Unpredictable adaptive voltage?

[Robert Paulson]

So, I decided to try and overclock my now aging 4790k, and followed all the instructions like a good boy: set fixed voltage, increase the multipliers and the voltage gradually, do long stress tests for stability, check the temps...etc. This way I reached the numbers I'm comfortable with: 4.6 GHz at 1.24v. Could probably push it to 4.7, but the machine is intended for heavy professional use, so I prefer to play it safe.

 

Now, according to the tips I've found pretty much everywhere, next step would be to change the voltage mode to adaptive, and here is when I learned that I don't understand the first thing about overclocking.

 

If I just change the mode, leaving 1.24v as the target voltage and the offset on 0 my real voltage, as reported by cpu-z, is 1.269v when idle and jumps to 1.303 under load. Of course I realized that's why we have an offset, so I set it to -0.065v, so now I have 1.206v on idle and 1.24v under the stress test. Cool, I thought, that's what I was looking for. 

 

But then the computer crashed while doing the cinebench test, and then again trying to render some video. I soon learnt why that was: the voltage never changes during normal usage, it stays at 1.206 even under heavy video encoding or benchmarking, and only reaches those 1.24v under synthetic stress tests.

 

There's clearly something I'm missing or I don't understand about adaptive voltage, but every tutorial I've found says that it should be as simple as setting the max voltage and watching it change depending on the cpu activity, so I'm really confused.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.