tl;dr
4.0ghz G3258 w/ stock cooler w/ Asus H81m-d plus
vcore 1.230 max temp 81
vcore 1.235 max temp 78
vcore 1.240 max temp 82
huh?
Hey all, first time poster, long time youtube fan.
I am a noob to overclocking, and thought I'd try my hand at the G3258 since it was so cheap and so that I could have a cheap second gaming rig at my apartment on campus.
System:
G3258 w/ stock cooler
Asus H81m-d plus (updated to latest bios)
2x4gb ddr3-1600 (clocked at 1333 due to mobo)
Fractal Design Core 1100
3tb Seagate HDD
250gb Samsung Evo (cannibalized from old computer)
Asus R9 270x (cannibalized from Crossfire setup - only doing 1080p gaming)
Corsair CX600 (had lying around from old build)
All in all, I paid around $290 for this build not counting the old parts and I'm quite impressed by it. I have no real plans of updating this rig, hence the cheap mobo and stock cooler; I wanted to keep costs down since I have a larger mid-size rig with a Z87 and i5.
I didn't win the silicone lottery though, my g3258 could only go up to 3.8ghz at stock voltage of 1.172. I test by running prime95 for a few hours, then some gaming like Shadow of Mordor. 4.0ghz was stable, but that required bumping up my vcore up to 1.230. It ran prime95 fine for a few hours, but crashed overnight while mass downloading my steam library (For prime95, max spike temps at 81, average high under load around 79 via hwmonitor).
The next day for added stability, I increased the vcore up to 1.235 but here's the part that confused me; my temps during prime95 dropped to a max of 78, with the typical value under load of 75 and idle of 40. This ran p95 fine for a few hours, ran shadows of mordor for an hour under high settings 1080p @60fps, and lasted the whole night of downloading a steam library and antivirus scanning while downloading everything. This was counterintuitive to what I believed; I thought that increasing the vcore would slightly increase my stability along with my temps.
Just to further test this, I bumped up vcore to 1.240 but temps went back up to 82 for a max. So my question is, is there some sort of sweet spot for temperature efficiency as well?
