CPU may be self-overclokcing?

Most new CPUs from intel and AMD have built in "turbo" which means under load, as long as temps are OK, they will boost up about 10-20% above stock clock speeds. AMD 8150 is 3.6 stock and has a turbo boost of 3.9, which is probably the 3.85 you are seeing rounded up.

In short, yes they do overclock a little on their own and it's normal and as designed.

1.41 V is kinda high tho. Try updating you BIOS to the latest version and go from there. Also check the Vcore in the BIOS as 3rd party programs have a tendency to be inaccurate

Yes I did consider that Turbo, but like I said, the computer is at idle and still constantly at 3.85. In the short term it's fine. It's water cooled in an open-loop setup so I'm not terribly worried about the temp end of things, but if there's some defect causing it to run at higher speeds when it shouldn't need to I'd like to know.

As for the Vcore, that did come straight from the BIOS. I'll have to check on the BIOS version in the morning to be sure (working on something right now) so I'll let post back here sometime tomorrow.

Wouldn't be the first time I'v seen auto settings over volt the hell out of a chip.

Well, they say if you can get things to change then you're getting closer to an answer...

I went ahead and updated the BIOS. The voltages in the BIOS didn't change, but once in Windows, the Task Manager the speed now freely bounces about. At a low it gets down to about 3.2 GHz, but will spike to 4. The problem that still concerns me however is that the speed is dropping when I'm in the web browser, or working in Office, floating around the 3.5 to 3.7 range, but floating around the 3.8 range when it's supposed to be idle.

Speccy does show more fluctuations in the voltage than the BIOS, Vcore dropping to a low of 0.9V and going up to around 1.45. There has also been a slight drop in temps, but I'm going to take a look at other conditions that might be affecting that.

Still, everything seems to be working. I don't how concerned I should be about this. It's not doing anything too over-the-top radical. It is driving up power usage a little when I'm not at the screen, but that isn't a whole lot. My original concern remains, however, that the CPU may end up pulling too much power or that there is some kind of defect that could cause sudden and unpredictable throttling. The range is fairly constrained, so unless someone has a definitive answer i don't know how much more attention I'll give this.

Thank you for your help and input. Greatly appreciated.

Best answer selected by DRosencraft.