Hello!
Yesterday I was doing some OC stress testing my 7700K with Realbench. I'm using AVX offset since my cooling is not (yet, soon getting a better one) enough to handle high multipliers and voltages. Applied a multiplier of 47 and AVX offset 3 with an adaptive voltage of 1.25 V, no offset. In RealBench since it's using AVX the CPU was running on 4.4 GHz @ around 1.152 Vcore, occasionally jumping to 1.6 V. Since it wasn't stable I raised the LLC level from 3 to 4 (or from 4 to 5, can't remember exactly but definetly one of those). IA AD/DC load line is set to 0.01. Pretty much everything is set as Raja@ASUS wrote in the Kaby Lake overclocking guide. Now my Vcore was around 1.6 V with occasional spikes of 1.8 V but still unstable. Under non-AVX load the Vcore was pretty stable at 1.248 V.
Did not want to raise the Vcore above 1.25 V since above it my CPU is reaching 80-85 degrees under RealBench. So I decided to play around with the offset. Lowered the Vcore to 1.215 V and applied an offset voltage of 0.04 V resulting in Total adaptive mode CPU core voltage of 1.255 V. Rebooted, did 15 min RealBench stress test, passed it and the Vcore was 1.248 V stable.
Today I turn on the computer, do some easy stuff like browsing the internet, reading forums. Just out of curiosity I take a look at HWiNFO (with is autostarting at Windows startup and has a polling rate set to 250 ms) and I see Vcore current 0.112 V, min 0 V,
max 4.064 V! :eek:
I took a screenshot and instantly rebooted to get into BIOS. Removed the offset voltage and now after 2 hours of monitoring my voltages seem to be perfect. Min 0.784 V, max 1.2 V while browsing.
I'm no expert but I don't think that 4 V of Vcore is in the safe zone yet alone it fits Intel's specifications. I don't know for how long and how many times did it spike to 4 V but at least once it did. It shouldn't have happened. I don't know what to think of: HWiNFO is inaccurate, offset mode is not working as it should, the VRM's are bad, or I'm doing something wrong.
Also with optimized defaults the Vcore is around 1.152 V under load in RealBench but it crashes in less then 10 minutes. Need to raise the Vcore to be stable even at stock frequency.
I'm not expert but this doesn't seem right.