This post isn’t meant to be contain groundbreaking information. I just wanted to report my successes with the Gigabyte X58A-UD7. Many people have been talking about the possibilities of OCing while leaving power saving features enabled. I’d been wanting to play with it a bit, but hadn’t had much motivation. But the hot summer days are taking a toll on me, and my room being in the mid 30s has prompted me to turn down the space heater under my desk
I haven’t been playing many games these days, but my 295 GTX and 8800GTS pump out a lot of heat at idle. So, change #1 was to pull out the 295 altogether. I think I’ll put a 5850 in it which is WAY more power efficient!
Then I upgraded my motherboard from the EX58-EXTREME to the newer X58A-UD7 (Rev 1.0). Unfortunately, one of the memory slots is dead, so I’ll be running in dual channel mode until I can get the motherboard replaced. I’m running Crucial DDR3-1066 7-7-7-16 memory. I’m still using the same i7 920 I’ve been using for over a year. These are the BIOS settings I changed to achive my overclock:
- I set all voltages to “normal” (except vDIMM to 1.6V)
- I set load line calibration to “mode 1″
- I set “Dynamic Vcore” to +0.10V
- I set QPI/VTT to 1.215V
- I set the DRAM voltage to 1.7V
- I set bclock to 200MHz
- I set uncore multiplier to x16
- I manually configured the memory to DDR3-1600 7-7-7-21-74 1T
That’s it!
At load, my Vcore is at about 1.3V and my AC power draw at the wall is about 540W max.
4.2GHz with 1.312V at load
At idle, the Vcore is at about 1V and my AC power draw drops down to 230W
2.4GHz with 1.008V at idle
I’ll be publishing an extensive overclocking guide for Intel users soon, stay tuned!
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TechREACTION.net, TechREACTION.net. TechREACTION.net said: New: Overclocking with Power Saving Features Enabled….it's getting better. (http://bit.ly/c2kd4j) [...]
What has stopped people in the past from using this? I am not much on saving power for the planet, but seems pretty good to use.
Hey Duke, there were lots of reasons. What Gigabyte gives you (and I have not seen on other manufacturers) is the abitily to change the effective VID of the CPU. This is very different than changing the Vcore because Intel’s C-STATES technology is based on the VID.
In most cases, when Vcore in manually configured in the BIOS, even if C-STATES were active, they failed to work properly. With Gigabyte’s DVID, it tricks C-STATES to work at a higher voltage.
You’re probably thinking of SpeedStep (“EIST”) which changes the clockspeed, on-the-fly….which has tended to work fine while overclocking, but it is orly responsible for a minimal amount of power saving.
It does still have a small detrimental effect on the potential of the OC, for instance with this chip I can hit about 4.3GHz with the power saving features disabled. But the power bill and the heat in my office has convinced me that this is the better option.
AMD users can use Phenommsrtweaker, a tool to customize CnQ, to overclock on-the-fly. The tool actually replaces AMD’s CnQ and enables users to use custom P-States so that when the CPU has nothing to do, it automatically downclocks. One can exploit this feature and set P0 to something like 3.6GHz and up the V-core as desired. Check out this see hoe to apply an automatic overclock for Phenom CPU.