1.352v too much for an i3-540?

[BallaTheFeared]

That's what it wants for 4GHz, temps are pretty good, mid 50's in Prime95 peaks around 60C at times with 4 workers.

 

[Blastman]

Nope, you’re ok. Long term you can use up to 1.40v vcore on Clarkdale (from what I’ve read on a lot of forums). Although, personnaly I might stay just under that.

1.352v seems way high for only 4.0Ghz.

There was an issue IIRC with 1156 m/b’s and Clarkdales running much over 1600 on the memory. I don’t recall what it was exactly, but some m/b’s didn’t play well with memory at the faster memory speeds and wouldn’t play well if pushed past 1700Mhz.

Try dropping the memory divider to 8 to get your memory speeds at or below 1600. Then try overclocking to 4.0 and adjusting vcore again. Your instability at higher clocks may be related to this problem.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Having bad luck with the bclk adjustment, I can't even make it into windows at 200 with memory at 1200 and the cpu at 2GHz, it won't post over 210.

This is where I was... Was trying to get my base clock on it but I might have to give that up.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Welp, I suck.

Woe is me.

 

[Blastman]

1156 M/B’s can really vary on how far the BCLK can go with overclocking.

xbit…

Most mainboards can work at a base frequency of 200 MHz and higher if you reduce the CPU frequency multiplier but EVGA H55 was only stable at 170 MHz.

So, depending on the M/B, some have trouble getting even over 170 BCLK. I would leave the multiplier at 23x and use a lower BCLK as opposed to a higher BCLK and lower multiplier.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Seems my problem was related to ram frequency, when I'd get into windows I'd artifact almost like my gpu was dying but I know it's not. So then I thought it was the PCIe bus getting clocked, which isn't possible because even 150 bclk would be impossible.

I just don't think the IMC on this chip can handle the ram at 1700+, could be wrong though I'm pretty clueless. Having no problems with the auto tune base, then dropping ram to 7-8-7, I know these will do 1900+ in my SB rig, or 2300 if I drop to 2x2gb so it can't really be the ram can it?

 

[Blastman]

I just don't think the IMC on this chip can handle the ram at 1700+, could be wrong though I'm pretty clueless. Having no problems with the auto tune base, then dropping ram to 7-8-7, I know these will do 1900+ in my SB rig, or 2300 if I drop to 2x2gb so it can't really be the ram can it?

Yup, I think that’s correct -- it’s the IMC, which is attached to the GPU. They don’t like speeds much above 1600.

 

[Concillian]

Mine's been running 4.0 @ 1.304 for about 18 months. I always back down from max for long term stability, so it probably passed P95 / IBT at 4.2 or something like that.

Running 22x 182 and 728 (1456) @ 7/8/7 for RAM.

There wasn't a whole lot of RAM above 1600 MHz DDR3 in those days. People who were spending on extra fast RAM in those days were much more likely to pair it with a Lynnfield, not a Clarkdale.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I've never run into a problem where my ram exceeded the capability of the memory controller, lol!

Wasted a good hour or two trying to figure out what should have been obvious to me, the desktop artifacting should have been a dead give away.

Good thing I went with the snipers to put a small page file on a ramdisk, otherwise I'd have been trying to hit 2000+ MHz @ 200+ bclk.

Pretty much settled in at 4.2GHz, 7-8-7 @1530, I could probably get that down to cas 6 but tbh there wasn't much of an improvement going from 9-9-9.