New X4 965 half-fails Prime95, leaves me confused

[xvi]

New 965 Black Edition C3 seems to fail Prime95 at stock clocks and volts after about 10 minutes. Temps on the stock cooler hover around 56c.

Small FFTs: Stable for the last 30-ish minutes, no errors.
Blend: Cores two and three fail after 10-15 minutes. Cores one and four stable for at least30-45 minutes, no errors.

At stock volts, I get BSODs within seconds if I raise the multi one notch to bring the CPU to 3.6GHz.

This build is for a friend of mine and after four or five months of him bugging me with questions like "Can I put normal DDR in that DDR3 motherboard?" and "I want a GOOD motherboard like the Crosshair Forumla IV. How many USB ports does it have?", I'm feeling way too lazy to return anything.

The inability to overclock 200MHz makes me think that the processor is near it's stability limit, but the processors being stable when running small FFTs make me wonder if it could be the memory (or memory controller, I suppose). What can I do to narrow down the failing component?

Phenom II X4 965 BE (Stock cooler, stock speeds)
OCz Black Edition DDR3-1600 (Overdrive reports 7-7-7-16, BIOS set to "Auto", running at 800MHz)
MSI 870a-g54

[brandonwh64]

kinda a stick situation here, if you have another AM3 motherboard, i suggest testing the chip again cause it could be the MSI board. if it works there you also gotta check to see if ram could be an issue.

your best bet is to find another board and test IMO

[Kantastic]

I'm going to put money on the RAM, OCZ memory is notorious for not running well without a massive load of tweaking. That would explain why Small FFT (CPU only) is running fine whereas blend (CPU + RAM) fails. Loosen the timings to 8-8-8 and turn down the frequency to 1333, see if that helps.

[cadaveca]

I blame board bios/ram not working well together. You'll probably need to go 1333mem divider, then scale up to 240mhz, for 1600mhz mem.

Stock voltage on 965BE C3 is 1.4v. If my cpu is hot, I won't get 3600 either...need to cool these chips well.


Also, new chip from AMD coming, so right now 965BE isn't the top bin any more.

[xvi]

Originally Posted by brandonwh64

kinda a stick situation here, if you have another AM3 motherboard, i suggest testing the chip again cause it could be the MSI board. if it works there you also gotta check to see if ram could be an issue.

your best bet is to find another board and test IMO

I have a DFI LP 790FX-M3H5 in my machine, but I'm not excited about trying to swap processors. I do have an older AM2+ board. I suppose that would work.

Originally Posted by Kantastic

I'm going to put money on the RAM, OCZ memory is notorious for not running well without a massive load of tweaking. That would explain why Small FFT (CPU only) is running fine whereas blend (CPU + RAM) fails. Loosen the timings to 8-8-8 and turn down the frequency to 1333, see if that helps.

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but looking up the original specs, the memory is supposed to be running at 8-8-8-24. The board is set to automatic timings, so it should be reading the SPD.

Originally Posted by cadaveca

I blame board bios/ram not working well together. You'll probably need to go 1333mem divider, then scale up to 240mhz, for 1600mhz mem.

Stock voltage on 965BE C3 is 1.4v. If my cpu is hot, I won't get 3600 either...need to cool these chips well.
Also, new chip from AMD coming, so right now 965BE isn't the top bin any more.

I tried to tell him that there were new processors coming out, but he didn't seem to care.

He has it for now. I'll be getting it back soon-ish. There is more work to be done.

[Jakeman97]

Don't think this will help your situation; but I have one of those CPUs installed right now on an ASUS AM2+ board M3A78-T and it runs beautifully. (just sold my second one as I didn't need two any longer) I ran a CPUz and here is what it gives me running at stock speeds and with G.Skill memory.
Jakeman97

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