Couple Of Question On 3800x2 Overclocking

[prac]

I have read a lot of info on overclocking the a64s and just have a few general questions since this is my first one. I am trying to get the highest external clock without actualy raising the CPU speed a tremendous amount, trying to keep it less then 2300Mhz. I am using an AMD 3800x2 (E4 Manchester) and 2x512 of Corsair PC4400, the rest of the system shouldnt matter since these are just general questions about the cpu.

I am currently running at 290x7 with the memory at a 333 divider. I saw people were having success with 290 but have not attempted to go higher without getting my questions answered. I did have the cpu and ram set to 1:1 with a 260 external clock, 3-4-4-8-1T, and did not encounter any errors after 12 hours of memtest. I did encounter errors at test 7 whenever I attempted anything higher. With my current settings the cpu is 290 and the ram is 230 so that should leave me some more room to raise the external clock before I hit 260 again.

I know that the 3800 tops out at 3Ghz so does that mean the external clock maxes out at 300? Also is raising the external clock to high going to instantly kill the chip or is it like ram settings, where a CMOS reset will clear up the issue?

I read an nice article here about overclocking the 3800 here and they listed the settings and voltage. They raised the voltage as high as 1.85 to achieve 280 external clock but that was also running at 2.8Ghz, I have it set at 1.40 currently. I was wondering if the vcore actualy had to be altered to just raise the FSB?

Any help or suggestions would be great, Thank you

 

[stevty2889]

External clock? Are you trying to overclock your CPU or the front side bus? Overclocking the FSB, but not the CPU won't give you any benifit. Anything over 1000mhz HTT tends to cause system instability, but does not give you any performance benifit..

 

[tomt4535]

Most 3800 X2's get to 2.5-2.6ish no problems. Mine runs 2.8ghz no sweat. The external clock maxes out at whatever your motherboard can handle. You should try to isolate the motherboard, and find its maximum overclock by setting the ram to a low divider and a low cpu multiplier. Overclocking your chip too much shouldnt kill it instantly, a CMOS reset should reset it no problems. The vcore only needs to be raised when you are overclocking the processor. When you raise the FSB to something where the cpu speed would be over stock, you might need more voltage, but if you arent overclocking the cpu, extra cpu voltage is not necessecary. The overclocking guide in the sticky in this forum tells you to Isolate and Consolidate. You want to find the highest stable settings for each part first, then find a happy medium that all the parts will work well on.

 

[prac]

Yeah external clock/FSB, were refering to the same measurement. I though I read that the higher this was the better and it was worth sacrificing ram speed over, but maybe I misread.

Most 3800 X2's get to 2.5-2.6ish no problems. Mine runs 2.8ghz no sweat. The external clock maxes out at whatever your motherboard can handle. You should try to isolate the motherboard, and find its maximum overclock by setting the ram to a low divider and a low cpu multiplier. Overclocking your chip too much shouldnt kill it instantly, a CMOS reset should reset it no problems. The vcore only needs to be raised when you are overclocking the processor. When you raise the FSB to something where the cpu speed would be over stock, you might need more voltage, but if you arent overclocking the cpu, extra cpu voltage is not necessecary. The overclocking guide in the sticky in this forum tells you to Isolate and Consolidate. You want to find the highest stable settings for each part first, then find a happy medium that all the parts will work well on.

I was 99.9% certain that raising it to high could be cleared by a cmos reset but I wanted to make sure since I wasnt 100% certain. I did read the sticky on isolate and consolidate and I started with ram, 260 is peak, and I was on the FSB. I was conserned over temps but I tried 290x8@1.4vcore and i was staying in high 20s to low 30s at load. I might mess with it more but Im content with that for the moment. Thank you for the great answer!