep on in the BIOS since I'm overclocking in the first place

I can add that air benching sessions with same e8400 going to >1.5vcore, 600fsb, 1.75pll etc have not caused any further signs of degradation. I am thoroughly convinced these chips are pretty tough. Next tests will be putting these under cold and really giving some juice.

Yowza Mrcape!!! I'm impressed. 600FSB?!!! What multiplier did you use, to get what speed? Cool! All this benching on air, no less. To support your findings, so to speak, I've been up all night feeding my "degraded" E8400 some high voltage: I managed to just post 4.5GHz with 1.8V on my WC kit. I'm figuring that was more than necessary. Anyway, I brought it back down to 1.472V CPUZ idle, running at 3.8GHz - it's stress voltage is 1.456. I was even able to run orthos blend stress tests for about 34 minutes before I stopped it; I was actually thinking 5 minutes would be enough considering how at 4GHz, no matter what fsb/multiplier combination I tried, not up to 10 seconds into the start of the test, my PC would hang and reboot.

That brings me to another observation I suspected before. With my new E8500, I was able to pull off 4GHz with ease, but I couldn't get anything higher than 4GHz stable. The E8500 would post and boot into windows, but it failed orthos small fft tests after a couple of seconds - it was a relief it didn't hang and reboot on me though as the E8400 was fond of doing. As I mentioned before, I managed to get the E8400 to get to 4GHz with about 1.6V, but it hangs and reboots the moment I start a stress test, be it small ffts or blend. However, now I'm using this E8400 chip stable as can be at 422x9, just as I was stable with my E8500 at 422x9.5. It would appear my motherboard has seen better days. It can't be the memory since I'm running it at the moment at 1125MHz, as opposed to its 1066 default...and I'm still using the extreme profile with a TRD of 7. I guess I can be glad I can use this motherboard at all. I would have seriously considered an RMA for this mobo, but I just had to go and remove that plate glued to the NB portion of the Crazycool heatsink assembly. I might look into the X48 offerings from Gigabyte later to test my theory of a faulty motherboard. For now, I'll leave the E8400 in here to avoid messing up my E8500 by accident.