Is it stressful for a cpu not receiving enougth power? I have 2500+@2200, 512ddr400, Asus A7N8X-X, eagle 320W psu. I can't decide wat vcore to set the cpu at. If i set my vcore to minumum and nothing freezes is that cool? How do i kno wat to set it to? If i set the vcore just to pass a cpu torturer, wat happens when the cpu is running at that voltage when it is idle?

"Is it stressful for a cpu not receiving enough power?"

No it isn't. That's like asking is it stressful to get a tan too slowly. Slow/low is always better, as long as it works.

"If i set the vcore just to pass a cpu torturer, wat happens when the cpu is running at that voltage when it is idle?"

The cpu cares more about the cputemp than the cpuvcore. If your cpu was human the cpuvcore would be the temperature outside and the cputemp would be the temperature under its tongue. Its like asking "will I get heatstroke if its 120F outside?" The answer is the temperature outside matters somewhat, yes, but what really matters is the temp of your body. Similarly, vcore is somewhat important but not nearly so much as cputemp.

It is good practice to set all of your voltages at the minimum that keeps the component stable. Thanks for bringing that up. Undervolting is underrated.

1.600 to 1.700v on my 2400+ is worth 2°C and it took me three weeks to pin it down. Default of 1.650v to 1.600v was worth that 2° in an effort to reduce cpu temps. The increase from 1.650 to 1.700 didn't raise temps (that I could measure)...just gave me a few more Mhz.

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i think i will just start at the lowest vcore and if anything freezes i'll just boost the vcore up. If im not giving my cpu enough power to perform functions does it affect performance?

Well, yes it does, kinda. I'll try to give an example.

At default vcore of 1.650, I can clock to 139Mhz where I run into random lock ups.

If I raise the vcore to 1.700 I don't see a problem until I hit 143Mhz.

If I lower vcore to 1.600, I can still run at 138Mhz just like at 1.650 but I see a temp difference of ~3°C when lowering vcore from 1.700 to 1.600.

Now, to throw a monkey wrench into the works:

Even though my rig was perfectly stable at 142Mhz @ 1.700 vcore (or so I thought) I ran into a problem with a new video card. Overclocking the video card would show great improvements under XP Pro but barely improve at all under Windows Me. So scratch head and blame it on the different driver versions? Sounded good to me! With everything else being equal with the low end card (a 9600se) I just naturally assumed it would be a driver issue. Another thread made me think a little today and on a lark, I set bios to defaults and lo and behold, video performance under Me increased by about 40%.

End result is that my video performance issues are solved, I'm running cooler at lowered vcore, and I'm not running on the ragged edge of my agp and pci bus.

I think I found the "sweet spot" for my old motherboard and if you do as you outlined (grab a notepad and write every change, results and all comments down), you should know when you've gone too far at a given vcore. Just make one change at a time...it'll take a lot of time but you get to learn and you'll see what kind of problems occur and at what times.

Good advice would be to commit Response 1 to memory (yours)...it'll save you a lot of head scratching in the future.

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in response to Response Number 1...

ur sayin aslong as cpu is cooled enough vcore can run at anything?