cpu overclock random restarts + vcore questions

[i_am_mustang_man]

i have a question about cpu overclocking:
i just pushed my AMD venice to 2.45 GHz, and it idles at 40, load at 50, so i'm pretty sure temps aren't the problem. my question tho is, firefox was restarting alot. then windows explorer, then hard restarts. i don't think it was overheating, because i have an after market cooler, and at the stock 2000MHz, the venice is at 48 under load. at stock, i don't experience any of these issues. should i raise the vcore and if so, to what? I've been told to just go to 1.55, but i think i want to try going to 1.45 first, maybe 1.5. also, is there anything wrong with going to 1.48? i just realized maybe mobos don't do that kind of stepping, but would there be any issue? ( i wouldn't think so, but i only think) Thanks for any advice!

 

[infrared]

i got my money on the memory. Try running SP2004 first for the cpu only. If that's stable, try the mixed test to check the memory. You might have to increase the voltage to the dimms, slacken the timings or perhaps use a divider to slow it up a bit.

 

[Ketxxx]

current vcore? might want to remove the ihs too. @ 2.6GHz my winchester only gets to like 45c.

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

am trying it now. thanks! btw, infrared, what did you do exactly to modify your ati silencer? i see we have the same vcard and cooler, and your frequencies kick mine out the top floor window. pm me if you don't want everyone to know your secrets. or if they are your secrets, no hard feelings on not sharing!

 

[infrared]

Didn't do much, basically i just polished the front at the gpu contact point, cleaned with arcticlean and applied a tiny drop of AS5. Removed the thermal pads on the backplate and replaced them with ceramique (You have to insulate a few capacitors) and then made some plastic sleaves to replace the rubber o-rings. You can then tighten the cooler more to compress the front thermal pads. Unfortunatly to get rid of those you'd need to epoxy some thin squares of copper onto the face-plate of the cooler.

erm, here's a link i dug up from the x800/x850 mods thread

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=98835&postcount=174

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

oh sorrry current vcore is stock, which is supposed to be 1.4, but it's reading at 1.41 (idk why)

 

[infrared]

as long as temps are ok, you can set the vcore at 1.48-1.55v. I wouldn't push any higher than that in this weather.

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

haha ok. thanks. i am going to try that! i ran stressprime for 10 minutes, stressing the ram, and nothing happened that was bad, so ya

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

running at 2450, with load at 52 with vcore at 1.45. stable too. my ram is down at 2040 (ddr333) so that's cool, going to keep upping the fsb, and maybe fiddle with multipliers. thanks for the help!

now, a fitting outburst of techie happiness: i changed my vcore and it didn't explode! oh happy day!

 

[infrared]

i changed my vcore and it didn't explode! oh happy day!

LOL ur a nutter... i love it!

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

oh, firefox crashed. set it to 1.50v. we'll see. maybe my venice just doesn't want to go above 2440. i don't believe it tho! going to run stress prime....

 

[Tatty_Two]

Mustang, I had the identical problem, it's your memory, it's going slightly too fast or you need too loosten timings, Explorer/firefox is always the first to go and it indicates memory, whats yours running at now? Check CPU-Z.

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

it was running at 204MHz. 4 MHz over stock. i just took it down from 2450 to 2400, and it seems to be stable again. it hard rebooted on me at 1.5V vcore and 2450 for the cpu and 204MHz for the ram. i don't know what's going on! maybe i just got a cpu from a shitty batch. these chips are only 'supposed' to be run at 2000MHz, so a 20% OC is not bad..... i think i might try taking out a bunch of my ram (1GB + 1 512) so i can run dual channel with my good stuff. it's so f'in hot out, i kind of like staying in and Ocing my comp, i've been meaning to do this for awhile!

would i need to loosen timings still?i don't have much experience with adjusting memory besides the multiplier.

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

i've been running at 1.5 vcore (should lower that....) and 2400 for about 20 minutes and no issues at all. any more ideas from anybody about what to do?!?

 

[Tatty_Two]

i've been running at 1.5 vcore (should lower that....) and 2400 for about 20 minutes and no issues at all. any more ideas from anybody about what to do?!?

2 things, bang it up to 1.55V....no probs there and put her on 2500 and secondly buy my old 3200 @ 2700 on 1.55V off me!!!!! flog yours on E Bay and everyones a winner!

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

haha, that's an awesome suggestion, but i have no money to spend on anything other than food right now. i'm sorry tatty!

 

[Tatty_Two]

haha, that's an awesome suggestion, but i have no money to spend on anything other than food right now. i'm sorry tatty!

Was joking! Am gonna build a cheap 2nd rig with the venice but with watercooling, am gonna try to get the venice to 3Gig on 1.7V....dont mind the risk as she has given me my monies worth but thats for the end of the summer!

 

[Daveburt]

Hey Mustang, Just a Suggestion....

Lower your Memory to 133, (really Loosen timings (9-5-5 2T))
As long as temps aren't a problem (not over 55c under load) raise the Vcore to 1.5.

Then crank your FSB to 245 (as a starting point), and pound the hell out of the processor ( I used Prime 95 Large FFT's tourture test)... let it run for at least a 1/2 hour if it doesn't crash, raise the FSB some more, you can do this LIVE with Clockgen (assuming the Jetway has an Nvidia chipset)....

Keep playing with this and you will eventually find out what the Processor is capable of!! If your temps are cool (I don't like to get over 55c), you may be able to up the Vcore even more...

Once you figure out what the processor can do and remain stable, lower the FSB by 5, and then start working on your MEM... Go to 166/1T first and try it all again.... (you can probably give your Memory a 5-10% voltage increase as well)

It's a tedious process, but it will teach you alot about your machines capabilities!
You may have to reset CMOS a couple times!!

If ya need a link to any of the OC utilities I mentioned, just lemme know!

L8r.......... Dave

 

[i_am_mustang_man]

thank you dave! i had pretty much just decided 2400 was my limit, but i never thought about doing it that way. I will do this probably sat night or sunday, cuz my gf gets in tomorrow until sat evening.

 

[Daveburt]

Sounds like you have your priorities straight... The GF should DEFINATELY come 1st!! (pun intended)

I did think of one other thing though, while your doing that you would want to lower your HTT to 3X, just to make sure your Mobo wasn't causing problems. At 3X you could take the FSB all the way to 333 and still be in spec for the HTT bus.

If you have 3 sticks of RAM, I would definetly take the weakest stick out and run it dual channel. But thats just me, if you can get it to 2.4 on 3 sticks it's probably OK but you'll lose some Memory bandwidth by not being Dual Channel.

One other note... My X2 is a 90nm chip too, and anything over 1.5v (vcore) doesn't really seem to help much with the OC (264 vs 260 fsb). Plus anything over 1.5v seems to make mine heat up quite a bit more. Keep an eye on your temps!

Hope this helps Man....

 

[Daveburt]

Just Curious.... Did you get a better OC on your processor?

 

[_33]

Sounds like you have your priorities straight... The GF should DEFINATELY come 1st!! (pun intended)

I did think of one other thing though, while your doing that you would want to lower your HTT to 3X, just to make sure your Mobo wasn't causing problems. At 3X you could take the FSB all the way to 333 and still be in spec for the HTT bus.

If you have 3 sticks of RAM, I would definetly take the weakest stick out and run it dual channel. But thats just me, if you can get it to 2.4 on 3 sticks it's probably OK but you'll lose some Memory bandwidth by not being Dual Channel.

One other note... My X2 is a 90nm chip too, and anything over 1.5v (vcore) doesn't really seem to help much with the OC (264 vs 260 fsb). Plus anything over 1.5v seems to make mine heat up quite a bit more. Keep an eye on your temps!

Hope this helps Man....

You seem to be quite knowledgable with the Nforce4 + A64. I have just discovered that by raising the LDT voltage from 1.2 up to 1.3v, I can now raise the FSB to 340. By Raising the memory ASYNC latency from 8 to 11, the memory can now deal with this high FSB. Now, I wanted to know, if it's normal in my system, for the cpu to be little cooler at 1.3v LDT + 333FSB + 8.5X than at 1.2v LDT + 311 FSB + 9X multi? We're talking of about 2°c idle/load.

 

[Daveburt]

Thats Kinda wierd 33.... Did you change the Vcore at all? Ambient (Room) temps CAN have an affect on cpu temps espescially(sp?) on an air cooled system....

From my experience, clock speeds don't effect temps NEARLY as much as voltage. But to see temps acually drop at a higher clock does seem strange...

I've really never messed with the LDT voltages, or delved that deep into Mem timings... You may be able to teach me a thing or two!!

AWESOME OC on that 3000 Btw!!!!!

*Just a Note*... Now that Conroe is somewhat available, you can pick up a 3800X2 for $150 that would drop right in that Mobo, they OC quite well, and once you go Dual Core you'll never look back....

 

[_33]

Thats Kinda wierd 33.... Did you change the Vcore at all? Ambient (Room) temps CAN have an affect on cpu temps espescially(sp?) on an air cooled system....

From my experience, clock speeds don't effect temps NEARLY as much as voltage. But to see temps acually drop at a higher clock does seem strange...

I've really never messed with the LDT voltages, or delved that deep into Mem timings... You may be able to teach me a thing or two!!

AWESOME OC on that 3000 Btw!!!!!

*Just a Note*... Now that Conroe is somewhat available, you can pick up a 3800X2 for $150 that would drop right in that Mobo, they OC quite well, and once you go Dual Core you'll never look back....

Thanks! I was getting to know the options and the Opteron 165 seems quite interesting, for the price, it's got some extra features that the regular athlons don't seem to have. Specially concerning HTT links. And I have seen so many Opterons clock to 3.1+ Ghz, just a good oportunity there. That could be my S939 last resort before a major switch, say summer 2007, when the K8L gets commercial + socket AM3 + DDR3. A memory bandwidth of 20 GB/s seems quite tasty on a 4 issue X 4 core CPU w/ 3 level 6 MB cache.

Right now my 3000+ can't clock more than around 2880 mhz as it makes computing errors at that clock level. During winter, it can reach around 2920 mhz before it corrupts. So, I tought; let's overclock the LDT a little more. So I decided to push it up to 335. So 335 X 3 = 1005 HTT, works like a charm in all benchmarks and games while ambient temps can reach 30°c. At those, the cpu Idles at 35-37°c and loads at 45-52°c. The NF4 chip runs at 49°c right now. But when I first installed that system, last march, the NF4 was mostly at 52°c and could go up to 56°c. But then, I didn't know what I was doing, and my case was poorly set up. The only high temp I have right now is the PWM IC which gets easily in the early 50°c when playing a game. When idle, it's around 45-46°c, again with ambient temp 27-30°c.

My knowledge comes mostly from reading a lot of stuff here and there, and trying things out on my system. It's really fun because I started off with a 1.8ghz value processor. Not only that, but my processor has a 55°c temp limit, compared to some others that have Venice's and they can go 59°c or 61°c. So mine really is a weak overclocker . I'm positive an Opteron 165 will get me 3.1 Ghz, maybe more, on air. I could be too ambitious. But, I do remove IHS, so that helps the temps.

My Vcore is 1.6v now that I think about it. At 2849 mhz, the CPU runs fully stable right now, with LDT 335. That gives me a superPI 1M of around 31 seconds and my sciencemark 2.0 score is in my sig.

 

[Tatty_Two]

33, those "extra features" you were talking about I think are not just exclusive to HTT process enhancements but also a more efficient memory controller or processes however I think the San Deigo Revision E6 also included them but the Venice cores don't.