A friend of mine just built himself a C2D rig, after his ancient 1.8GHz P4 died on him. He got a nice E6400, 1GB of Kingston DDR2@533, and the 945GZM-S2 Gigabyte Mobo, as well as a pair of SATA drives.
The rig runs well: it's stable so far, and pretty responsive. The problem is that it won't go over 1.6GHz, even under heavy CPU load! (I'm aware that C2D CPUs can underclock themselves when idle).
While reading the mobo manual after my friend called me, I realized it has a max FSB of 800MHz. Now, the mobo's BIOS shows a multiplier of X8, whit a host CPU clock speed of 200MHz. Indeed, 200x8=1600MHz, which is what he is getting. The limited FSB of the mobo is the culprit.
While checking out Gigabytes Website, I found out that the mobo CAN support a 1066 FSB (which is what the E6400 requires, right?) if it is overclocked. Now, though I have many years worth of experience building machines, I am no overclocker, and I know little in that regard.
Feeling adventurous, I decided to try my hand at it. So in the BIOS, I set the Host CPU clock speed to 266MHz instead of 200, so that I'd yield the desired 1066 and thus 2.16GHz on the E6400. I also changed the memory's multiplier so that it'd stay at 533MHz after changing the CPU's speed.
With this configuration, the computer won't boot into Windows. It won't even detect the SATA drives.
Resetting the CMOS and getting the FSB back to 800MHz works to get the computer to work, but with the same 1.6GHz CPU speed problem of course.
I tried flashing the BIOS to the latest version, no luck.
WHat do you suggest? What am I doing wrong? THe website claims that it can indeed achieve 1066MHz, and in fact the BIOS updates mentioned in the page seem all geared towards improving overclockability. Remember we don't want it to go to 3GHz or anything. We just want it to run at stock speeds!
Thanks in advance!
The rig runs well: it's stable so far, and pretty responsive. The problem is that it won't go over 1.6GHz, even under heavy CPU load! (I'm aware that C2D CPUs can underclock themselves when idle).
While reading the mobo manual after my friend called me, I realized it has a max FSB of 800MHz. Now, the mobo's BIOS shows a multiplier of X8, whit a host CPU clock speed of 200MHz. Indeed, 200x8=1600MHz, which is what he is getting. The limited FSB of the mobo is the culprit.
While checking out Gigabytes Website, I found out that the mobo CAN support a 1066 FSB (which is what the E6400 requires, right?) if it is overclocked. Now, though I have many years worth of experience building machines, I am no overclocker, and I know little in that regard.
Feeling adventurous, I decided to try my hand at it. So in the BIOS, I set the Host CPU clock speed to 266MHz instead of 200, so that I'd yield the desired 1066 and thus 2.16GHz on the E6400. I also changed the memory's multiplier so that it'd stay at 533MHz after changing the CPU's speed.
With this configuration, the computer won't boot into Windows. It won't even detect the SATA drives.
Resetting the CMOS and getting the FSB back to 800MHz works to get the computer to work, but with the same 1.6GHz CPU speed problem of course.
I tried flashing the BIOS to the latest version, no luck.
WHat do you suggest? What am I doing wrong? THe website claims that it can indeed achieve 1066MHz, and in fact the BIOS updates mentioned in the page seem all geared towards improving overclockability. Remember we don't want it to go to 3GHz or anything. We just want it to run at stock speeds!
Thanks in advance!
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