When using adaptive voltage, the top of the curve isn’t necessarily the whole story. ASUS drove this point home when we met and I’m doing so now; we all need to do this as a public service to our users and readers. Even though you set 1.25 V as your maximum voltage, under certain very heavy loading conditions (i.e. stress testing), the voltage can and will exceed the maximum you have set. Let me say that again – if you stress test using adaptive voltage, even with the maximum set to 1.25 V, the CPU will – guaranteed – request and receive more voltage than you have told the motherboard to deliver it. It’s just the way this works.
In the ASUS demonstrations, setting a maximum 1.25 V in this scenario and then running something like AIDA64, Prime95, etc – any stress testing application designed to stress more than normal loads – the CPU requests and gets ~1.36 V. There is nothing you can do about this and it will happen whether you want it to or not.
All is not lost though! You probably noticed every time I told you what would happen it went hand in hand with stress testing. That’s because those are the only scenarios that will lead to this behavior. In all other circumstances so far as ASUS can tell, the CPU will cap at the set 1.25 V and never exceed it. Even if you’re Folding@Home it should maintain the 1.25 V cap (though those folding at home are under 100% load all the time and I’d suggest using a manual voltage for those machines just in case). Likewise, video encoding, audio encoding, compression, rendering – any CPU-intensive process, your CPU will maintain the 1.25 V cap.
