Green Tea: retro AMD-nVidia build

[TRWOV]

more benchmarks:

PCmark2002

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PCmark05

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Monster Hunter Frontier

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Unigine Tropics

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Unigine Sanctuary

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Unigine Heaven

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[[XC] Oj101]

Originally Posted by TRWOV

Apparently the average OC is 3.2Ghz, I'd like to reach 3Ghz at least.

I'll leave it at 200Mhz x14 CPU x5 HT for the time being. The only thing I don't like is that I can't take advantage of my RAM's 250Mhz rated speed but I've lowered the timmings to 2.5-3-2-5 so not everything is lost.

Who told you that? Getting 3 GHz stable on S939 is no small feat, I've never seen 3.2 GHz stable - out of the ~200 S939 chips I've been through not even my FX-55 which did a hair under 4 GHz could do more than about 2.96 GHz perfectly stable. The odd one (call it one out of every fifty chips) could bench 3DMark2001 at up to 3.3 GHz but forget any form of stability. Of course, my idea of stable is 24/7/365, for game stable I've gotten up to about 3 GHz.

As for your memory, S939 had PLENTY of room to play with the HT speed, don't be scared to try 254 * 11 (2,794 MHz on the CPU, DDR508 on the RAM).

Moving on to voltage, I think the DFI boards were the only ones which could supply enough voltage to hurt a S939 chip. I've run 1.62v for 2.92 GHz stable on a 3700+ for the last... Jeez, it must be closing in on eight years now. No degradation whatsoever, cooling is taken care of by a Zalman 9700.

[TRWOV]

I made a search for "FX60 overclock" and many posts stated >3Ghz so I thought that was the average. Anyway, I think that I'm being limited by my board. I suppose that I'm getting close to its power delivery limits with this dual core.

About the HT, anything above 210Mhz won't boot on my board. 206-210 is unstable, boots fine but fails in the second or third loop of Intel Burn Test. 205 is semi-stable, sometimes I complete 10 loops and sometimes it fails in the middle of the run. I've tried setting the HT at x4 ad the CPU at x12 thinking that may help but it didn't. Maybe the NB/SB is overheating (this ULi chipset is a single chip solution) but I don't have enough clearance even for a 10mm thick fan. I'll try with a low profile cooper heatsink but I'm not holding my breath.

Another weird thing is that if I set the multi at x14 CPU-Z reports the speed as 2.6Ghz but the bios and dxdiag report 2.8Ghz. Still the Gflops don't increase so I think that CPU-Z is reporting the right speed.

[[XC] Oj101]

Were these people talking about proper stable or bench stable? Most people buying FX-60s were buying them to benchmark.

You want to keep your HT Link speed at under 1,000 MHz for maximum stability, the higher your HTT speed the lower you want the HT Link multiplier to be. For example, if you want to run 200x14 for 2.8 GHz you can do so with the HT Link multiplier at 5x as 200x5 = 1,000MHz. If you want to change that to 280x10, you'd need to drop down to a 3x HT Link multiplier as 280x3 = 840 MHz which is well below 1,000 MHz but 280x4 = 1,120 MHz which may introduce some instability. I don't know why you're stuck at such a low HTT speed though, all of my chips were able to do over 300 MHz and a fair number could do in excess of 400 MHz.

Going from 2.6 GHz to 2.8 GHz is not a massive increase, it's a 7.7 % increase in frequency so your increase in speed in going to be in line with that. I see you were getting about 6.75 Gflops at 2.6 GHz, at 2.8 GHz a 7.7 % increase will net you a maximum of around 7.23 Gflops - are you sure you aren't seeing a small gain and dismissing it?

[eidairaman1]

The ASRock boards of that time werent known to overclock hard

[[XC] Oj101]

I must have read wrong, I could've sworn an Asus board was being used. Oops

[TRWOV]

A (small) development:



I ordered more FX stickers since the ones I had bought previously didn't made it. The seller sworn that he shipped them... I've heard bad things about the Italian post so I guess he could be saying the truth. I don't know why finding an Athlon FX sticker is so hard

I've been playing some Scarface on my Green Tea since it doesn't work on W7 and I'm having a blast. I still need to paint the speakers though.

[xBruce88x]

looking good so far!

[TRWOV]

I need to get off my butt and put the finishing touches on this build.

[eidairaman1]

Originally Posted by TRWOV

I need to get off my butt and put the finishing touches on this build.

Take all the time in world. rushing a build can be disasterous

[ThE_MaD_ShOt]

Originally Posted by TRWOV

I need to get off my butt and put the finishing touches on this build.

I hear you man. I need to get off my butt and start my new build. Maybe when the case gets here tomorrow that will get me going on it.

[TRWOV]

Got the sticker:



It's bigger than I thought:



There's still a couple of minor things I'm not 100% satisfied with such as cable management but in such small case it's pretty hard to do, plus taking down the system is almost like a jigsaw puzzle now (I need to put the components in a certain order or they won't fit inside) so I guess I'll let them as is. The build is 99.99% done now.

[t_ski]

Too bad you don't have a green backplate for that video card. The blue looks out of place.

Great job anyway