I've been cheerfully running my 4200+ X2 at stock speeds without really thinking that much about it, but when I found myself contemplating whether or not I should go out and buy an Opteron 185 instead I figured I might as well take a look at OC'ing what I have, first.
So, I cranked the bus speed to 240 and hit 2.6 Ghz, and Prime95 started giving errors right away. I tried cranking voltage to 1.5 (didn't want to try higher) but still unstable, so I dialed the bus speed down to 230 and got 2520 MHz and it seems quite stable. That's with a multiplier of 11 and a voltage of 1.40 even.
The next step was to adjust K8 to SB to 4x, giving me a HT Link of 920Mhz which is perfectly fine, as I won't come close to saturating that even with gigabit network etc.
So much for background.
My questions concern RAM. When I left it in auto it ran at a laughable 133Mhz, so I cranked it to 166. At that speed, CAS is 2 with this memory which is good - but at 200MHz CAS goes to 2.5 and Tras goes from 7 to 8 (the latter has little performance impact I believe).
So, though I presume the answer is that I should run 200mhz (which comes to 230 according to CPU-Z with this oc) and eat the 2.5 CAS instead of 2 I figured I'd ask - is that true?
Another issue I wasn't really even aware of was the 1T vs 2T thing. My old S939 mobo was running with 4 x 512, and I migrated that. This means that the board I'm using (A8N32-SLI Deluxe) autoselects 2T and trying 1T manually of course didn't work.
How much of a performance hit do I take running with 4 chips? Does the fact that I have now clocked the memory at 230 Mhz make up for that at all? Should I in fact just go out and buy two 1GB sticks instead?
Thanks for any input here.
So, I cranked the bus speed to 240 and hit 2.6 Ghz, and Prime95 started giving errors right away. I tried cranking voltage to 1.5 (didn't want to try higher) but still unstable, so I dialed the bus speed down to 230 and got 2520 MHz and it seems quite stable. That's with a multiplier of 11 and a voltage of 1.40 even.
The next step was to adjust K8 to SB to 4x, giving me a HT Link of 920Mhz which is perfectly fine, as I won't come close to saturating that even with gigabit network etc.
So much for background.
My questions concern RAM. When I left it in auto it ran at a laughable 133Mhz, so I cranked it to 166. At that speed, CAS is 2 with this memory which is good - but at 200MHz CAS goes to 2.5 and Tras goes from 7 to 8 (the latter has little performance impact I believe).
So, though I presume the answer is that I should run 200mhz (which comes to 230 according to CPU-Z with this oc) and eat the 2.5 CAS instead of 2 I figured I'd ask - is that true?
Another issue I wasn't really even aware of was the 1T vs 2T thing. My old S939 mobo was running with 4 x 512, and I migrated that. This means that the board I'm using (A8N32-SLI Deluxe) autoselects 2T and trying 1T manually of course didn't work.
How much of a performance hit do I take running with 4 chips? Does the fact that I have now clocked the memory at 230 Mhz make up for that at all? Should I in fact just go out and buy two 1GB sticks instead?
Thanks for any input here.