MSI 990FXA-GD80 V2 vCore Droop

My board seems to always run at least 0.04 volts lower than what I set it to, and under a load it drops even further.

I have mine set at 4440MHz at 1.393 volts

Under load I have seen it drop to 1.29 volts

BUT even with that said I have run occt a couple times for about 10 minutes(plus other benchmarks) at a time, have been running at this setting for the last week, and I have had no errors or problems.

Ive been told its because of the load line calibration, but I do not think this board has that setting.

I do believe the cpu pll voltage is supposed to have something to do with how the cpu voltage is regulated, but I have no idea how.

No, it's a very good motherboard - I get better clocks out of my FX-8350 with it than I do my ASUS CHV-z motherboard . Like any piece of equipment, you have to understand it in order to get the most out of it.

The GD-80 V2 has no LLC , which isn't really a big deal if you take the time to understand the vdroop that it has at a given speed and load.

Most of them will reach a maximum droop of .07 volts when powering an 8 core FX chip at 4.5 ghz + . When it reaches that maximum droop, it doesn't drop below that voltage unless there are problems elsewhere, psu or vrm cooling. The variances in voltage are from less cpu load that allow it to trend upwards towards the value you have it set to.

It takes very little air movement to cool the VRMs down a huge amount, just make sure you have good air movement across them .

All you really have to do is compensate for Vdroop manually in your settings in control center. In my case I can run 5 Ghz IBT stable at 1.53 volts loaded, if you factor in the Vdroop while setting it up, you will need to add the .07 so the setting will be 1.6 . This scares some people , but the only time it sees that much voltage is when idling and if you have good cooling it doesn't seem to hurt a thing. Also if you enable CNQ it will only raise the voltage to that level when necessary.
ASUS, MSI , GIGABYTE it doesn't matter what brand motherboard you have, the chip is going to need whatever voltage it needs to be stable at a given clockspeed. Boards with LLC add voltage automatically, basically you are doing the same thing by compensating for vdroop manually.

The best tool I have found for helping to understand V-droop is OCCT and the graphs it produces , give it a go and tell me what you find out

what he said ^^^

only problem I have had so far is that I cant overclock my corsair memory, otherwise windows will start allocating 4GB of it to Hardware Reserved. I haven't really figured out whats wrong but I also don't really need to overclock my ram -_-

one other thing i noticed is that the north bridge multiplier will crash at x13 and over, but I have managed to use the FSB frequency to get it up to 2800MHz

It's important to note that the default voltages are also very low for cpu-nb and HT link, don't be afraid to bump them up a bit.
My CHV-z pumps 1.4 volts into the cpu-nb compared to 1.2 for the gd-80 and it can boost that with llc settings.
I don't know if I can get my 2400 mhz ram to run that fast on the GD-80 but it will on the CHV-z. However it doesn't really make things that much better. If you can get cl 9 at 1866 and above you are just as well off , in most things.
Best I have done is about 2350 mhz on the gd 80 for ram clock.
I really like the gd-80
'

It's not perfect, but overall it's a really good board. I really like mine. I used it in the recent Multithreaded Mayhem contest with a 1045T and it did really well. (in the 6 thread category)

I have not noticed too horrid volt fluctuation, but when I get my rig back together I can contribute some hard figures.