i5 2500K Passes IBT on Maximum stress but fails P95 AVX 27.7 BSOD 0x124 - Page 2

That's not 100% true my friend, I can pass 50 IBT loops but my system fails at Prime95, indicates that it is unstable. You take the risk of file corruption in case your CPU is unstable, Prime is a much more reliable and thorough test than IBT and should be ran for a long period of time to achieve stability if you ask me...

Success!!! Finally, I was able to stabilize 4.6 GHz!

I updated my BIOS to 10.5
Set voltages:

Vcore to 1.43 (1.4 in CPU-Z)
I/O - 1.07
S/A - 0.97
PLL - 1.84

I also set the Short and Long Duration Power Limit values to 200 and 255 respectively and set the maintained time to 30 seconds before disabling EIST, then I disabled EIST so the values should be saved in the background.

Managed to run Prime95 blend for a full 12 hours without a single error and it finished a full cycle of tests from the smallest to the largest FFT, relief! Also ran IBT for 10 passes on Maximum and it passed, finally I can call this config stable, this is enough for me.

Would like to hear your opinion about my current voltages and stability on 4.6, thanks.

People at the MSI forums told me that my Vcore is too high, I can lower the Vcore to below 1.4 and stabilize IBT at 4.6 GHz, I've managed to do that with 1.37, the question is, will it be really stable and can I rely on my PC based only on IBT. The guys there say that it should be more than enough to verify that your overclock is stable since nothing will stress the CPU so much.

The temps difference was about 5C lower with the regular version of Prime as compared to the 27.7 AVX version, not that big, GFlops scores were the same, 130 seconds for a loop and 120GFlops on average, I didn't take a screenshot. Max temp in both P95 and IBT reached about 70-74C.

Besides, why is the AVX version of P95 so important and how many of you i5 owners actually used it for your stress testing? It seems like the AVX version of P95 is a little too harsh...

Thanks

Ok, another update, I've decided not to cross 1.4V in the BIOS so I decided I'm gonna try 4.5GHz and lowered the voltages as follows:

Vcore - 1.4 (1.384 in CPU-Z idle, 1.368 load)
I/O - 1.07
S/A - 0.95
PLL - 1.82
DRAM - 1.514

I then tested P95 AVX 27.7 Blend test which ran successfully for a full 12 hours! Check out the screenshot:



Which really surprised me, I was sure I'm gonna get a BSOD but it passed.
Then I ran IBT for 10 loops on Maximum to finish it off and it passed as well:



I'm very pleased with this, I was able to lower the Vcore by 0.3V, lower the PLL and S/A and still get it stable on 4.5GHz

The difference in performance between 4.5 to 4.6 will be invisible, plus I've read several reviews which proved that there is hardly a difference if any at all in gaming or benchmarks so I'm fine with 4.5GHz at 1.4 Vcore.
I think I'm gonna settle down with 4.5 GHz it's a very nice 30% overclock to an already very powerful CPU, no need to push it to 5.0 and try to fry the CPU with high voltages

What do you think?

P.S.

For some reason, MSI Click BIOS and Control Center still show my S/A voltage as 1.05 even though I have it set to 0.95 in the BIOS manually, I know that the limit is somewhere at 1.2 so even if it's true I'm fine, but still, it's weird, anyone else experienced this? I would hate to find out that this voltage spikes for no reason...

Thanks