Strange Vcore on E4300 at Load

[orangegator]

I just put together a new build with an E4300 and a GA965P-Ds3 rev1.3 It's overclocked to 3GHz and seems to run fine. I've been using TAT and Orthos to test temperatures and stability. TAT temps never exceed 69C and Speedfan doesn't exceed 55C.

Here's the weird part. I have the Vcore at 1.28V. Under full load in TAT, the Vcore reading drops to 1.23V as read by speedfan, Everest, and by CPU-Z. Everything seems to run stable. I don't think this is the CPU throttling since the temps aren't that high. Also, I tried it at Vcore=1.34V and it dropped to 1.28V under TAT load.

Is this unusual? Should I be concerned? Is the voltage actually drooping under load or is this some sort of measurement error? What do you think?

Here are my system details.

E4300
ACF7P
GA-965P-DS3 rev 1.3
Antec TruePower II 430W
EVGA 7100GS
Seagate 320G Sata
2x1gig generic PC5300

 

[dr_kuli]

It's normal Vdroop, use Google in case you don't know it.

 

[orangegator]

Gee thanks for that tip about Goolge . Seeing this is such a simple newb question I should have known. :roll: I've been reading these forums for a while and am fairly knowledgeable about computers. I thought vDroop was just the difference between the voltage setting in the bios and the actual voltage. I've heard its trypicaly 0.015V. Which is about right. I currently have it set at 1.275V an it's reading as 1.292V with no load. I didn't realize the voltage drops when the cpu is stressed. Additionally, I have an AMD system with an Acer motherboard and an X2 4200+ @2.5Ghz and CPUZ shows the voltage rock solid at 1.25V at load and no load.

So, to restate my question is a drop of 0.05V under load anything to be concerned about? Seems high, but maybe that's not. Thanks in advance for someone who actually fully answers my question and doesn't just point me to google

 

[Heyray2]

The vDroop is normal, and it's actually expected. Tolerance for this droop has been designed into the processor.

Obviously though there is a limit on the amount of droop that can be tolerated, which appears to be around 0.11v for C2D procs.

I'd say that as long as your system seems to be stable then it's probably safe to ignore the droop.

Here's a very technical explanation of vDroop on Intel processors that I found on this forum. I'm still looking up some of the big words in the dictionaryD), but it's a good read nonetheless.

http://www.thetechrepository.com/showthread.php?t=126

 

[orangegator]

Thanks for the answer and the link. Lots of info in it.