6600 at 3 GHZ fails orthos in 2 minutes, but stable on prime 95 forever

[patentman]

Hey all, I'm new to the overclocking thing, so forgive me if I ask any dumb questins over the course of this thread.

To get to the point, I recently puchased a 6600C2D, the EVGA 680i mobo and some corsair ram. I'm using a thermal take big typhoon (arctic silver has not broken in yet). All of my bios settings (p24 bios) are default, except I have the ram FSB unlinked, the CPU voltage at 1.325 (defaul is 1.3) and the FSB at 1333...thus overclocking the CPU to 3Ghz. It running at ~35C idle, ~45-47C under full load (again AS has not broken in).

Anyways, the overclock seemed stable enough, It boots windows just fine, survived the Prim95 torture test for hours, and let me run oblivion maxed out for a couple of hours (had 1-2 odd crashes in there, but i think that might have had something to do with one of the oblivion mods I have installed). However, it consistently fails orthos after about 2 minutes, with an eror messages to the tune of "Hardware failure detected, expected answer = x, answer received = y" where x and y are huge numbers.

I know my ram is not the best (its corsair's generic twinx 6400), but I should be still able to ramp up the CPU clock speed of the CPU independently of the ram by unlinking the Ram's FSB from the CPU's. Or at least I think I should be able to.

Anyone have any tips?

 

[Shimmishim]

Prime95 (assuming you're using the non-multithreaded version) only stresses one core while Orthos will stress both your cores.

That is why prime runs fine but orthos fails.

you can try increasing your cpu voltage to gain more stability. your temps look fine.

 

[orion23]

Don't worry so much about orthos failing.

I cannot get my PC to be orthos stable no matter what.

I can pass 3Dmark06, 3Dmark05, game, repair winrar Archives with 100% cpu utilization 24/7 and my PC doesn't crash.

Orthos however, does not last 5 seconds!

 

[bobsmith1492]

Did you try Memtest to see if the memory has any problems at that speed?

 

[patentman]

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492
Did you try Memtest to see if the memory has any problems at that speed?

I haven't. I figured since I was running a divider (Ram FSB is stock speed for DDR 800) that this issue has nothing to do with the Ram. I'll try it though and make sure.

 

[patentman]

Thanks bobsmith, turns out one of my sticks of Ram is bad. Memtest detect ~10 errors over the first 5% of coverage. I took out 2 of the 4gb, ran memtest and it came back clean. Time to RMA!

 

[bobsmith1492]

Originally posted by: patentman
Thanks bobsmith, turns out one of my sticks of Ram is bad. Memtest detect ~10 errors over the first 5% of coverage. I took out 2 of the 4gb, ran memtest and it came back clean. Time to RMA!

No problemo, glad you found it.

 

[patentman]

UPDATE: turns out the Ram wasn't bad. ON a whim a reseated all the modules and ran orthos and memtest again. All came back clean. Running at 3.2 GHz now, load temps are ~52-53C, Idle ~35. Stable on Orthos and Prime 95 for 6 hours each. This CPU is wicked fast now!

 

[gerwen]

You don't have to unlink the Ram from the fsb, it will run fine at any fsb up to 400, although i had to boost its voltage up to 2.1V

 

[patentman]

Originally posted by: gerwen
You don't have to unlink the Ram from the fsb, it will run fine at any fsb up to 400, although i had to boost its voltage up to 2.1V

I haven't tried OC'ing the ram yet. I bought the basic corsair 6400 (ddr 800) and so I'm a little nervous pushing it too much. haven;t heard too many people talk about this ram's abilty to OC. I am VERY happy with my system as it is. Gothic III and oblivion used to chug along, now both are smooth as glass with every possible bell and whistle turned up.

 

[stevty2889]

edit: never mind

 

[gerwen]

Originally posted by: patentman

Originally posted by: gerwen
You don't have to unlink the Ram from the fsb, it will run fine at any fsb up to 400, although i had to boost its voltage up to 2.1V

I haven't tried OC'ing the ram yet. I bought the basic corsair 6400 (ddr 800) and so I'm a little nervous pushing it too much. haven;t heard too many people talk about this ram's abilty to OC. I am VERY happy with my system as it is. Gothic III and oblivion used to chug along, now both are smooth as glass with every possible bell and whistle turned up.

Earlier you said you unlinked the ram from the fsb so you could overclock up to 3.2GHz. That would be ~355 FSB (9x355 quad pumped for 1420 effective bus) . Without overclocking the ram, it will run up to 400 FSB (9x400 = 3.6GHz processor, 1600 effective FSB) Like i said, you may have to up the voltage to 2.1V (that is Corsair's spec)

Link the ram back to the fsb and you'll gain some performance from the ram. At 3.2 it will be running under spec. Don't expect the ram to go over a 400 fsb though. Mine definitely won't.

 

[patentman]

Originally posted by: gerwen
Earlier you said you unlinked the ram from the fsb so you could overclock up to 3.2GHz. That would be ~355 FSB (9x355 quad pumped for 1420 effective bus) . Without overclocking the ram, it will run up to 400 FSB (9x400 = 3.6GHz processor, 1600 effective FSB) Like i said, you may have to up the voltage to 2.1V (that is Corsair's spec)

Link the ram back to the fsb and you'll gain some performance from the ram. At 3.2 it will be running under spec. Don't expect the ram to go over a 400 fsb though. Mine definitely won't.

OK, I linked the RAM back up and ran into some difficulties at stock votages (1.8) with my current OC (3.2Ghz). Didn;t have time to play around with the Ram voltages last night and I have school until 11pm tonight. I'll have to mess around with it tomorrow.

Also, I'm having difficulty pushing my CPU past 3.2. It will post and then crash when XP starts if I push even the slightest bit beyond 3.2. CPU voltage is set at 1.375 volts now (~1.32 actual as measured by Mobo's onboard sensors). My voltages seem uniformly on the low side (meaning actual voltage is less than voltage settings). Maybe I have a PSU issue? I'm running a 600W coolmax EZ-wire 600T.

 

[gerwen]

My system would run windows at 3.2 with ram at 1.8V. It failed the orthos Ram stress almost instantly though. Bumping the volts up to 2.1 solved the problem.

As for pushing past 3.2GHz. Going into the high 300's for fsb is difficult on many boards. Have you tried going straight to 400 or 401 FSB(3.6GHz)? You might be surprised. I would bump the ram up to 2.1V to do that. We use the same ram(i think), and it's rated for 2.1 (which i found out after a bunch of digging.) Once again, your ram should be able to do 400 or 401 FSB without being unlinked. If you have problems booting, you can always unlink it and run a divider to rule it out though.

The voltage issue is called droop, and is seen on most motherboards. My Vcore is set to 1.275 in bios, but droops to 1.264 or 1.248. It's not a power supply issue, everyone sees it. It's probably due to IR losses on the motherboard traces or components.

***edit*** My system at 3.2GHz is similar to yours at 3.6GHz, same FSB. I'm not sure how good the E6600's are at reaching those FSB's though. Search around and see what kind of results others have been getting with your chip.