Argen,

 

That sloppy loose memory timing. You can get 2FPS in FSX without overclocking!

 

HLJAMES

 

? What's wrong with my memory? 9-11-10-27-2T are pretty good timings for 2133 MHz, or am I completely mistaken? I bought the quickest memory I could possibly find for 8GB, and they already gained me 5%-10% FPS compared to my 1600 CL9 memory. 1600 CL9 is what most people have, but those are much slower than the current RAM I have.

 

I don't have any experience with overclocking RAM either. My mobo doesn't allow for a higher clockspeed and I don't want to increase the voltage too much. 1.5V for these sticks is great and 1.65V is bad for your memory controller (that's what I heard at least).

Mine is 2133 CAS 9-11-10-27. Same as your Arjen. Faster timings, if available, would be very expensive.

 

Dominator GT.

 

I chose this because the heat spreader fins can be removed. It fits under the D14 then.

 

Nice RAM, glad I got it. My system run's superbly.

Arjen,

 

I created a chart based upon the values provided. I used the exponential average function to vizualize the curve of performance.... Very interesting results IMO

 

 

Ben, glad you did the graph. (I wanted to, but was too lazy lol.)

The relationship in those data is clearly linear above 4.0.

 

Pierre predicted a linear relationship between OC speeds and FPS for Sandy Bridge processors after analyzing FSXMark11 results posted by contributors here. (I believe he found that the slope of the curve was not quite as steep as Arjen's data are showing, though. But the data Pierre was looking at combined a variety of processors and systems, and of course each processor seems to have its own personality.)

__________________________________________________________________

 

As for the original question, I don't think you are going to get any definite answer, Arjen, because you are asking for a yes/no answer to a question that involves considerations along a spectrum. (Similar to a question like Will I get lung cancer if I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day for 40 years? There's no yes/no answer for a question like that because there are increasing levels of risk along a spectrum.)

 

I have been interested in this same question of what is the safe upper limit for Vcore for Sandy Bridge (i7-2600k in my case) for the past few weeks. Several people have opined on other boards about what the risks might be -- kind of hard to tell who to believe, since a number of the opinions were posted when the chips were still new and people hadn't yet had a lot of experience with them.

 

Some examples:

 

A Tom's Hardware reviewer discussing automatic overclocking programs that come with some motherboards (October 2011):

We've learned through trial, error, and dead processors that voltage levels beyond 1.45 V at above-ambient temperatures can kill an Intel CPU etched at 32 nm (Sandy Bridge-based parts included) very quickly. Those same processors die a fairly slow death at voltage levels between 1.40 V and 1.45 V (somewhere between weeks and months on our test benches). And we're expecting more than a year of reliable service from the parts we've dutifully kept below 1.40 V. Not all motherboards are perfect however. Voltage instability on a particularly cheap motherboard fried one of our processors when it was set to only1.38 V. Subsequently, you've seen us use 1.35 V for the overclocking tests in older motherboard round-ups, embracing 1.38 V to 1.40 V in more recent pieces covering higher-end platforms....

 

Rather than sit here and try to beat the “Automatic” and/or “Easy” overclocking methods engineered by some of today's most popular motherboard manufacturers.... We'll only start raising eyebrows if they exceed that 1.4 V limit that we simply cannot recommend our readers push past if they have any expectation of long-term durability.

 

Sin0822 in a January 2011 guide to overclocking Sandy Bridge at overclockers.net, although that thread continued for at least a year after that (also note that he comments that his chips are early chips, not the retail chips that most users would buy):

VCC: Commonly Called Vcore, the voltage supplied to the processors inside the CPU. This voltage is a large part of Sandy Bridge overclocking. Now from personal testing, and weeks and weeks of headaches and hard ships, I have a few things I would like to share about this voltage.

I say maximum voltage for Vcc/Vcore is 1.50v for 24/7, 1.55-1.60v for extreme benchmarking, please stay below to 1.6, and don’t use any type of Load Line Calibration past 1.55v. Please not that high temperature teamed up with high voltage will kill your processor faster than anything else, it creates a perfect environment for processor degradation.

 

Miahallen in a January 2011 overclocking guide for Sandy Bridge:

Sandy Bridge is very new, and a “safe” voltage range for long term reliability is not yet known. As we spend more time and learn more about this platform, I will update this guide with a more educated estimate. For now, I’d suggest staying below 1.45V or 80C load temperatures. I feel those are both fairly conservative settings.

 

A poster commenting in a July 2011 thread on the Intel community support website (from the poster's avatar and the language used -- "we do not" -- it seems that he is an Intel representative, but it's an old thread plus he is pointing out that Inteñ does not provide support for overclocking):

In this case since the maximum Vcore for this processor is 1.52, it will be running under specifications, so there should be no issues at all....

 

Keep in mind that over-clocking does not depend only on the Vcore voltage and processor temperature, but also you need to take in consideration other options in the BIOS itself.

Anyways, since we do not recommend over-clocking we do not provide support on it, however if you still want to over-clock the processor, you might want to do it in an escalated way for processor safety.

Push foreward until you're in game FSX core temps reach close to 80c. You're done!

 

HLJAMES

Mine is 2133 CAS 9-11-10-27. Same as your Arjen. Faster timings, if available, would be very expensive.

 

Dominator GT.

 

I chose this because the heat spreader fins can be removed. It fits under the D14 then.

 

Nice RAM, glad I got it. My system run's superbly.

 

I guess I've got the exact same memory as yours then: I got the Corsair Dominator GT 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 2133 MHz 1.5V CL9 at 9-11-10-27-2T. Didn't have room to install the little fans that came with it

though. Since I got this memory in spring last year, I haven't had one single hiccup of my computer.

Yep thats the stuff

 

The mini fans aren,t needed to be honest, even with an OC ram does't get that warm.

 

Nice ram me thinks

GSkill F3-17000CL7D, 7-10-7-27-1T

Sandy Bridge runs very cool an R240 radiator will take all the way to 5.2 GHz.

 

HLJAMES