A64 3000 Venice on A8n Premium OC

[Sabre]

Hi, first post so here goes....

I have the rig up and running but want to get the 3000 Venice to at around the 3500 or 3800 stock speeds. I want to avoid uping the voltage (much) if I can. I would like to keep my memory at stock 400mhz for now and just work on the CPU.

I have read various overclocking guides, but I am new to the a64 methods. Can anyone with a similar set up give me some step by step help ...

[kevpuk]

OK, first steps as follows :

- Lower HTT multiplier to 3x
- Put RAM on a divider such as 133MHz (DDR 266)
- Ensure PCI/SATA/PCI-Express is locked (not sure of settings on your 'board - often locked by default)
- Up FSB in 5-10 MHz increments
- Boot system and run stress test.....eg SuperPI in first instance, Prime95 later....
- Providing completes test, reboot and up FSB again in BIOS

As and when fails to boot, or fails test in Windows, lower FSB by a few MHz until you get a 'happy' value

Use something like CPUZ to get details in Windows......RAM, CPU etc

Should be able to go a fair way without upping voltages......as per my system (see sig) I got to 2.4GHz with NO voltage changes.....but very occasional instability and thus lowered it back down a little......I, like you, am keen to squeeze a little extra out of my 3000+, but not at the expense of stressing components

Good luck and keep us posted

[dangel]

See my thread here:

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=53061

Same principles for a single core

[Sabre]

Cheers guys, erm dangel I started looking at your guide but you say set the CPU multiplier to 10 yet the board and current bios only offer 9, any ideas?

[taqie]

come on baby..of course he can set his up to 10...its because he has 3200+..I think or something better...yours is 3000+ which runs at 1.8Ghz with multi 9x200Mhz..so the max multiplier you can have is 9...gud luck then with ur oc...

[Sabre]

ok i was on the right path then, so if I go for 275x8 i should be on for 2400 with x4 HTT ?

[taqie]

so do you mean you set you HTT multi to 4...I think you should set it to 3x..the HTT times the HTT multi should be less than 1000Mhz...the purpose of lowering your cpu multiplier and the ram divider is to find the highest HTT achievable by your mobo....then after you know the HTT and the RAM speed with its latencies..you can change this two variables to achieve your desired oc results with the highest performance...oc an AMD64 is quite challenging...

[taqie]

ooppss.....forgot to answer your question.... 275 x 8 should give u a processor speed of 2.2Ghz

[Sabre]

cheers, youve been really helpful. If you dont mind me asking how have you done your OC. If im on the right track your 300x9 with a HTT multiplier of 3. what have you set your ram clock to ie 333 or 266 9or is that the diveder, this is bloody complicated

[taqie]

hehe....I'm a bit shy to tell me abt my memory divider because mine is damn low...My memory divider is 133...so my ram is running a little lower than its intended spec at 192.88 Mhz...although I do have an option of running it with 150 divider which means my ram will then running at 225mhz with a relaxed timing of 2.5-3-3-10...don't forget Nforce4 chips work best at tras 7....you could use memtest to test your max speed if its stable... hope this helps....gud luck

[taqie]

oopss...forget to answer your question again...hahahahaha...regarding my overclock...I took a different approach as I know most venice can do 2.7/2.8Ghz on air...I also already know my mobo HTT limit is about 330...so I just test my memory to get my desired speed with low latencies...so test if your mobo max HTT, setting the cpu multi to 4 and the memory divider to 133 or 100...then you increase ur htt until u cannot run memtest...or does not boot...then tell me whats ur max HTT...perhaps we can work it out abt the next step....

[Sabre]

OK, been at this OC for a while now. I have the machine running at 2250Mhz using the following: 4xHTT, 250 FSB, 333 (5:6) Divider all at stock voltage (1.4 CPU).

I cant seem to get it stable any higher, without increasing the vcore greatly. Has anyone else pushed this board and cpu sucessfully any further, if so what did you do ?

[kushtibari]

drop the memory divider and put it at 3xHTT so you're removing those as potential weakspots, and try dropping the multi and keep raising the 'FSB' to see if its that issue thats causing problems. I raised the chipset voltage a bit when running at 300+ although I am running the MSI board. You shouldn't really be looking at raising the voltage unless you're going a fair bit higher.

[Sabre]

ok dropped to x3 HTT and left memory on 100mhz (200DDR). and changed multiplier to 8. raised the fsb to 300 and get 2400.

but will not pass prime test, and have to raise vcore to 1.45 and memory to 2.7. I thought I could get alot higher with this setup....any ideas?

[kushtibari]

chipset voltage? try increasing it to 1.6v

[oralpain]

What are you using a lower than stock multiplier? That will limit your OCing. The only practical reason to do so is if you are tring to get very high OCs out of your memory.

The higher you have to raise the external clock the less stable you will likely be.

Try 267x9, 3x HTT, DDR 333 (CPU/11) memory divider, 1.5v core, 2.8v dimm.

Make sure spread spectrum and cool and quiet are off/disabled.

What memory timing options do you have on that board?