Phenom ii x4 965 BE very high stock voltage

[bgwhite11]

I just got my 965 and a mobo at microcenter, and at first things seemed pretty good. I noticed the voltages were kinda high(~1.44) in CPUZ so I went into the BIOS and manually set the multiplier to 17(instead of auto) and the voltage to 1.35(instead of auto). It booted fine, 100% working. I then decided to raise the clock about 200Mhz by upping the multiplier to 18 and raising the voltage to about 1.4. Did not boot to windows but boot screen said "CPU overvoltage falied!". I then entered the BIOS and set everything back then saved and restarted. Got several beeps from speaker and the same warning screen came up, so I went into BIOS and saw that the voltage upped itself to 1.7!!!!!! I DID NOT change to this voltage. I set everything on default(auto) and rebooted. System working fine but voltage is at 1.5 according to CPUZ! 3.415Ghz and idling ~45c.

I don't know what to do. This is on a cheapo 4 phase ASUS mATX board(waiting for AM3+ to come down in price+bulldozer). I don't know why the voltages are high at stock/default settings...

Help?

 

[bgwhite11]

Forgot to mention-
I flashed to most recent BIOS already and have disabled features like Cool 'n Quiet

 

[bgwhite11]

Anyone?

 

[kajabla]

1.44 is acceptable. Just set the voltage to auto; the motherboard knows how much current it needs better than you do.

 

[bgwhite11]

Everything is set on auto right now and it's at 1.5v, now, this is my first AMD cpu, but that is very high for stock voltages.

 

[bgwhite11]

Went into bios and manually set ram timings and frequency.
Manually set bus speed(200mhz), multiplier(17x) and vcore(1.375v).

Booted fine, cpuz shows voltage from 1.38v-1.4v, which is better. Temps are down by ~4c.

I definitely will not be OCing this board again.

Thanks for your response, kajabla.

 

[bgwhite11]

One more thing, I am getting huge drops in gpu usage in Crysis every 1-2 minutes, then it recovers in about 1 minute and continues this cycle.

Afterburner shows that my vram is not being maxed out (only ~750mb/1gb gtx 460).
It also shows that the gpu usage drops from 99% to ~30%.

Could my cpu be bottlenecking it? I can't find an OSD for cpu usage that I can use in games. I wouldn't think a PII x4 at 3.4ghz would bottleneck a gtx 460, unless the motherboard is cutting the voltage/frequency.