Advice overclocking an Opteron 165 on Asus A8N SLI SE

[koocha]

Hi

I followed a tiny guide I found on a forum:

at 1.8 ghz stock, with a locked max multiplier of nine, you can set
the ram setting from ddr 400 to ddr 333, change the voltage to 1.45
for the cpu, set the fsb at 245, youll bring that baby up to 2.2
stable.
this will set your ddr 400 back to its origional bus speed withought
overclocking the ram at all.
as far as overclocking beyond that point, i have heard that the origional hsf
will provide enough cooling for up to 2.5 ghz, thats quite an
overclock right there 700mhz WOW, thats withought extra cooling, ive
heard of these f**kers flying at 3 ghz no problem with the proper
techniques and cooling

So I did that and it worked. I think put the FSB up to 250Mhz. Worked fine.

I then put the FSB up to 255Mhz and it wouldn't boot windows. I put it back down to 250Mhz and windows blue screened when it was loading. I tried upping the vcore, dropping the HT multiplier, but it kept blue screening.

I'm now running it at the default settings and I'm not sure where to go next. Can I have a chip that won't even do 2.4Ghz?

Thanks for any help.

Tim

PS - this is my first overclocking experience since my barton 2500 -> 3200

[Dark Horse]

This DFI Street guide is a good start:

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20823

I could write loads on this topic buts its pretty much all covered there. Main thing to do is read up lots and take it slowly. The best piece of advice I can give you is to not bother with memory overclocking as unless you want to spend 90% of your total overclocking time going for an extra 1% in performance in modern games its really not worth it. Just make sure while you are finding you cpu max mhz that you ram is underclocked through a really low divider (1/2, something like that). Then when you find your max cpu speed just stick it on a divider so that its as close to 200mhz as possible.

Also bear in mind that a stable overclock is when you can pass prime95 for 12 hours or so, not just when you can boot into windows.

[koocha]

Thanks for that, it's a good read

[koocha]

Come to think of it, my problems started when I plugged in my old PATA drive to get some stuff off it. Will having this plugged in affect the overclocking potential?

[kojak71]

Extremely unlikely, but then again nothing is impossible. In which case does you motherboard have a working AGP/PCI divider? Or is your PSU being overtaxed with the extra power draw a HDD requires?

There's no mention in your original post about the Hyper Transport multiplier being reduced. The Hyper Transport doens't like running out of spec. so for adjust it accordingly.

[koocha]

you can follow my overclocking adventure in this thread:

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=69927