P4 Prescott VCore

[Ralf Hutter]

Prescott runs at lower Vcore 'cause of 90nm. I've used two, one runs at 1.32V, the other at 1.39V.

If you're worried about stability, just run 12-24hrs of Prime95 at the default Vcore. I think you'll be fine. No use adding more Vcore to an already hot CPU, right?

[burcakb]

I've looked at a very similar setup last weekend. Exact same board - just not sure about the Pro2 part (865PE chipset, L775 socket) with a prescott 3.0GHz CPU.

The BIOS was set to run VCore at "normal" which it stated was 1.28V. MBM showed the motherboard feeding 1.22V to the CPU. I didn't have time to do proper Prime95 testing but it looked stable. (well, definitely more stable than before I came - the damn techician hadn't screwed down the heatsink, had applied minimal paste and the CPU was hitting 85C !!!)

I was also very surprised at the voltages so when I came back home, I looked up the data on the CPU heat page and it seems that yes, the 3.0 GHz runs at 1.28V default.

[ckolivas]

If your system runs stable, run it at the lowest voltage it can run so that it runs cooler. It really doesn't matter what the actual voltage is, as long as you can survive 24hours of mprime (prime95) torture test without errors or crashes. Corruption to your operating system would be extremely unlikely to be able to alter your voltage settings that are in your BIOS.

[mczak]

I'm still battled to to why its says "1.525V" on the Intel box, though? Is that referring to something else and not what the VCore should be set to?

It probably means this is the highest voltage the cpu in the box will ask for. Remember, all current intel cpus are "multi-VID" parts, meaning they no longer require all the same voltage, but depending on your luck you might get one which is specified to run at a lower or higher voltage. Though 1.525V is clearly bogus, I believe VID range for prescotts is 1.25V - 1.4V (you could probably look at the datasheets for details).