Voltage Spikes

Adeptus Titanicus

Having recently built the rig in my sig, I've been running the Asus probe software that monitors temps, voltage etc in the background. Twich this eveing the voltage monitor popped up showing that the 5v rail spiked briefly to about 6v! Is this dangerous to anything? at the moment it's stable at 5.053.

AT the mo it's all running at:
12v: 12.281
5v: 5.053
3.3: 3.36
Vcore: 1.584

Any opinions/advice welcomed.

AT

Col_Loki

Well first off those voltage rails look fine. A sudden spike might be a mis-reading my the asus probe, run prime95 while looking at the voltages...... see how much they vary. The better the PSU the less the rails will change.

Ive had my Vcore spiking from 1.78 to over 1.9v and The monitor giving me a quick alarm. If the spikes occur on a more regular basis then you might run into problems especially as 6v is quite a difference..... wouldnt bother me too much with the Vcore .

Run prime95 and see what it shows up, id be very supprised if there were bad results from that PSU as all the reviews ive seen are fantastic and the rails rock solid.

Adeptus Titanicus

Thanks Loki, I'll set that going now. I've never used Prime95, but downloaded it after reading the overclocking threads (intend ocing this weekend). Is there a particular stress test tI should choose that would push the PSU and this rail?

Much appreciated.

AT

edit: actually, will go with the "In place large FFTs (maximum heat, power consumption, some RAM Tested)" for the moment. Does that make sense?

Col_Loki

I just run the torture test in prime95, havent changed any of the settings. At default it will really push the CPU, Memory and in turn your cooling & PSU. Its very un-lightly that a game or encoding will push the CPU as hard as prime95 so if your stable with it then your golden.

If the voltage rails are nice and steady then you've nothing to worry about, regular spikes are bad and can cause ram errors , but generally not hardware failure. Your voltage levels are well within the recomended , so run prime95 and see how it handles under load (which should be pretty good).

Adeptus Titanicus

ok, That torture test has been running for just over an hour, and it has been rock solid. Have been running Motherboard Monitor too to track the highss and lows and there has been very little variation. the 5 rail ranges between 5.05 and 5.11! Not bad! Like you say, hopefully it's just the monitor software.

Oddly enough, the Asus monitor reports the 12 rail as being 12.09 while the MBM reports 12.6. Everything else matches.

Prime95 was a good tip allright. Was able to see how good the Zalman really is!

Thanks for that!

AT

Col_Loki

No probs at all.

With your setup you can almost afford to not bother with the tests and just presume everything is fine . The fact that there is little or no variation in the rails means your PSU is handling your system perfectly, and like i said prime95 is prob going to push it further than any other program can.

Take some of the readings with a grain of salt, MBM has been known to show up strange figures to say the least..... great program all the same. Generally there are differences between the actual voltage output and the reported output but thats just natural. Your rails are fine and the move from idle to load is a best indication of PSU performance.

Hope temps were good also, Zalman have some very sweet products!!