Chronicles of my x2 3800+ o/c (first ever o/c for me)

[goobernoodles]

Ok, well... I can't seem to get past 210ish HTT. This is my frist time overclocking. I clocked my ram down to 133mhz, set the HTT frequency to 2.5, set the cpu ratio to 5. Could this be an issue with the ram? I have 4x512mb GeIL value ram... Also the temps are 33-35c idle. XP90 with a thermaltake silentcat on it. The motherboard is a MSI K8N Neo4-F.

EDIT: This was the original post, solved that, keep reading.

 

[saltedeggman]

4x512 would be the problem... my guess....

try running in 2x512 setup to see if it helps

also relax all the timings on the ram.... to reach max HTT

 

[TankGuys]

That's definitely odd. Yea, try cutting down to 2x512.

Sometimes you just get bad boards... hopefully yours isn't one of them!

 

[stevty2889]

Try a non-fractional HTT muliplier. Try 3x rather than 2.5x.

 

[goobernoodles]

That did it. Currently stress testing at 2.4ghz. 166 divider and HTT 240.

 

[goobernoodles]

Ok... now I'm getting Super PI and Prime errors almost instantly... CPU temp is 35 idle... and goes up to 40ish... Should I be getting errors at this low of a temp??

 

[compgeek89]

Might want voltage... I dunno.

 

[goobernoodles]

Eh, yea, I spoke too soon, I upped it to 1.4v and its stable so far. Is it ok to use 2 different programs to test the cores? And is 47c too hot at full load?

I have Prime95 on one core and OCCT on the other. So far so good.

 

[goobernoodles]

Well 15 min so far. I'm gonna go over the gf's for the night. Hopefully I'll come back home to see no errors... that, and I get a 7800gt tommorow.

 

[compgeek89]

55 is too much, 47 is excellent. 52-53 is as high as you wanna go.

 

[goobernoodles]

Well, I'm not entirely sure what happened last night, had a power outage. >:/

Regardless, I got my 7800gt today, so I reformatted and I'm testing again. I can't seem to open 2 instances of prime95 so I'm using Super PI and Prime95.

I'm using MSI's CoreCenter for temp monitoring... and there are some strange things going on:

1) vcore (set to 1.4) fluctuates from 1.36-1.39
2) the program constantly shows the speed its running at, and it fluctuates from 672mhz (223htt x 3.0) to 2400mhz (240 x 10) to 4129mhz (242 x 17)....

What the crap?

 

[saltedeggman]

try CPU-z for another reading on those speed/vcore

 

[biostud]

run prime95 as: "prime95.exe -a0" and "prime95.exe -a1", it will open two instances, one for each CPU.

 

[goobernoodles]

I just realized that I had the voltage raised by having "extra cpu voltage +3.3%" instead of actually setting it to 1.4... Is this not preferable?

 

[Doctorweir]

A little jumping on the voltages +-0.03 is normal, depending on the stability of your PSU, Mobo circuits, etc.
I would prefer to actually set the voltage...no percentages...
When starting to overclock make sure to disable Cool n Quiet in the BIOS to prevent Windows from fooling around with multipliers and voltages. A good CnQ config is for later...