Just a little update post PCI-E HD4850 install.
After fiddling around endlessly trying to find out why suddenly my E5200 or HD4850 won't OC, I made it to oc a little bit to a certain extent. The piece that changed was switching to DDR2 800 (G.Skill PI Black 2x2GB)
Current setup:
E5200 @ 3.48GHz (278fsb)
4GB G.Skill PI Black DDR2 800 @ 4-4-4-10 2T
Sapphire HD4850 (660/993)
3dMark06 - 11859
3dMark05 - 18290
Aquamark - 145650
Orthos stable - 4hrs so far (didn't get to test it any further)
Compared to:
E5200 @ 3.33GHz (@ 266fsb)
2GB OCZ DDR400 @ 3-4-4-8
Sapphire HD4850 (625/993)
3dMark06 - 11376
3dMark05 - 17408
Aquamark - 128,771
Orthos stable - 12hrs
It didn't go up by much but what's interesting is what I changed. First, the DDR2 800 works fine but I still cannot oc from 266fsb and 625/993 GPU. It just resets the VPU after tests.
So as others did, I also had my PCI-E Clock locked to 100Mhz and I thought, hmmm, why not SYNC it WITH CPU. I made the change and surprisingly, it gave me the results above. No crashes, no VPU resets. I'm not sure if setting PCI-E clock to be sync with CPU is ideal though.
So just for kicks, I set PCI-E clock back to 100Mhz and 3dMark06 completed but VPU reset again.
There was a point where I was able to push the CPU to 288fsb (for 3.6Ghz) and GPU to 675/993 with the following results:
3dMark06 - 12237
3dMark05 - 18286
Aquamark - 149979
But in this setup, it's not Orthos stable. Crashes after 37mins for rounding error. Guess it's my vcore not being enough this time.
Also, I tried pushing the RAM to 348Mhz @ 5-5-5-15 2T (with my CPU @ 278) but it's a no-go, VPU resets again. The RAM pair is running at 5:4 ratio which I assumed should be ok but 4CoreDual doesn't like it
I don't know what to make out of the results. But from what I've done so far, it has got something to do with the flakiness of the PCI-E clock on this mobo.
Even played Crysis for 2hrs and it didn't crash on my current setup (1920x1200, all settings on high, averaging 29fps)