At 3.8 GHz Some Minor Voltage Increases Become Necessary
We continued our attempts to increase the speed of the FSB clock rate and boot the system at 190 MHz FSB. We could no longer sustain stable operation at this speed, which led us to boost CPU core voltage levels. We raised the voltage in steps of 0.025 V until the processor could operate without crashing at peak load. We achieved this goal when the voltage levels reached 1.500 V, or 0.1625 V above the standard level.
After increasing the input voltage, the system boots without difficulty at 3.8 GHz.
CPU-Z also fails to show the correct voltage here as well.
Of course, power consumption also increases as a result of raising the input voltage, but the Zalman cooler was able to handle the corresponding increase in temperatures without any problem, which enabled continued work at a modest noise level. In fact, it wasn't even necessary to set the fan rotation speed to its maximum value just yet.
In idle mode, power consumption was about 14 W higher than at 3.6 GHz. When the system was heavily loaded, however, it took a noticeable leap upward of about 36 W - the average power consumption of the CPU climbed to nearly 190 W.
RAM performance increases in lockstep with CPU clock rate; we could now select a memory clock of DDR2-760 in the BIOS, which produced an increase of 7.6 percent in memory performance.
Settings allowed for the memory at a 190 MHz FSB clock rate.
