When you raise the clock speed (or multiplier) the voltage needs to go up with it to maintain the increased speed with more power to the CPU. Also need to pay attention to DRAM speeds and voltages as well. This is at least the old school method of doing it. It all depends on the quality of the motherboard as well if it can handle the extra speed and voltage that the CPU needs. I have had old Conroe and Wolfdale chips that I could crank up the speed and the stock voltage was already high enough and the chip was a good bin that I was able to lower the voltage a bit. I haven't personally had a processer that had it's OC made stable by lowering the voltage.
Actually, the reason we increase voltage really has nothing to do with the CPU
needing more power technically. We do get more power, but to get more power you could also increase the current. What we're trying to do is get more voltage to make something happen, not just pump more power into the CPU.
The reason you need to increase voltage after a certain amount of overclocking is because of how alternating current works. The frequency is the speed of how fast the current oscillates, it goes up and down, up and down. The higher the clock (or frequency) the faster it goes up and down.
The computer reads the voltage at the "top" or peak up the "up" swing as a 1, and the "down" as a 0. That's how it crunches its numbers.
You evnetually get to a clock so faster that it goes up and down too fast for the computer to reliably read if that was a 1 or a 0?
The way it works, when it goes "up" to read it as a one, it kinda bounces around for micro micro micro seconds, then levels out for a bit and once it levels out THAT's when the CPU reads it as a 1.
If it's going too fast, the CPU only sees the wave as it sort of bounces around, and it won't read it as a one, that is when your clock becomes unstable, and it won't work.
We add voltage to the A/C Wave to make the wave "shoot up" faster, and therefore it "levels out" faster too, so while you're still running at the faster frequency (or clock) it will speed up how fast the wave rises.
Kind of like a rubber band, the farther I stretch it, the more tension I put on it, the faster it's going to travel once I let it go. Same thing with AC current when adding voltage.
The more voltage, it raises faster, gets the bouncing around part out of the way faster, levels out faster, and can read it as a 1 before the wave starts to drop again.
That's why you need to increase voltage to stabilize a clock. It's got nothing to do with providing more "power" to the CPU. It's just the physics of electricity works and how can we make it read a 1 quicker.
Can't speak for why lowering voltage would make something more stable, that seems backwards to me lol...I imagine it has something to do with making the wave raise and fall too quickly, off the top of my head. Still seems weird though haha
