Weird. So I gave OCing another try today. I set FSB to 246 and ram to 4-4-4-12. Still not terribly stable (XP wouldnt crash, but certain apps/games would act funny). I changed timings one by one, i.e. 5-4-4-12, 5-5-4-12, etc. No difference. One game that is pretty reliable in telling me whether the system is stable or not is Bioshock. If I OC it too far, it'll crash almost immediately. If I dial it back down, it'll launch, but crash when I load a game. No need to run Orthos for hours on end, Bioshock will tell me if its working or not within seconds.
Then I changed DRAM Bank Interleave and disabled it out of curiosity. Again, FSB is at 246, ram is at 5-5-5-15 (and thats it, everything else is left on Auto). With Interleave disabled, Bioshock works no probs. Steam and DoD:S work with no problem. I ran Orthos for a little over 2 hours, and it reported no problems. Could it be Interleave thats the issue? Why would disabling it make my OC much more stable? I tried each setting, i.e. 2 way, 4-way and 8-way. With 2 and 4 way enabled, the OC is unstable. With 8-way, I cannot POST. But disabled it works fine. In fact I could post up to 266fsb, but Bioshock crashes on anything over 250 it seems. However my DoD:S benchmarks did go down. With it on auto, I would get 63fps on dod_kalt. But now I get 58fps or so.
Still not getting any closer to the 2.4ghz I'd like, but its a start. Since this seems to be a RAM issue, should I just get some OC friendly ram? My AData DDR2 800 is not OC friendly (and I knew that when I bought it). But I could always sell it and get some OCing ram that can take the higher FSB right? What do you guys suggest?
Also, if I do the BSEL mod, will that be stable? I mean if I cant get 2.3ghz stable, how will a BSEL'd 2.4ghz be any different? Would I have to mess around with RAM timings?
Facebook
Twitter