Core i7 930 Prime 95 failure

[dirtynammer]

my core i7 930 seems to be the reject out of all the chips made as it behaves pretty wierd compared to other chips. I have it overclocked with HT on, and it idles at 39 which is great but at load with prime blend test temps reached close to 80, which seems like a pretty big jump to me but whatever. My main concern however is when I ran prime for 8 hours, I had an error on core 4 six hours into the test. Should a be worried about this? most people unless they are true enthusiest wont run prime for more then 3-4 hours.

 

[Lmeow]

Is this at stock speeds?

 

[dirtynammer]

sorry my bad, 4.0 with HT on

 

[geofelt]

my core i7 930 seems to be the reject out of all the chips made as it behaves pretty wierd compared to other chips. I have it overclocked with HT on, and it idles at 39 which is great but at load with prime blend test temps reached close to 80, which seems like a pretty big jump to me but whatever. My main concern however is when I ran prime for 8 hours, I had an error on core 4 six hours into the test. Should a be worried about this? most people unless they are true enthusiest wont run prime for more then 3-4 hours.

That is exactly why you stress test with prime95 or whatever.

Some chips are better than others. You got one that makes an above average chip possible.
You did well by testing for long enough to flush out an error.

What can you do?

1) Back off the overclock a bit. Do you really need 4.0?

2) Heat is a prime reason for limiting overclocks, and 80c. is high. Try reseating your cooler. Most people use too much material and it acts as an insulator.
I imagine that you have a good oem cooler; the stock coolers are not that good for overclocking.

3) Raising the cpu voltage a bit could help, but read a bunch to understand what you are doing first.

4) Each HT gives you about 1/3 of a core extra cpu power. It is of use only if you are heavily multitasking and consistently use all 4 cores plus the hyperthreads.
You can usually get a higher overclock by disabling hyperthreading.

 

[redechelon]

Yeah, do you have a stock cooler? What is your CPU voltage?

80 degrees is high, but not unbearable. Most would consider 80C at full load "safe", but on the edge and definitely not preferred. Try to keep it under 75C or around 70C.

Disabling HT will give you a huge drop in temps, and will likely not influence your gaming performance if that's all you're worried about. I have benchmarked the difference (and read reviews) with it enabled vs. disabled and it varies on the game, but for the most part... it's not worth it. *Sometimes* HT will give you up to a %10 boost in threaded applications, but for gaming, HT makes anywhere from a 5% gain to a 2% loss in fps.

 

[welshmousepk]

HT is near pointless for gaming, so unless you do alot of encoding i'd say disable it.

also, what voltage are you at? have you tried bringing it down a bit?

as other have said, for that sort of OC you need a good cooler. if you have one, you shouldn't be seeing temps like that so its either not working, or your votlage is far too high.

EDIT: and to answer the last question in the first post, yes you should be worried. a Prim95 crash, no matter how far in, means your system is unstable. if it crashes while you are accessing windows files you could corrupt your hard drive. which is a very bad thing.
you need to be sure your OC is stable, or pull it back til it is.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

My son's 920 gets unstable at 3.8 Ghz w/ HT on. Turning it off gets him to 4.0 Ghz which he uses for gaming. Using Asus OC profiles from BIOS provides easy switch. Now both those are w/o fiddling w/ any other BIOS settings.....after adjusting about 8 or 9 of those, he was able to hit 4.2 Ghz w/ HT on.

At the 3.77 setting fill load temps are in mid 50's.....At 4.0, he can hit 70, 4.2 is about 72 (all temps average of 4 cores).

 

[dirtynammer]

thank you so much for all your help, much apreciated you are all so smart. vcore is 1.26, im using the prolimatech mega whatever air cooler. Will be turning off HT as all i do is game, and thanks welsh for the answer on prime 95. THANKS AGAIN everyone!

 

[dirtynammer]

Best answer selected by dirtynammer.

 

[dirtynammer]

jesus, HT off dropped temps to 64 while im running prime 95. Will run the full night and see if I get any errors. Dropped my vcore down to 1.23.