Are the 10900K OCTVB voltages excessive?
Are the 10900K OCTVB voltages excessive?
I acquired a pre-binned golden 10900K Avengers Edition right now on a Z590 Maximus XIII Hero. It’s directly cooled with an extremely strong loop, so temperatures aren’t a concern. I’ve been trying out various OC techniques such as sync all core, per-core load, AI OC, OCTVB. The issue is that everything is set to Auto like vCore, LLC, SVID and similar settings Intel suggests for OCTVB. When I enable x51 all cores with TVB +2 and -1 at 70°C and -2 at 85°C, it runs smoothly in frequency terms. However, I’ve noticed the load on vCore spikes up to about 1.504v during gameplay. It doesn’t throttle much—Division 2 keeps around 65°C even at higher loads, but voltage fluctuates a lot. I’ve seen readings from 1.396v to 1.504v in HWINFO64. Even with Prime95 Small FFT and AVX enabled it stalls at x52 between 1.252-1.280v, which is stable and stays near 78-81°C, never reaching the second TVB threshold at 85°C but jumping back up when load spikes again. As you can imagine, a pre-binned golden chip with 5.2 all-core cache at 1.252v and full AVX stability isn’t something I want to compromise with Intel OCTVB, especially since it tends to overvoltage beyond 1.5v.
I'm not familiar with those alternative OC techniques. Most people stick to a full-core multiplier and fixed voltage settings. If you understand the chip's classification and recommended operating range, you could lock it in manually to avoid erratic voltage adjustments.
Well, the temperature is now around 32°C, and you've noticed the electricity costs are rising. I tend to stick with my EIST/C-States and keep voltages low. After Sandy Bridge, static overclocking isn't appealing. This method lets me define custom temperature goals and maintain a comfortable room temperature without cranking the air conditioning too hard. When the environment gets cooler, I can slightly raise the limits and let things run a bit warmer. The current settings are 5.3 for all cores, 5.0 cache, 1.411v adaptive LLC4 with AC/DC and SVID trained AVX offset of 0. Die sense load voltage is about 1.396v. I've verified stability on both my Hero and a Z490 Ace across SSE and AVX tasks. However, it does draw around 363W in Prime95 Small FFT when AVX is enabled, which isn't very efficient. The key point is that even with all Intel recommendations and no overvoltage commands, the system still assumes a 1.504v load is ideal on a 10th-gen chip that doesn’t need much power. I’m curious about the BIOS source for this voltage setting—does it relate to SVID or something similar? I’d like to see if there’s a way to adjust it without negative offsets, perhaps by tweaking the V/F curve or using an offset only on the x53 point. Let me try testing that.
I'm using my 6950X with a voltage offset setting (1V plus 200-240mV based on configuration). When under load, it throttles both clocks and voltage down just like normal, but it never exceeds the voltage I set with the offset when running the allcore multi.
Applying a global adaptive offset affects the entire curve, leading to idle crashes. The 800Mhz idle and all frequencies in between are impacted. A lower offset than -0.050 results in insufficient voltage for some frequencies. Adjusting the V/F curve to focus on above x48 multi resolves the issue. I configured it with V/F #7 x52 -0.080 and V/F #8 x53 -0.060, achieving stable performance up to 1.448v at 5.3 and 1.272v at 5.2 during short load tests with Prime95, y-cruncher, and Cinebench R23.