i7 920 cannot work beyond 4Ghz

I'm continuously working with my i7 920 throughout the day, but it is showing stable only at 3.8ghz.

It's solid at 3.8 using the following settings:

Turbo off
Blck: 200
Mult: 19
Dram Freq: 1603
CPU Voltage: 1.35V
CPU PLL Voltage: 1.96V
QPI/DRAM Voltage: 1.35V
DRAM Voltage: 1.70V

With a 20 multiplier, and the same settings it will boot, but when logged into windows a bluescreen appears on the desktop.

I tried to reach upto CPU voltage of 1.6V and QPI/DRAM of 1.35V, but after a few munites or so it craters as seen by prime95. With the highest settings above, temperatures get up to 75 C

I'm a little tense of pushing it further... Is there anything else I should try? Or should I feel satisfy with 3.8Ghz?

Can you please tell me what are your idle temps and which radiator are you using?

Can you tell me what's the speed of your Ram?Are you using 1333 Ram,it might be that you are making the Ram speed too high. Try this one out by making the unlink the QPI and RAM simultaneously. Run the Ram speed and timings equally to make it stabilizes.

It might be that the chip may not hit, no matter what ever you do. It would be advisable to be with the content of 3.8. That is more than 1ghz. See what happen next by unlinking the Ram.

Is your PLL Voltage too high. Make your Vcore up and keep your PLL around 1.85 or below it. With high PLL you are going to ruin your chip. HT probably holds you back.Right now disable it because it's not helping anyone in the benchmarks.

Try this

1.43 Vcore
1.84 PLL
QPI 1.36
Vdimm 1.67

Bclk 200
Multi on Auto
Turbo enabled and HT disabled.

Enable HT if you get the same going. Depending on your chip you will probably add more juice to use HT.


Also disable CPU TM, Cpu C state, CPU Virtulization

Thanks for the solution you gave to me.

I have gone through the solution you provided and i got the Idle temps at 3.8ghz to 35C. And the Full load temps was shown around 58C.

It was of Scythe ultra kaze with 3000rpm fans on it and with Koolance quad rad.
It also shows Iwaki MD30 pump and EK Supreme CPU block on it.

It consists DDR3 with Patriot Viper DDR3-1600

It might cause you some problem if the water cooling hits 60*C.


It seems to be some kind of problem on your side related to temps is concern.

Considering the flow that i used to get with Iwaki, i think the temps were too high.

I think i should deal with it tomorrow itself, and may end up by replacing the koolance rad.

I think 60C on water is very common during full load and these things run hot. It would be prefer for some one who load the temps below 60C on water. It's difficult for anyone to do this kind of task. It may be possible with the stock but not with the overclock.