ASRock 775Dual-VSTA overclocking experiences?

[aussieburger]

So my current setup:

E6300 @ 2137 (=E6400 )
Bus Speed: 305
FSB : DRAM: 3:4 (with flex on)
Memory Frequency: 407
Mem: 2.5 3 3 7 1T @400mhz (2 x 1024 MDT PC3200 2.5 3 3 7 1T)

no problems so far and i've reached my goal of e6400 Now that i'm there with no problems has anyone gone further ? If so what Bus Speed ?

Since my Memory Frequency now matches my rated is it possible for me to go further ? Or do I need to decrease my mem speed to go further ? ... sorry for the newbie questions but would like to learn

Also anyway to view my memory voltage on this board ??

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: aussieburger
So my current setup:

E6300 @ 2137 (=E6400 )
Bus Speed: 305
FSB : DRAM: 3:4 (with flex on)
Memory Frequency: 407
Mem: 2.5 3 3 7 1T @400mhz (2 x 1024 MDT PC3200 2.5 3 3 7 1T)

no problems so far and i've reached my goal of e6400 Now that i'm there with no problems has anyone gone further ? If so what Bus Speed ?

Since my Memory Frequency now matches my rated is it possible for me to go further ? Or do I need to decrease my mem speed to go further ? ... sorry for the newbie questions but would like to learn

Also anyway to view my memory voltage on this board ??

Nice! I am about to get a retail E6400 and this mobo and try my luck. I figure when I can afford new RAM and a new PCI-E videocard I should be able to overclock way up there. Plus right now if I get this board I am looking at an E6600 for a E6400 pricetag.

One more :beer: until I press that "buy now" button!

 

[aussieburger]

I think that should be achievable for you ... I went with this board since there's no point upgrading my 7800GS AGP at this stage until DirectX10 cards hit the market ... an added bonus was being able to keep my ram

Say do you know the answer to any of my questions ?

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: aussieburger
I think that should be achievable for you ... I went with this board since there's no point upgrading my 7800GS AGP at this stage until DirectX10 cards hit the market ... an added bonus was being able to keep my ram

Say do you know the answer to any of my questions ?

What are your questions? I am a bit ADD. :beer:

 

[aussieburger]

Originally posted by: aussieburger
So my current setup:

E6300 @ 2137 (=E6400 )
Bus Speed: 305
FSB : DRAM: 3:4 (with flex on)
Memory Frequency: 407
Mem: 2.5 3 3 7 1T @400mhz (2 x 1024 MDT PC3200 2.5 3 3 7 1T)

Since my Memory Frequency now matches my rated is it possible for me to go further ? Or do I need to decrease my mem speed to go further ? ... sorry for the newbie questions but would like to learn

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: aussieburger

Originally posted by: aussieburger
So my current setup:

E6300 @ 2137 (=E6400 )
Bus Speed: 305
FSB : DRAM: 3:4 (with flex on)
Memory Frequency: 407
Mem: 2.5 3 3 7 1T @400mhz (2 x 1024 MDT PC3200 2.5 3 3 7 1T)

Since my Memory Frequency now matches my rated is it possible for me to go further ? Or do I need to decrease my mem speed to go further ? ... sorry for the newbie questions but would like to learn

No problem on the newb stuff, we all gotta learn some how.

But I would say you are near the max overclock while using that motherboard and RAM. The 775Dual-VSTA is not known for it's overclocking capabilities past 300FBS which Anand only found to be stable at 297 and yet you are at 305. I have heard of higher but unproven to me.

Your next step will be the same as mine... the purchase of a better motherboard but that's the thing right now... there aren't a lot of choices on Conroe motherboards right now.... give it a couple months and you will see motherboard options like you never saw!

 

[aussieburger]

cool thanks for the reply and help !!

Ok so i'll sit on that for now until I decide to switch to pci-e and get a new board then ... hopefully lots more choice and better prices out there by then !
this board looks nice:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2822&p=1

but not until directx10 for me ... thanks again

 

[lepump]

..ok, had some time to test my pc today with prime95
these are my results:
(tried some of the settings without oc:ing the cpu and i have tried with different voltage settings)
2-3-2-6-2 -> error
2.5-3-3-6-2 -> error
3-3-3-6-2 -> error
3-3-3-12-2 -> error
3-4-4-12-2 -> error

back to unclocked 266fsb
3-3-3-6-2 (354mhz) -> ran 75minutes, no errors

but come on kingston hyperx low cl memory, it has never shown me any hyper qualities
shouldn't i be getting 2-3-2-6-1(2) with 400mhz without problems??

on my "old" ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe i could take not being able to go cl2, 2.5-3-3-12-1 was ok. but now with a brand new mobo i was hoping for a bit more...

can someone please tell me what's going on here. i'm not going to buy new ram..

 

[lepump]

ok the thing is i used to have ddr400 set in bios.
but when i put it on auto with a 266fsb i got cpu-z to show 354mhz speed. (with flex on)
prime95 ran past the usual error stages.

now i'm going 2-3-2-6-1 with the same settings 15minutes of prime95 and counting..
looks like it's the 300fsb or ddr400 setting that is causing problems for me.

-->hmm... 30minutes of prime, should be 'stablish' then. but cpu-z showing a 3/4 divider and 354mhz sounds wrong 3/4*266=199... but 354 with 266fsb should need a 6/9 divider. so i guess cpu-z is giving me wrong readings.

how can i get proper ddr speed info?

..and what does the bios drive strength setting do???
seems like my hdd:s are really slow and noisy

-->everest shows 4:8 = 133mhz memory bus speed..
guess that explains the poor benchmarks i get now. but atleast it's stable

-->295fsb seems to be stable also.. so a nogo on 300fsb then

 

[tenax]

great thread guys..i've just joined this little club with a 6400 and asrock board..a gig of corsair xtreme ddr 400 on board..made the move from an msi neo with a3000 as my wife needed an upgrade..and so i get one too just got it put together today and while i don't really care if it can overclock, it's fun too play (this system also serves as my htpc with dual tuner cards so stable as my msi was is of the most importance)

currently have the processor running at 2360 from the stock 2130. fsb at 295, memory at 393..timings set automatically are: 2.5, 3, 3, 5, 2T...ratio 3/4...cpu and mobo temp holding at 39 and 38C respectively (in a new antec desktop overture 2 htpc case..seems to be cooling quite nicely)

for the money for the board especially, i'm actually quite thrilled with this. i had an asus a8v that was a pretty pricey board in it's time (about 265 canadian versus the 65 i got this one for) before i bought the msi neo and it would cry for it's mama when i got past 283 or so..which was pretty disappointing given the amount of overclocking options it had. i gave up on overclocking the a64 3000 after too much grief with the a8v and went for sheer stability and the msi gave me that for almost 3 years,running 24/7 and now my wife gets it.

no question in my mind that being able to lock the pci has helped a bunch on this board..it's really quite silly that it hasn't been a standard option pretty much since the overclocking game began!

just ran some sisoft sandra benchmarks..if you haven't, download it and benchmark your processor against anything amd has out there..pretty neat..especially puts a big grin on my face when i see this processor at a 4th of the price of the fx's were the hot thing and how these kick butt.

i haven't used intel except on my machine at work since a pentium 3 -500 i think it was...a lot amd processors since and a few that will still be around for awhile, but i have to hand it to intel with this unit..(asrock for the board, if it doesn't have any foibles)

ps-i'd like to know what ide drive strength means as well..i've only heard the term in reference to memory and agp before..my hd's (4 of them..all wd's..3 internal, one external) are all running fine)

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: tenax
great thread guys..i've just joined this little club with a 6400 and asrock board..a gig of corsair xtreme ddr 400 on board..made the move from an msi neo with a3000 as my wife needed an upgrade..and so i get one too just got it put together today and while i don't really care if it can overclock, it's fun too play (this system also serves as my htpc with dual tuner cards so stable as my msi was is of the most importance)

currently have the processor running at 2360 from the stock 2130. fsb at 295, memory at 393..timings set automatically are: 2.5, 3, 3, 5, 2T...ratio 3/4...cpu and mobo temp holding at 39 and 38C respectively (in a new antec desktop overture 2 htpc case..seems to be cooling quite nicely)

for the money for the board especially, i'm actually quite thrilled with this. i had an asus a8v that was a pretty pricey board in it's time (about 265 canadian versus the 65 i got this one for) before i bought the msi neo and it would cry for it's mama when i got past 283 or so..which was pretty disappointing given the amount of overclocking options it had. i gave up on overclocking the a64 3000 after too much grief with the a8v and went for sheer stability and the msi gave me that for almost 3 years,running 24/7 and now my wife gets it.

no question in my mind that being able to lock the pci has helped a bunch on this board..it's really quite silly that it hasn't been a standard option pretty much since the overclocking game began!

just ran some sisoft sandra benchmarks..if you haven't, download it and benchmark your processor against anything amd has out there..pretty neat..especially puts a big grin on my face when i see this processor at a 4th of the price of the fx's were the hot thing and how these kick butt.

i haven't used intel except on my machine at work since a pentium 3 -500 i think it was...a lot amd processors since and a few that will still be around for awhile, but i have to hand it to intel with this unit..(asrock for the board, if it doesn't have any foibles)

ps-i'd like to know what ide drive strength means as well..i've only heard the term in reference to memory and agp before..my hd's (4 of them..all wd's..3 internal, one external) are all running fine)

This post has me smiling... my E6400 is set to show up next tuesday and my ASRock Dual board on wednesday although Newegg sometimes cheats the system by a day... so earliiest is tuesday night and latest is wednesday night. I build systems for lots of people so I estimate a total build time of around 45 minutes.

I know I said it in another thread but I feel like a little kid at Christmas waiting for this gear to show up! :laugh:

 

[eelw]

Originally posted by: tenax
ps-i'd like to know what ide drive strength means as well..i've only heard the term in reference to memory and agp before..my hd's (4 of them..all wd's..3 internal, one external) are all running fine)

Yeah, some of the weird settings found in the VSTA BIOS. And what's with the high/low option for Vmem?

 

[RDOG]

I've got the 6400 too, with the Patriot ram, and my 7800 GS AGP.

I'm running at 285 fsb (2282). I've been as high as 2.39 (wanting that coveted 'next chip up OC'), but had to run ram compatibility and some wierd fsb/ram ratios that seem to make most benchmarks a wash. RAM is set to high voltage. I've noticed manually setting bios seems to make things stable. Ran Orthos (prime 95) overnight in both cases, and all is stable. Temps are 38 normal/42 load.

3D Marks are up a little over 1,000 points, using the same ram and vid, so I'm feeling pretty good about the upgrade with a relatively inexpensive board. Would love to overclock more, but I've saved about $500 in upgrade costs for the moment, so that's a fair trade. Perhaps there will be bios changes along the way to help.

Any other tips, experiences welcome.

 

[tenax]

Originally posted by: Beachboy

This post has me smiling... my E6400 is set to show up next tuesday and my ASRock Dual board on wednesday although Newegg sometimes cheats the system by a day... so earliiest is tuesday night and latest is wednesday night. I build systems for lots of people so I estimate a total build time of around 45 minutes.

I know I said it in another thread but I feel like a little kid at Christmas waiting for this gear to show up! :laugh:

yep...my build time was super quick compared to some..the expensive a8v pretty much required me to have an engineer degree to get through the 400 page manual (seemed like it anyway..i remember thinking when i bought it do i really need all this to do the build..and i'm no stranger to building new rigs). the msi neo had a little trick where you had to put in slower memory, change timings and then put in the ddr 400 which took me 2 or 3 days to figure out.

the only issue at all i had with setting this board up was:

-my system interrupt controller wasn't installed. the board was working fine..but i got a tip to put in the cd that came with the mobo to see if it would find the driver..it did and that went away.

-got some freezes on the windows boot menu when i got to setting up my display so it could go to my big screen tv..came this close to reinstalling windows..then decided to uninstall the 6600 in system devices and upgraded from an 89 version driver to the 91's available at nvidia's site..no problems since.

i mention this stuff especially given that i never did reinstall the os even though i was far from convinced going from via to via chipset was going to work..but it appears to have worked fine. last time i did that, there were duplicate incidences of all kinds of stuff so i don't know if i have windows xp or via to thank for being able to do this. the bonus was i was able to do the same putting my wife's hd with windows xp into the msi system (going from gigabyte 7vtxe that has to be about a 4 year old board) and it's working fine as well!

one question i do have is, how do you get the cd rom to be used as a boot device while still having a hd with operating system as a boot device? i know a big lettered message comes up saying that there is a bootable device in the cd player player, but pressing enter when that comes up gave me nothing (even though i had the cd rom set as first boot device, the os hd as second). i ended up taking the hd out of the equation as a boot device and got an error of some kind.

but i only got the standard message that allows you to boot from the cd, yes or no when the hd was not set as a boot device.. a catch 22 there. i'm assuming i just have to find the right button to push

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: tenax

Originally posted by: Beachboy

This post has me smiling... my E6400 is set to show up next tuesday and my ASRock Dual board on wednesday although Newegg sometimes cheats the system by a day... so earliiest is tuesday night and latest is wednesday night. I build systems for lots of people so I estimate a total build time of around 45 minutes.

I know I said it in another thread but I feel like a little kid at Christmas waiting for this gear to show up! :laugh:

yep...my build time was super quick compared to some..the expensive a8v pretty much required me to have an engineer degree to get through the 400 page manual (seemed like it anyway..i remember thinking when i bought it do i really need all this to do the build..and i'm no stranger to building new rigs). the msi neo had a little trick where you had to put in slower memory, change timings and then put in the ddr 400 which took me 2 or 3 days to figure out.

the only issue at all i had with setting this board up was:

-my system interrupt controller wasn't installed. the board was working fine..but i got a tip to put in the cd that came with the mobo to see if it would find the driver..it did and that went away.

-got some freezes on the windows boot menu when i got to setting up my display so it could go to my big screen tv..came this close to reinstalling windows..then decided to uninstall the 6600 in system devices and upgraded from an 89 version driver to the 91's available at nvidia's site..no problems since.

i mention this stuff especially given that i never did reinstall the os even though i was far from convinced going from via to via chipset was going to work..but it appears to have worked fine. last time i did that, there were duplicate incidences of all kinds of stuff so i don't know if i have windows xp or via to thank for being able to do this. the bonus was i was able to do the same putting my wife's hd with windows xp into the msi system (going from gigabyte 7vtxe that has to be about a 4 year old board) and it's working fine as well!

one question i do have is, how do you get the cd rom to be used as a boot device while still having a hd with operating system as a boot device? i know a big lettered message comes up saying that there is a bootable device in the cd player player, but pressing enter when that comes up gave me nothing (even though i had the cd rom set as first boot device, the os hd as second). i ended up taking the hd out of the equation as a boot device and got an error of some kind.

but i only got the standard message that allows you to boot from the cd, yes or no when the hd was not set as a boot device.. a catch 22 there. i'm assuming i just have to find the right button to push

Set bios as per normal
1st boot floppy
2nd boot HD
3rd boot CD rom

During boot up press F11 and select boot device for that session and enter, that easy.

 

[tenax]

lol..of course now that you mention it, i remember seeing the F2 or F11 options but it went by so fast it didn't click even though it said "boot" beside it..thanks!

while i'm here, i note here's where you really see the power of dual core technology. on my a64 3000, my cpu useage with my pvr's recording would run in the 35-42% range with both pvrs recording..just checked same situation with this cpu.. basically 3-5% at any given time..awesome!

 

[RDOG]

IDE drive strength is the strength of the IDE signal. Supposed to help when overclocking when the bus get noisy.

 

[tenax]

that would make sense given by definition that is the intent with memory strength that is variable..the question then i would have is ..what would be the downside whether it applies to memory, ide or agp..voltage you are drawing from the ps, maybe?

 

[RDOG]

I think that's true, but I'm thinking it has more to do with the same they tell you when upping the voltage on anything: shortens life of the components.

Not sure that's really a risk here.

 

[aussieburger]

Originally posted by: aussieburger
So my current setup:

E6300 @ 2137 (=E6400 )
Bus Speed: 305
FSB : DRAM: 3:4 (with flex on)
Memory Frequency: 407
Mem: 2.5 3 3 7 1T @400mhz (2 x 1024 MDT PC3200 2.5 3 3 7 1T)

I've had to reduce my bus speed to 300 due to a blue screen that popped up while played BF2 Intense gameplaying since and all has been fine

so now:

E6300 @ 2110 (~E6400 )
Bus Speed: 300
FSB : DRAM: 3:4 (with flex on)
Memory Frequency: 400
Mem: 2.5 3 3 7 1T @400mhz (2 x 1024 MDT PC3200 2.5 3 3 7 1T)

 

[tenax]

Originally posted by: eelw
Yeah, some of the weird settings found in the VSTA BIOS. And what's with the high/low option for Vmem?

cheaper way to give us memory voltage options, i guess rather than increments.

had one problem yesterday during overclocking fsb to 295..not sure it was related to that or coincidence, but my hauppauge ir blaster kept getting "lost"...i ended up installing an earlier version after trying to reinstall the current version and reinstalling both my pvr's about 6 times. i'm going to leave as is for the week at 285fsb (checked this morning and it was fine)..and then maybe give it another whirl next weekend..just want to see if the problem reoccurs. i'm not that confident in this board yet

the problem was weird in that just out of the blue after working fine the night before (before overclocking) and all of sudden it said that the blaster hardware was not installed..checked connections and it was fine.

the only things i did was:

changed memory setting to 200
changed fsb in increments up to 295
put the memory flexibility setting on
enabled fast vlink

when i first installed both the pvrs when i did the build, everything went smooth. tried using same drivers yesterday and damned if i could keep things installed. pvr2 usb was fine, but the pvr 150 would get dumped to recycle by beyond tv and kept getting errors along with the blaster problem.

i then left the memory setting for my ddr 400.
changed fsb to 285
left memory flexibility setting on.
disabled fast vlink.

like i say, so far so good. at least i've narrowed down the possibilities for what caused the problem.

 

[aussieburger]

what is fast vlink ?

 

[tenax]

communication speed between north and south bridge.

 

[Mr Vain]

Originally posted by: aussieburger
what is fast vlink ?

Ultra V-Link Bus
Delivering data throughput speeds of up to 1066 MB/s from the VIA VT8237R Plus South Bridge to the VIA PT880 Ultra North Bridge, the Ultra V-Link interface delivers the necessary bandwidth and low latency required by today's increasingly demanding multimedia applications.

http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/p4-series/pt880_ultra/

 

[lepump]

and what exactly happens when you mark vlink to fast? is there a noticeable speed difference?