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Originally Posted by LordHood2 Say there are two identical CPUs, both clocked to 4.2Ghz. CPU A is at 1.39v, CPU B is at 1.5v. What would be the differences in said CPUs as far as performance in a gaming environment? |
The greater the vcore, the greater the electromagnetic interference (EMI) within the CPU due to clockgen pulses. Enabling Spread Spectrum in BIOS is meant to modulate EMI by varying CPU speed accordingly, usually something around +/-0.5%. But Spread Spectrum both reduces clock-for-clock performance and lowers the overclock ceiling. So in an overclocked environment, Spread Spectrum should almost always be disabled. Hence, in your scenario, the one with the lower vcore will usually outperform the one that needs higher vcore since it will suffer from less interference. This can usually be illustrated fairly clearly with benchmarks such as SuperPi or wPrime, but whether or not the difference in performance would translate into an experiential difference when gaming may not be quantifiable. Suffice to say, the best vcore for any given overclock is the lowest possible vcore while maintaining the required level of stability.