The way I see it is an over clock is only stable if it can run the same applications as a stock clocked chip could at full bore for the same time periods. So if you could take a stock 4770k or something and run prime95 small FFTs albeit at 90C for 24 hours with no issues then your OC should as well. Having a high standard like that means I have more confidence in my OCs and my systems.
> The way I see it is an over clock is only stable if it can run the same applications as a stock clocked chip could at full bore for the same time periods.
AVX has been on a separate clock/offset for a while now, and many OC'ing motherboards will let you tweak it.
Given how much power AVX consumes I wouldn't be surprised if throttling it even let you clock the rest of the core higher.
> run prime95 small FFTs albeit at 90C for 24 hours with no issues then your OC should as well
That's nice in theory but in practice if it's gonna crash it's gonna do it quick. I doubt many CPUs are suddenly erroring out for the first time at 23 hours. So why not just test for an hour and call it good? An hour of super abnormally high stress is more than enough to validate it for standard usage in my opinion. More than OK at 30 minutes too. Usually fails within the first 5 seconds, if you make it to 1 min then you have a very solid chance of making it the whole way. 30-60m is plenty.
If your data assurance requirements exceed one "proof test" shot[0], so to speak, then you have no business using overclocked CPUs at all. Prime95 SmallFFT is way way more stress than you would ever put a CPU under in any real-world load, and like an overpressured proof shot it's not really the best thing in the world for the processor to do this nonstop. Electromigration is a thing that exists.
I think it's possible with exotic cooling solutions like custom water cooling. The costs are often ludicrous and not something you'd put into a cloud server but for a home workstation a good water cooling setup can get you better than stock performance such that you could run Small FFTs for hours or days and be fine. That sounds like overkill but it's peace of mind for me and I need that or I'll just keep the thing stock which I've been doing lately. My current 1620v2 xeon based workstation with a lot of enterprise Sas SSDs and tons of ram is at stock because the xeon line is locked down and it's plenty fast.
