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Thread: nForce3 250 Chipset Overclocking

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    DR
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    nForce3 250 Chipset Overclocking

    There is no doubt in our minds that the AMD Athlon 64 will take a great leap forward in overclocking circles with the launch of the nForce3 250 chipset. At last, now that the PCI bus can be controlled, the full potential of the processor can be achieved.
    http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD03NTE=

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    did BiT-Tech Bcc NVIDIA PR into a private email sent to ATI Technologies?...
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    After reading through your article; while very thorough... I'm not too sure about where you achieved 250Mhz fsb. I say this because the Athlon 64 does funny things with 0.5x multipliers where it uses 9/10 of the system bus for the memory bus AFAIK.

    I don't have an Athlon64 rig at the moment to show this, but from my own testing of the FX-53; I could reach 230fsb with an 10.5x multiplier, but only 217fsb with the 11x multiplier. Ideally, I should have tested lower multipliers to make sure that what I was testing was not limited at all by CPU speed.

    To add further to this, when running superpi 1M, at 2610Mhz (227x11.5) it actually struggled to reach 33s, rather than 2555Mhz (213x12) which managed 33s quite comfortably. Seeing as this is quite heavily memory bandwidth dependant, I can only assume that the real memory bus is actually lower.

    Could you test the 9x multiplier to see if you can reach 250fsb at that multiplier too?

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    The Athlon 64 is unlocked for all multipliers below its standard. This means that our 3200 which is stock at 10x has access to 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 etc many 0.5 variants are there as well.

    In the test we simple reduced the Multiplier so that the CPU was not working so hard to test, where possible, so that the Motherboard and chipset could cope with 250FSB. All that happened is that the CPU speed was reduced. This is only part of the story when using HyperTransport as the AMD64 processor controls some functions previously done on the motherboard.

    We tried several multipliers includng 9x and things worked as expected. At 250Mhz FSB the cpu ran at 2250mhz and the RAM ran at 250Mhz

    Hope that helps

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    Aopen AK89max NF3 150 which has a fully working PCI lock(I checked it with my PCI geiger).This is the boards absolute max.

    If you want the lowdown on this board there is a nice review over at anandtech

    At last, now that the PCI bus can be controlled, the full potential of the processor can be achieved
    Seems some 150 boards have a pci lock.....

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    DR
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    Only if the manu implements it

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    Quote Originally Posted by David
    Only if the manu implements it
    David,

    All the manufacturers can implement the lock on all the NF3 150 boards if they can be bothered.NVidia were shocked that only one or 2 had.They all implement the AGP lock but it seems struggle with the pci lock.

    The AOpen was just the same pretty much till we worked with their engineers to get the board performing as it should.

    I feel review sites owe it to enthusiast to get manufacturers to get it right, a few emails is usually all it takes and the manufacturers usually welcome the input as it helps sell their product.

    In short helping the manufactuers gets a better review and a better product.

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    DR
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    Hence my comment, there is a lock but only if the manufacturers implement it.

    We do try and talk to manufacturers - this Gigabyte was an early board and we have been working with them on bios updates.

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