Quad Core Thread: Overclocking, Cooling, Motherboards, Troubleshooting & General Info

[Clunk]

Undoubtedly C3PO has more dextrous fingers than I for poking around humming mobos.

My 'problem' (if so it be called) is less physical and more philosophical. I once had a physics professor who banned (on pain of failure) any student from asking a question beginning with "Why". He was quite happy to respond to any query of "How..." because that's what physics does: it describes HOW things work, not WHY they work. I'm having the same trouble with your guide.

I'm only too happy to screw things up. If my computer is running smooth then I'm not learning anything. It's boring. Thanks to your guide I have more "test" programs than I can shake a stick at. Took awhile to figure out at 'affinity' stuff in Prime95, and Sandra is a little over-detailed for beginners (if that's the 'Lite' version what in God's name do you get if you throw money at them?), but not un-useful. Fun, regardless. (Was forced to learn enlightening things about resetting CMOS too, when having too much fun though.)

My memory kept defaulting to 800 (when I know it's PC2 8500C5 1066 capable). So I messed around with the settings - et voila, DDR2 1066 enabled - which I must say did make a decent boost to real world application. I was happy. Incidentally the speeds weren't printed on the chips as per your guide, had to use this interweb thingie to discover 5-5-5-15. Which brings me back to one aspect of my 'problem'.

What the heck do these numbers mean to a beginner? I can grasp that 4-4-4-12 might be "better/faster" than 5-5-5-15 but you go on to suggest things like 4-3-4-8 (or something) and the lights go out. Most people understand that 1066 is 'faster' than 800, fair enough - but abstract latency timings, and WHY they are better, is confusing to newbies at the best of times.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing... I've learned more in the last week from mucking about with your guide than I have in the last year, and I'm all the happier-mind-boggled for it! I merely suggest that in future revisions (you strike me as a personality who loves to revise [that's for the C3PO jab] [smile!]) you don't just say "Now we're going to try this..." without offering some suggestion (i.e. context) as to WHY we should want to as opposed (like me) to just raising the multiplier and accomplishing the same thing. My fuzzy brain is loose on the push-pull relationships involved with this stuff, but we're learning. And don't even get me started on voltages. (Strangely, say for memory, as you suggest to manually set it [mine is rated for 2.2v] the BIOS gets very upset if I try to do this and prints the number in bright red - apparently to scare me off - but it reverts to a pleasant white text up to 1.95v. These things make me reach for more Twix.) Obviously, and unfortunately, you can't be a guru expert on any and all contrasting hardware possibilities, but is a small collegiate treatise upon Latency too much to ask? (Cough.)

Anyway, the struggle continues! (In a Galaxy far, far... oh get off it already.)

The thing with the memory not setting to 1066Mhz is in the troubleshooting guide here, number 10.

Sandra is there only for the memory bandwidth benchmark. There are some other features that others may find useful, but for the guide, they aren't needed. You can use whichever program you like for testing the bandwidth, it is only to give you an idea as to what is going on, and the best tests are real world applications, and only you know which ones you use the most, and only you can tell if there are any notable real world differences.

There are no secrets as to why certain timings work better for some applications, it is just trial and error.

Going back to what was said right at the beginning of the guide regarding no two pieces of hardware being the same, well this is especially true when you look at the bigger picture, the PC as a whole, and add in other factors such as software used, operating system and so on.

Overclocking isn't an exact science, it is about getting the most out of your components, and each person will find benefits and drawbacks from doing some of the steps in the guide.

The suggestion to use 4-3-4-8 is purely an example, and not all RAM will be able to do this, so again, it comes back to doing whatever works best for you.

Regarding the RAM voltage numbers being printed in bright red. This is purely because the JEDEC standard for DDR2 is 1.8v, so by increasing the voltage that much, your bios is screaming at you to turn it down so you dont fry your RAM, but since the JEDEC specs were introduced, there have been advances in performance RAM, and many memory manufacturers now use these higher voltage, higher performance chips.

The JEDEC spec is the reason why your motherboard sees the RAM as PC2-6400. The fastest official spec for DDR2 is PC2-6400, so the motherboard will always default to that speed, however, the RAM is rated to run at PC2-8500 by the manufacturer, but you have to set it manually, along with the timings and voltages.

I hope that answered your questions.

[smellybumlove]

holy crap cakes!!!!.

booted fine at 385 and umm hit the blue screen of death!.
booted again at 377 just about got into windows..............blue screen again.

is that because of lack of voltage??

its at 365 now

sad cos its staying quite cool so it can go some more

[Clunk]

holy crap cakes!!!!.

booted fine at 385 and umm hit the blue screen of death!.
booted again at 377 just about got into windows..............blue screen again.

is that because of lack of voltage??

its at 365 now

sad cos its staying quite cool so it can go some more

Could be a few things.

Couldn't tell you if its lack of voltage until you tell us what voltage/settings you are running

[smellybumlove]

Could be a few things.

Couldn't tell you if its lack of voltage until you tell us what voltage/settings you are running

it was at 1.4250 and regarding settings.... which ones do you refer to?.

i basically followed your guide.

4-4-4-12 ram timings @1.95v
all that stuff in the cpu for power saving etc is disabled.

not sure what else to say

[Clunk]

Im just looking at your system specs, a 370w PSU with an overclocked quad is stretching it a bit, what graphics card do you have?

RAM looks to be well within its limits if it is running at 1:1.

[smellybumlove]

well dont laugh....

a msi rx1550, think its a ati x1300 chip!.

its just in there until i get my new 8800 (which is a story in itself!!).
i overclocked the pcie to 111.

[Clunk]

You dont need the pcie that high, set it to 100 and it should be fine.

You need a bigger sig

[smellybumlove]

You dont need the pcie that high, set it to 100 and it should be fine.

You need a bigger sig

big???.

i thought its pretty small compared to other forums!.

whats the limit here?.

meh its stable at 111 anyway

[Phil_P]

Im just looking at your system specs, a 370w PSU with an overclocked quad is stretching it a bit,

Agreed - you simply don't have the available current with that PSU to be pushing a quad that far at those voltages. The enermax 370W has two +12v rails limited at 14 and 13 amps, respectively. 14A on the CPU rail gives you about 168Watts top and you're trying to draw upwards of 200Watts. You're gonna need a lot better PSU or seriously reduce those vcore voltages.

[smellybumlove]

do you think the 8800 gts will push it to far?

[Phil_P]

do you think the 8800 gts will push it to far?

You may be OK if you don't overclock anything.

To be honest, I'm surprised you've got as far as you have with that PSU. Are you stable under full load (Prime/orthos etc) at those speeds/voltages?

[Phil_P]

Also, can you post your "VID" reading from coretemp (or a screenshot of coretemp).

[aidanjt]

do you think the 8800 gts will push it to far?

you *might* use 280W if you load absolutely everything at the same time.

[smellybumlove]

You may be OK if you don't overclock anything.

To be honest, I'm surprised you've got as far as you have with that PSU. Are you stable under full load (Prime/orthos etc) at those speeds/voltages?

yeah its very stable, i had orthos for 2 hours but it only did 2 cores.

it does suffer v-droop though its a 1.368 on cpu-z, but i set to 1.4 i think

[mroz]

Re Orthos, aren't you meant to run two copies & set suitable core affinities in the task manager to get it to push all four cores? NB I'm clueless, tired & have only reead about this OC stuff so far, so you should probably ignore me.

But while I'm here... isn't two hours too short a time to conclude stability?

[Clunk]

yeah its very stable, i had orthos for 2 hours but it only did 2 cores.

it does suffer v-droop though its a 1.368 on cpu-z, but i set to 1.4 i think

Completely pointless ^^

Use 2x orthos if itll run like the last poster says, or 4xsp2004 and set the affinity for each one manually, or the newest prime95 beta that does it all for you.