Speedstep and Overclocking

Forum Overclocking : Intel Speedstep and Overclocking

Hello from a new member

Ive researched this topic (speedstep) and found lots of conflicting information concerning whether or not to leave speedstep active when overclocking.

What Ive heard:

Leave it on - saves power and cpu life
Leave it off - causes instability when overclocking
Just depends- results may vary depending on your mobo or how high of an overclock you are trying to achieve.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks in advance.

System specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo e4600 @ 3ghz (12 x 250)
Asus P5L-MX
4gig Gskill DDR2 800mhz
Ati Radeon 5770 1gb DDR5

Yes, I know its a clunker but its given me three years of reliable use. I just recently decided it was time to give it a little boost with a minor overclock

Reply to Firecell

I will go with "just depends" . My E8400 with a mild overclock 3.0 to 3.6ghz runs fine with it on. It reduces the multiplier to 6x from the stock 9x reducing clock speed to 2.4ghz from 3.6ghz with a 400mzh FSB. You just need to play with your system and see if it is stable. I do have to turn it off for anything around 4ghz to be stable.

Edit: Welcome to the forums BTW

Message edited by anort3 on 02-18-2010 at 10:46:28 PM

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Reply to anort3

Good point. The oc seems stable after a 1 hour burn-in at 100% cpu utilization on both cores but that was with speedstep disabled. I read a review at legion hardware that said the max oc on this cpu was 3.3ghz but I know it has to go higher than that if its not even breaking a sweat from 2.4 to 3.0ghz. Ive read that the board is stable up to 310mhz and the current oc is 12 x 250. Id love to get an aftermarket cooler and try pushing it to 3.4 or even 3.6ghz. After Im satisfied with the results, I will enable speedstep and see what happens.

Overclocking is a blast!

Thanks for the welcome, I love the forum so far

Reply to Firecell

You HAVE to use aftermarket cooling to get more than a mild overclock on anything.

Here is a great pretty much step by step guide for you. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] uals-guide

Good luck.

I turn off SpeedStep, work out my OC settings, then turn it back on. No problems with stability so far.

Reply to jsc

Yeah exactly what jsc said

Leave it off while you are still finding the perfect OC

After you get the OC stable turn it on and see if it remains stable

Most of the time you are not utilizing the CPU to the fullest so having speed step on will help drop core temps and power usage while not being pushed

Reply to waynewarrior78

I just OC'd my i7-920 and got it stable with:
base clock: 167 MHz
cpu vcore: 1.2v
LLC: On (level 2)
C1E (enhanced halt): off
C2/C6/C7 state support: off
cpu mult: 20
uncore mult: 16
QPI mult: 18
mem mult: 8

I use the Corsair H50 and after a 24 hour prime95 blend torture test the max T junction temp ended at 63* C on one core but the others all had a 59* C max.

Anyway, I have two questions.

1) When I enable Turbo Boost, my cpu multiplier seems locked at 21. Even when running another prime95 blend for 2 hours it stayed at 21. Is that the intended purpose of Turbo Boost; to just add 1 to your multiplier constantly?

2) When I enable EIST (Intel's speed step), my multiplier never reduces and my core voltage stays at 1.18v and rises to 1.2v under load. This is exactly what my core voltage was doing before I enabled EIST (Actually, I was seeing a voltage droop under load before I enabled LLC, but with it on I saw a small voltage increase under load, up to what I set the vcore to in the BIOS). Is this out of the ordinary?

Reply to ryanschmitty

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