CPU Voltage - drops below 1.0V

[jacksonmills]

Hi all,

I'm running an Intel i7-920 (2.66ghz) on an ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard.

I've ben noticing lately that I've been having a lot of random "slowdowns" during normal usage. At first I thought it was the amount of RAM I had- I increased this to 16GB and still experienced some pretty significant slowdowns. Then I thought it might have been the CPU itself. During the process of troubleshooting, I noticed that my CPU temperature was way too high; it was operating at about 100c. I then realized this was because I had attempted to clean the Heat Sink ( it had gotten really dusty ) and the Heat Sink was no longer making contact with the CPU. I took the Heat Sink completely off, cleaned the Heat Sink and CPU, and applied new thermal paste (Arctic Silver). This got the temps down to about 30-40c. So far, so good.

But now I am noticing in CPUID that the voltage to my CPU is dropping below 1.0V. It usually starts at about .980, then goes up a little bit at a time ( increasing the clock speed and the multiplier ) until it gets to about 1.24V, at which point the CPU voltage drops down below 1.0V again..

So my questions are:

1) Is this normal? Is it possible I damaged my CPU here?
2) Does this possibly indicate another problem? ( i.e. the power supply )?

 

[theclash150]

100 Celsius is definitely hot for a running temp but for an absolute max temp, 100C isn't actually all that bad. Also, your CPU core voltage dropping below 1.0V is typically not a bad thing. You should only really be concerned if it goes too high as it might damage some transistors in your CPU.

The problem sounds a lot like your hard drive may be causing the slow downs. I would try a fresh install of windows.

 

[jacksonmills]

100 Celsius is definitely hot for a running temp but for an absolute max temp, 100C isn't actually all that bad. Also, your CPU core voltage dropping below 1.0V is typically not a bad thing. You should only really be concerned if it goes too high as it might damage some transistors in your CPU.

The problem sounds a lot like your hard drive may be causing the slow downs. I would try a fresh install of windows.

I just ran a fresh install of Windows - is there another way to tell if my hard drive is the problem?

Also, for some reason this problem is alleviated somewhat if I reset my BIOS to default settings on restarting my computer. Not sure why that would help, it might just be the restarting that is helping it, but the first time I successfully "got rid of the problem" was when I upgraded my BIOS and reset it to factory settings. Then, 2 boots later, I saw the problem again.

 

[killerhurtalot]

I think the CPU is just underclocking itself to save power....

my i5 3570k idles at below 1.0v and at like 1.8ghz...


and 100C shouldn't damage the CPU...

 

[theclash150]

Run a hard drive benchmark using Atto or some other tool.

http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?sku=Disk_Benchmark

 

[jacksonmills]

So, I did a benchmark of the hard drive, this was what I got:

This is a Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor @ 10,000 RPM, btw.

Anything abnormal here? Where else would I look? Kinda weird for things to randomly slow down here/there, especially when doing something as innocent as opening a Explorer window.