E4300, try to help me find what I'm doing wrong

[Agentbolt]

I'm having some issues with my Overclocking here, and I can't figure out why. Please keep in mind I've been out of the loop since the AMD Athlon 2500+ changing into a 3200+ days.

My rig consists of:

C2D E4300
Kingston ValueRAM PC-5300 2 Gigs
Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 Motherboard (F10 BIOS)
NVidia 8800GTS

I can overclock the processor to around 3.2 GHZ, but I appear to have hit a ceiling there. The system won't even post when I get my FSB above 370. I thought this was a little odd considering it'll run at at a FSB of 333 with NO voltage increase at all. I've tried upping the VCore as high a 1.6 volts and still, no post.

This wasn't all that big a deal, that appears to be a low-normal overclock for this thing, but when I was trying to figure out what my bottleneck was, I'm frankly stumped.

First, I tried setting it to its default FSB of 200, and setting the memory multiplier to 4 to get the memory running at DDR2 800 speeds, because I figured the memory was what was causing the bottleneck. However, the memory appears quite happy to run at DDR2 800 so long as the timings are set to 5-5-5-15. I've verified in CPUZ that the memory's speed IS at DDR2 800, so I guess it's not the memory.

A little confused, I decided to lower the multiplier to 7, and set the FSB to 400, leaving the processor running at 2.8 GHZ. I figured it should be able to do this since it can run at 3 no problems on stock voltage with the multiplier set at the normal 9. However, again, no post. I tried multipliers of 6 and 8 as well with no luck.

Now I'm really confused. This motherboard should be able to run at 400 MHZ FSB, right? I've tried upping the FSB voltage .3, along with pretty much everything else, but I still absolutely cannot get the **** thing to post if the FSB is set above 370.

I'm currently using the stock Intel HS until my Artic Freezer 7 Pro arrives, but I wasn't planning on actually leaving it at 3.6 GHZ until the thing arrived, I was just looking for the ceiling I could get it to post at out of curiousity.

So does anyone know what I'm missing here? I'm sure there's something simple, but it's bugging me that I can't figure out where my system is topping out.

Appreciate any answers, thanks

 

[Sand101]

I have also hit a wall. My processor is Orthos stable at 360x9 - 1.450v. 370 is a no go, no matter what I do. I also can't get a lower multiplier to work (I did read something about lowering the multi is actually overclocking teh NB chipset here - http://www.thetechrepository.com/showthread.php?p=32#post32).

Not too displeased, the 4300 at 360x9 is screaming (and my CPU is hitting 57C on Orthos at that point, so I probably would have stopped here anyway).

 

[myocardia]

You can't run @ 400 Mhz FSB with value RAM, it won't do it. Not because the RAM itself can't run @ 400 Mhz, but because of Intel's memory straps. Google it, if you want to find out more about them. Anyway, 370-400 is off limits. 401-whatever your RAM can handle is what you should be using (although not on the stock heatsink, except with a lower multiplier). 401 FSB gets you up to the 1333 memory strap on your board; 400 is still using the 1066 memory strap, and your RAM can't handle that.

 

[Tempered81]

use a memory divider and set your ratio to lower the speed of your ram

i run my ddr 333 at 180mhz on my asrock board so i can use a fsb speed on my e4300 at 300mhz

 

[Agentbolt]

Well, this was enlightening. Thanks guys, appreciate it.