1:12 thermal Cycling 18:15 oxide breakdown 28:52 electromigration

As an Electrical Engineer with a masters, I approve this video. Pretty well explained.

I don't like this video very much but it's not like I'll make a better one any time soon

Thanks for releasing this, it was great, even if you don't like it, we do.

The fastest degradation of chips I've ever seen was when I bought some Doritos yesterday.

24:27 all of buildzoid's chips "I can't believe you've done this"

10/10 ramblings.

Hey BZ just wanted to say i really appreciate you going over this topic in great detail. There are too many people on forums spouting about high voltages/temperatures but cannot explain why. Thank you

A slight correction on electromigration. Current only flows on the surface of the conductor, not inside. Electrons jump from one atom to the next, from one end of the conductor to the other, leaving "holes" behind, and the direction of the flow of the current is actually the opposite of the direction of flow of electrons, so, basically, the direction of the flow of "holes". Every conductor has a certain resistance, which is actually the resistance to the electrons jumping from one atom to another, and one can think of it as the amount of hold an atom has over an electron. Also, current always flows in the direction of least resistance, which is now even more obvious. We can observe electromigration as migration of electrons that deviates from a wanted path due to changes that happen in either lower or higher resistance in certain areas of a conductor. If there's more than wanted resistance, electrons will take a different path, if there's less resistance, more electrons will flow on the same path over the same time. Voltage, temperature, impurities in the conductor and many other factors (including electromagnetism) can determine whether the electrons will behave as we want them to or not. So, too much resistance in a wanted path or lower resistance in a not wanted path will be the symptom of electromigration. The rest of the explanation that involves current, temperature and other factors is correct. O, and one more thing, electrons have insanely low mass, so it's not a bump as described, but they lose energy on overcoming the resistance, and are no longer able to follow a path that has more resistance than electron has energy, so they take a path of lower resistance. [edit] one more note, greater the resistance - more heat, which causes even greater resistance.

Watched it - understood it - like it. Thank you for this, please keep up with the good work!

Room temperature can also be like 5C when you're the extra ghetto type of overclocker who just opens the window in the winter for extra low ambient temperatures since chilled water cooling or dry ice is too expensive.

Very good explanation. That is the reason why I'm undervoting/underpowering my 1080 Ti down the point it does perform 5-10% less than stock settings (but plenty enough for me). But use SO much less power. 80-100W less. Having a GTX 1080 Ti use 150-160W is really nice. 60c max on air with very low noise. And the knowledge of much less degradation. Also always undervolting my CPUs when doing stock speed. Undervolting is possible on most chips, because the stock volts are normally set high(to be stable with even the worst binned silicons). Undervolting also saves you money on a bigger cooler and on the electric bill. But yeah... undervolting plus a bigger cooler is the best for longevity. I have a retro rig with a QX6850 (12 years old) that at stock freq, can be undervoltet quite a bit. So must still be in in good nic ;)

Hi Buildzoid, I'm both a trained physicist and chemist. If you have questions or want me to make a video going into more detail on Oxide Breakdown and Electromigration just shoot me a reply.

Dude, this is amazing info for us mere mortals! Great video!

Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate what your sharing. Some of us don't know, wouldn't know, or even consider the things you are explaining. You help make people smarter about things. TY!

Interesting and enlightening. Thank you for your support.

Thanks for the information, love the scientific vulgarization of the different processes and phenomena.

Love this video! Very informative and thought provoking.

I just want to re iterate: Thanks for your efforts. 👍

33:27 tried to tell a guy once that higher clocks take a bit more power, he insisted that only voltage matters. but like any electrical system power draw is a result of work being done, in the form of heat generation...and transistor switching. forgot the context of the argument but i think the guy was saying that an extra 500mghz on the core, as long as voltage stayed the same, power draw would remain the same

Cool video! Love watching these kinds of explanations

This was an incredible breakdown and really helped me with my overclocking adventures and will help my viewers stay safe and not damage their components! Thank you so much!

Great lesson for free, thank you so much Prof. BuildZoid!

Fun fact: The material for PCB (sub) is always mostly glass and epoxy resin & copper for the tracing and via hole plating (of course some other substances, but mainly speaking). More higher end tier board, more fillers. Fillers in the material usually for heatspeading and to try to make the PCB more robust.

I really enjoyed this video. I was learning throughout the video.

It`s a great vid bro, very informative despite a few uncertainties.

thanks man!! I like the rambling.. this gives me a moment to not hear me rambling with myself and I on this stuff, and this way I can get a few other points of view to add to my own rambling.. and I probably add a shirt to soon..

This was very informative. Little bit chaotic and not very specific at some points, but you touched so many topics that more details would be even more confusing. Thank you, another great vid!

This is such a fantastic video. Getting knowledge about a topic that has always interested me, while listening to your stories of grilled chips... what an experience. edit: 27:00 semiconducting elements do not behave linearly. check the zener breakdown. id suspect something similar to happen to an overvolted transistor in a cpu. it goes from resistor to conductor real fast. 47:05 "this is a terrible video" ... getting into semiconductor stuff right now, this is the best video i've seen so far. the depth of this is well appreciated and way beyond what you usually find on youtube...and for free.

Great BZ! I was missing some ramblings

This was a VERRRYYY good video and has greatly educated me on-chip degradation and safer OC habits

Happy 1st Birthday to one of the best Videos on YT!

A topic i’ve always wondered about, thank you

-digs out my Atari 800XL¬ Ah, the days when CPU's had no cooling whatsoever (not even a heatsink) and ran at 5 volts - just like everything else in a computer. XD To be fair, there ARE stories of overheating from that era. But it's usually a design with extremely poor airflow and an unusually hot component. (one of the rare components hot enough to require a heatsink) In fact, the most likely thing to overheat in that era would be your computer's power supply... By the way, if you have an old 8 bit system for some reason... Don't trust those old power supplies. Although they may still work, for many computers they're so cheaply made that when they do blow up (when, not if) they'll take most of the circuitry of the computer with them. Given the age of the systems, that's not something you can reasonably fix...

The thruth is that you are a hidden gem and I really glad that you share these videos with us. I study electronics, and basicly I can fill up those hole's you have in your mind about thge physics of these, but without the knowledge you have specific in overclockingI can't use it in terms of PC hardware and overclocking which I really love.

Buildzoid doesn't care about DX10 or lower. We found his true love.. tesselation!

Very interesting video, thanks for making this !

The oven 'trick' also works because of surface melting, which is a quasi-state where on the surface a layer of atoms melts. This will/can mend cracks forming in the solder balls and its connections, therefore restoring a good connection

Thank you so much BZ!

Very good vid, it gave me the confidence to try to beat the next gen big brother of my current CPU. I did 4.2 all core OC at 1.4V on a Ryzen 5 2600X with idle temp of 27.50c/load over time temp 71.50c using the Wraith Max box cooler for FX 8390 CPUs. This allowed me to beat the CPUZ single core score of the stock Ryzen 3600 and match it in multicore score, validated and stored on CPUZ site. It gave me great joy to beat $190 CPU with one I got new for $89 on sale. Note: it is Dec. 2019 mature manufactured.

I recently had my computer report 8GB instead of 16.... I thought I had killed one of my RAM sticks. Turns out I had thermal paste in one of the sockets.

Hmm. Thanks for the info! I am actually having what sounds like it might be a thermal cycling problem, currently. The (438mm^2) GPU is fine when web browsing or playing less graphically-intense games, but as soon as I play a game with "shiny" graphics, I get a BSOD (or sometimes just sudden black screen.) I thought it might be something in the interaction between GPU and power supply, since OCCT's GPU "memtest" runs for at least 4 or 5 minutes (which is where I stopped it manually,) with the core reaching 60-70ºC on DIY hybrid cooling w/120mm rad. The "3D" test that loads the core (and draws more power) crashes almost immediately. If replacing my power supply proves ineffective, I may just resort to partially disassembling my GPU and sticking it in an oven at 170ºC.

Actually a ton of good points that are nice to know and really helpful. Very good content, wouldnt know where to learn it, if not here :-)

#Buildzoid - Punching chips in the face since 2015. (24:23)

33:31 in most cases the current rises more than linear because with higher frequency the time were there is a shoot through or bough of the mosfets still changing will get longer because the MOSFET has to work faster.

So much for rambling, this is a crash course! good job as always bz.

Great video, it did make sense, but I have a question please. How does TDP limits affect both the current and the temp? Because at the end you said, its hugely temps and current, but BOTH of those are drastically reduced on Intel systems, if you set a custom TDP limit. Is this the way to go to prevent damage mate? Thanks for the time anyway!

I don't know if I missed it but there is the fact that the smaller the lithography, the lower the voltage and over voltage tolerance. I remember I saw an interview on gamernexus where the interviewee said that the biggest cause of the degradation was by far the voltage due to how you said, the place that heats up is well below the chip and because of that, independent of the cooling system (without subzero) the heat generated there by the overvolt increases exponentially compared to the rest of the chip and that over time slowly ends up burning part of it and depending on the voltage used the heat reaches such a point that it simply does not have time to transfer from there to the rest of it which causes it to burn almost instantly. As mentioned, it is a problem that also tends to worsen a lot with the reduction of lithography since the chip becomes a lot more sensitive to changes in voltage and temperature as it gets smaller and the components tighter and closer.

Excellent thanks. With regards to graphics cards what do you think about ram safe sustained temperatures? Relevant for mining and the inevitable wave of ex mining cards.

This was brilliant for my brain, easily the best video that explains what you are trying do very well. Dumb explanation videos are good.

👍👍 Really helpful. My knowledge of chip degredation finishes at the n.... So this was a great insight.

Hi Buildzoid. Given the choice between an ASRock X370 Taichi and a Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 wifi, which would you choose to use and keep? Many thanks for your amazing work and knowledge.

I love videos like this one.

Great video. I enjoyed it a lot.

I had a laptop who's Nvidia video card died like this. After resoldering it worked 3 more weeks

So basically, keep temps low, and voltage moderate.. Thanks for all the details and explenations in between

27:43 Patrons, you know what to do. Let’s make history.

12:50 That's EXACTLY what happened with my Rebrandeon variant, the 280X. And just a month before warranty expired, funnily enough. Couldn't return it in time. I can definitely tell you that the Twin Frozr cooler, infamous for inadequate thermals on the AMD side coupled with insufficient maintenance would yield this fate for sure. The recent hot summers really got it. I wonder if I can still fix it.

Back when I was running a modded Prometia, I remember discussions about phase change causing more thermal contraction/expansion. The discussion went something like that the difference in load/idle temperature, especially within parts of the core, was bigger with phase change than with air, so this was a reason for premature breakdown, even though temperature and voltage was kept within reason. Does it make sense? I remember some people kept running a low priority load on the CPU to avoid as big temperature differences.

Nicely explained and now have better understanding of these failures. I have a faulty HD 7950 with a crappy cooler from sapphire, which seem to explain the overheating and damage happened. I always wonder why we cannot have socketable GPU at this point from NVDIA/AMD ?

Very interesting vid. I flashed my GTX770 yesterday to -100MHz core and made a custom fan curve because it is my child and I dont' want to loose it.

I suspect that the oxide breakdown dependence on temperature has to do with the electron energy distribution being narrower at low temperature, so you have fewer high-energy electrons that can damage the oxide. It's the Fermi-Dirac distribution.

Hey, this is better than my chem lecture. More interesting too.

27:12 - BuildZoid what is your opinion about the idle 1.5V of 3gen Ryzen?

Bender: "Like putting too much air in a balloon!" Fry: "Of course! It's all so simple!" Great video! I'm a simple man, so I appreciate when smart guys break it down Barney-style.

This is an important topic. Thanks.

could you perhaps do a video on the details of direct die vs IHS?

on the topic of water, one of the big advantages of it is actually the thermal volume of water it's self; under a long-term heavy load, water and air cooling performance isn't that different, but where water really has an advantage is in sudden temperature spikes, which would mean a larger thermal difference between the chip and the substrate, are much better managed due to the higher thermal volume of the cooler.

Nice to listen to while trying to fall asleep

Would it be correct to think that chiplet design chips are more resistant against thermal cycling caused damage since the individual dies are smaller and thus expand less?

Curious if the temperature cycling is what killed my 7870 which started artifacting with a pattern across the screen. Smaller chip than 7970 still, but maybe the quality was suboptimal. It’s a reference design, wasn’t used that heavily especially towards the end of its life, but I used a custom fan curve that got it up to 80C~ peak because I was sick of how noisy it got at idle and when temps were just 60C under load.

Love it!

"That's just like the chip got punched in the face" LOL that's what how I describe it to my friends when I'm trying to explain how to OC and about the voltage needed. Just don't punch it in the face too much and it will be a happy camper! I'll definitely be linking this to them!!

The Fury X also has a benefit of the built in water cooling. The Fury or Fury Nano cards will be the ones that'll show the thermal aging affects way sooner than the X. The Fury X also throttles at 65'C because of water pump. heh

Appreciate it, good video

My takeaway from this is the longer the video the more Buildzoid breakdown we have.

there is something i dont understand with the vega56 card i have. the gpu temp, hbm, vram temps are at 65c70c there is a hotspot temperature that it goes to 105c . what is that !!?? that what throttles the core clocks what will be the best thermal paste for it

47:30 "you know what, just take the CPU out of the motherboard and just keep it in the fridge. Only way to keep your cpu from degrading"

I wish there was an Alexa type device that was a wee mobile Buildzoid that all his awesome technical knowledge could be referenced, intact with dry wit. I'd pay double for the dry wit.

Would the Zen 4 7000 series degrade if it's constantly running 95c long term?

0:45 humble buildzoid :)

Whoa, new GIMP looks like Blender & Photoshop had a baby.

2 volts to the core definitely needs to be a tee shirt

My 3950X was hitting 1.5v or more at times. I set a -.1v offset in my bios. Lost like 10°C and my Cinebench scores went up. I’m half tempted to keep going down to find the happy spot, as this was just a zOMG STOP fix.

As I understand the papers with the psyics is the following. Thermal breakdown = Heating and cooling, for example when solder cracks happen in SMDs (RTX "Space Invader" memory issues) Volts = Oxide breakdowns, for example in Ceramic Capacitors loose their effectiveness over time. (Image ghosting on older electronics) Current = Electron Migration, for example in a CPU when a transistor gate is "open" or "closed" other transistors sitting close or next to each other can cause free electrons to migrate across the gates. Some common exploits manipulate this effect like "Row hammer" in RAM.

Does anyone know what the oxide breakdown voltage for TSMC's simple 7nm process ( 7N ) is (under normal temperature operating conditions: say 25 to 70 deg C) ? If i'm not mistaken, I think this is the process on which Ryzen 3000 Series processors (Matisse) have been designed and fabricated. I also have a feeling that the Precision Boost 2 "algorithm / function" (NOT the PBO + Auto OC, but just the "straight out of the box" PB2) on these chips might be a little too aggressive.., especially regarding the max core voltage that PB2 allows some core(s) to use now and then... - maybe, maybe not...(?) ; this is just a hypothesis and what i'm trying to figure out..

"You can't have negative current." The physicists grant you a pass, since you didn't specify current density. ... Is the Hall effect just a -laminar- turbulent flow of electrons? (Edit: _breathes in electrical engineer_ )

Ive been hearing stories of +1.3v overclocks significantly degrading zen 2 ryzen chips. Not sure whether to believe the internet on that one. I swear most people that post on overclocking forums dont know what they are talking about.

What is a good voltage for all core 20h a day use for 2700x?

this is pretty interesting, it helps us understand why our chips do degrade over time which is my main concern as a non-overclocking consumer.

How long do you need to supply too much current and heat before you're likely to damage a CPU? Kept crashing due to 'Power Down Enable', applied LLC and voltage adjustments when not needed, r5 3600 reached 90-105c for seconds at a time, for a few days during tests.

Is it ok for a i9-10900k to keep it at 1.48-1.5V with the core temperatures 20deg (Cryo cooling) ?

About electromigration if cause for electromigration is electrons bumping into atoms, than twice voltage mean twice amperage so four times the "kinetic" energy of moving electrons

i bought a 780 ti with artifacts for 30$.But with custom bios with lower vram clocks and only as a secondary gpu (on boot freezes but if i boot with other gpu i can restart the 780 to work) i can play games for a few minutes without artifacts.What is the chance of the gpu itself is bad and not the vram chips?

As a network engineer, voltages and oxidation are part of our everyday lives, atrophy.

Nice video. Could you please provide links (or names) of the papers you read? I believe that as transistors get smaller, the biggest issue is for sure going to be hotspot temperature - there´s simply no way how to get heat out of such a small area except water cooling channels right inside the chip (that has been demoed a few years ago on some ARM chip I believe). Even today the delta between the hotspot and edge temperature on Navi can easily be 15+°C - and that´s the measured hotspot, the real hotspot might be even 10°C higher than that (depending how many sensors you have and how smartly are they located). Sadly, we can´t get access to all the temperature sensors that Vega II/Navi/Ryzen has (AMD has been really pushing it in this area), it would be really cool to visualize them - see how the temperatures change based on a different kind of load - integer/floating point code, AVX code, cache/memory intensive code. Or see how the values change based on mounting pressure.

AHOC: "I don't really care about anything older than DX11." Radeon 9000 series: "we wuz kingz"

his 1's really look like 7's sometimes

hey man i applied 1,5 volts on my old xeon x5675 when intel says not to exceed 1.45 volts.... i just did it for testing its not a 24/7 stable use. My stable is 1,4 volts for 4.5ghz..., is that ok? did i degrade my cpu??? temps didnt excceed 76 celsius on 1.5 volts on stress test..

is the 9900ks using a save voltage with stock settings?