Athlon64 3200+ Only NOT able to OVERCLOCK???

[SlickAU]

Hey dudes 🙂

I have got an Athlon64 3200+ Venice with stock heatsink and fan. I tried OC'ing it a while ago (only up to 2.2Ghz to start of with) and it was running fine UNTIL :S i started playing a few games (eg. BF2, Stronghold 2) when all of a sudden while in the middle of a game it had a spac attack! 😛

Basically it was running fine for maybe 30 mins and then the screen just went black and the monitor started acting as if it was in standby mode (black screen, light flashing). 🙁

Now I am thinking this might be a power issue as the PSU i have atm is only a 300W Antec PS from thier SLK1600 case. But wouldnt a lack of power restart the computer or something?

Any ideas guys?

Thanks,

Slick 😎

 

[Paktu]

It is most likely the PSU. What kind of video card do you have? How many hard drives?

 

[SlickAU]

I got the Gigabyte 6600GT, 1 x CD-RW Drive, 1 x DVR-RW Drive (i have disconnected the CD-RW just in case its the power), 1 x 120G ATA HDD, 1 x FDD, 1 x Sound card.

I seriously doubt it is the video card as the problem does not happen when the CPU isnt overclocked.

Any other ideas?

 

[Lithan]

Could be power, more likely it's ram. Make sure you're running 2t and try using a divider.

 

[Thor86]

It would help if you stated which motherboard used and what bios settings used to overclock. :beer:

 

[SlickAU]

Lol im not sure how to run the RAM timings @ 2T using a divider (yes i will research into it).

The Motherboard is:

Gigabyte K8NS ULTRA939

All i did was change the FSB to 220 (i think - It uses a 10x multi doesnt it?)

Thanks

Slick 😎

 

[Diogenes2]

What kind of RAM ?

 

[SlickAU]

RAM: 1GB (2x 512MB) DDR400/PC3200 Geil DDR RAM (dual channel)

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: SlickAU
All i did was change the FSB to 220 (i think - It uses a 10x multi doesnt it?)

Ugh.
You can't just do that on A64s.

You need to drop the LDT from 5x down to 4x.
You will also likely need to drop the RAM down to a lower speed by using the 166 divider. You should be able to run at 1T though.

Also, pls. help yourself out by reading the guide at the top of this forum...

 

[Visual]

like n7 said, there are a couple of things you need to adjust first.
a) LDT, HTT multiplier or HT multiplier - all the same thing. multiplying that with your FSB (also called HTT frequency or just HTT) should not exceed 1000mhz by much (or 800mhz on nf3 and nf4-non-ultra boards). lower that according to the FSB you want to achieve, it doesnt reduce your performance anyway.
b) again from the post of n7 - ram speed. if your ram cant take the overclock but your cpu can go higher, put your ram on a lower divider. be careful though, as some RAM modules have tighter timings for the lower speeds, so for example if your ram is running cas3 at DDR400 and cas2.5 at DDR333, using the DDR333 divider with your timings on auto will enable the tighter timings... when you raise your FSB to 240 so that your ram reaches DDR400 speeds again, your ram might not be able to run these tighter timings. the best thing to do is set all your timings manually.
c) make sure the pci/agp and pci-express busses are running in their specs. there are some mobos with flaky bioses that don't enable the pci locks. for example on my asus i need to set my AGP frequency to 67mhz in order to activate the pci/agp lock.

run a program like clockgen for an easier start in overclocking - it allows you to change your FSB on-the-fly without reboots, while showing your fsb, ram, pci, agp or pci-express frequencies all at once so you can see if any of them goes too high. also run a torture program like prime95 and superpi to make sure your pc is stable - you can have prime doing the torture test while slowly rising your fsb in clockgen to see at what point errors will appear - thats one of the fastest ways to find your max overclock 🙂

 

[SlickAU]

Sweet. Thanks guys for all your advise (especially n7 and Visual).

I will try these suggestions this weekend and i will post the results!

Slick 😎