680i (eVGA, XFX, BFG...) A1 / D00 Rev. VCORE AND VDROP DONE!

[Xenozx]

OK, so I did this pencil mod and OMG its fooking awesome! Like, wow who would have thought something so simple could do so much?
before mod
1.5v set in bios. PC health in bios showed 1.44 CPU-Z showed 1.42 Under load 1.39v
after mod
1.5v set in bios. PC health in bios showed 1.48 CPU-Z showed 1.486 Under load 1.496

Holy crap!

Pic of it done on my 780i, may be a crappy pic, old camera, new one coming for xmas

http://www.xenshardware.com/images/DSC03042.JPG

[FlyBoyGeo]

Its amazing what a difference it makes. I just redid mine a day ago to play with my new e8400, stroked it about 4-5 times with #2 and mine overvolts a slight amount. Im not complaining though.

[DonFaygo]

Worked on my 780i to an extent, bios set to 1.275 only showing 1.26 under load. Penciled the vdroop heavily, even tried to pencil both, but nothing changed so I erased the seond one.

OR is there something I need to do with the vcore? Do I pencil that too?>

[DonFaygo]

I just read thru that, I am suppose to shade the vcore, arent I?

[DonFaygo]

Anyone, lil help here, lol

[123456iambelial]

man, that was easy! I did it while the computer was on and could watch the voltage go up as I kept rubbing the pencil across the terminals.

Did you shade the whole thing?

[123456iambelial]

OK, so I did this pencil mod and OMG its fooking awesome! Like, wow who would have thought something so simple could do so much?
before mod
1.5v set in bios. PC health in bios showed 1.44 CPU-Z showed 1.42 Under load 1.39v
after mod
1.5v set in bios. PC health in bios showed 1.48 CPU-Z showed 1.486 Under load 1.496

Holy crap!

Pic of it done on my 780i, may be a crappy pic, old camera, new one coming for xmas

http://www.xenshardware.com/images/DSC03042.JPG

Did you ran your pencil across the resistor? like shading the whole thing.

[123456iambelial]

How did you shade your resistor? Did you shade it across from top to bottom?

[Rayce185]

Sorry to bump this old thread, but I have an XFX 780i and the Vcore drops by 0.088V under load. Will dins22's pencil mod do the trick for me? I am a bit confused by the Vcore mod, since it only shows one indicator and says "to ground", which I don't fully understand.


Also, can I use conductive ink instead of a pencil?

[TheGoat Eater]

the point of using a pencil (graphite) is to be able to vary the resistance - conductive ink would be bad then since it would be a straight trace then (correct term?) so don't ever use trace ink when it calls for penciling to vary resistance

[Rayce185]

Thanks for the heads up. I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow, since I only have HB pencils in the house.

I also found this article on Anandtech stating how bad modding the vdroop is... http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3184&p=5

What's about that?

[celemine1Gig]

Thanks for the heads up. I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow, since I only have HB pencils in the house.

I also found this article on Anandtech stating how bad modding the vdroop is... http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3184&p=5

What's about that?

It's quite simple:

Don't mess with circuits unless you understand what you are doing.

If you try to eliminate the droop voltage in a circuit that was designed with droop in mind, odds are that the overall decoupling capacitance is too low to smoothen the voltage over-/undershoots on fast load changes. That means that you'll probably make your CPU suffer from these spikes (positive or negative), which again means that it probably won't live very long.

[Rayce185]

Yeah I understood that. I am using the CPU at Intels max specced voltage (1.36250V) with the pencil mod and have noticed that CPU-Z can go up to 1.368V when under load.
But as I have also stress tested the CPU at 1.5V, I'm pretty sure that minimal upwards tolerances like this are in a non critical area.

[celemine1Gig]

Yeah I understood that. I am using the CPU at Intels max specced voltage (1.36250V) with the pencil mod and have noticed that CPU-Z can go up to 1.368V when under load.
But as I have also stress tested the CPU at 1.5V, I'm pretty sure that minimal upwards tolerances like this are in a non critical area.

Yep the extra stress will most likely only show in the long run. But you never know. The best thing is to leave the droop function untouched unless one plans to do some additional modifications. Some of the newer boards might have more headroom and supposedly were designed so that one can "disable" the droop function. But that depends on the very board you're using. I dare to say that that all 680i based boards were probably still relying on the droop function in the design stage.

[Rayce185]

As far as I know the EVGA 780i FTW has a "vdroop off" function. Just wondering, since it's the same board with basically 100% solid state caps and a modded BIOS.

I'm still sitting with the issue of a 1.4V VTT max, as I cannot clock higher than 450mhz because of it. My goal was 500 at least... Is it possible that I need to re-flash the BIOS with the P08 CD from XFX again? Or even try P07?

[celemine1Gig]

...Just wondering, since it's the same board with basically 100% solid state caps and a modded BIOS....

I would be careful with statements like the one above. As long as you didn't design the board, who told you they were the same? Is the layer count the same? Are all voltage regulators, transistors, opamps and even the capacitance and inductance values the same? I highly doubt it.

What I'm saying is: Just because it looks the same, doesn't mean it electrically is.

You always need to double-/triple-/quadruple-check when it comes to hardware-mods.
Anyway, if you got the bios option, why not use it. I just saw that you actually had a 780i board and not a 680i, as I had thought first when looking at the threads topic.

[lioncool]

thank you so much guys this very easy 2 sec pencil mod my qq600 evga 680i stable at 3600 ghz