Hey hardware lovers! I've been tweaking and overclocking my 2600K lately, and have encountered some things I can't explain myself, so I thought I'd throw some questions on here.
First, leaving the Vcore setting on auto in my MSI P67 motherboard bios makes all reasonable overclocking impossible. People (including http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-overclocking-efficiency,2850-4.html) generally report being able to overclock to around 4.4 GHz with settings on auto. My system refuses to boot with overclocks of just a few 100 MHz.
So I went and set Vcore to 1.365, the 4-core clock speed to 4.5 GHz, the 1-core speed to 4.8 (like was done in the article mentioned above). Things worked perfectly! I then lowered the voltage, to an unreasonable 1.330, and what do you know: things still worked. Running an IntelBurnTest at Very High while playing music caused no issues.
But, things seemed to be noticeably slower. Things like switching or opening programs seemed delayed, although the system was completely idle and had enough free RAM.
How could this be? I know the voltage itself shouldn't affect performance, but could something else be?
First, leaving the Vcore setting on auto in my MSI P67 motherboard bios makes all reasonable overclocking impossible. People (including http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-overclocking-efficiency,2850-4.html) generally report being able to overclock to around 4.4 GHz with settings on auto. My system refuses to boot with overclocks of just a few 100 MHz.
So I went and set Vcore to 1.365, the 4-core clock speed to 4.5 GHz, the 1-core speed to 4.8 (like was done in the article mentioned above). Things worked perfectly! I then lowered the voltage, to an unreasonable 1.330, and what do you know: things still worked. Running an IntelBurnTest at Very High while playing music caused no issues.
But, things seemed to be noticeably slower. Things like switching or opening programs seemed delayed, although the system was completely idle and had enough free RAM.
How could this be? I know the voltage itself shouldn't affect performance, but could something else be?
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