- Jan 29, 2005
- 5,198
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I think I made it stable as it is right now. It was not un-stable, but so far I have not noticed crashes, or any symptoms related to un-stability.
It's still running at stock speed. At 2.2 Ghz. And I want it to stay there. But I wanted to get some "more performance potential" without touching the CPU frequency.
So I slowly changed three (so far, might be more, later) things in my BIOS, and done one thing physically.
First, I heard about the famous 2T Command. That, if either Disabled, or set to 1T (if "1T" is actually showed in the options), it'd do 1T Commands, meaning faster operations (that's what I heard, and saw in a thread). So I disabled it, and then it was stable, and blazingly fast, to my tastes anyway.
Then, I went back to the BIOS, and I wanted to change one of the basic Memory setting (CAS latency, RAS to CAS delay, RAS precharge and TRAS). I chose to modify TRAS first, as suggested by a friend. It was set at 8 Clocks, by default. In fact, it was 3.0-3-3-8 by default. So I changed the TRAS to 5 Clocks right away. And to my surprise, nothing bad happened ! Stable.
Then, I Enabled the Bank Interleaving. I also heard it's supposed to be a good thing to enable when using Dual-Channel, and, of course, identical DIMM's. And it's my situation.
Physically, I re-applied AS5, and finally removed the reference thermal thingy. With a MUCH better result in terms of temperatures. I applied it as suggested by an article I saw from a link posted somewhere around here in the boards. Just a little in the center, and then going in circle, bigger and bigger, until all the surface is covered with only a thin amount of it. Well in fact, I decided to make it so all the surface is covered with AS5. The article said only the center. But hey...I don't trust void spaces in between where some air could easily get to, and help my CPU over-heat faster.
And, finally, I decreased the VCore voltage from 1.500 to 1.450.
First, I tried to decrease it to 1.425, but I thought it was maybe too much of a difference, so I've set it a bit higher to 1.450.
It's only a difference of 0.050, but it did help reduce the temperatures, both in idle and load states.
All that, combined with good wires / cables management inside the tower, abd both side panels removed.
Now my 3500+ NewCastle idles between 35º to 36º Celcius, and reaches up to (according to what I've seen so far) 44º to 46º Celcius on load. I multi-tasked a lot, ran an Anti-Virus scan, one Spyware scan, one Registry cleaner scan, plus a DVD movie (Matrix Reloaded !) and finally, Rome: Total War (I stared an off-line game for the purpose of testing, had something like 6'000+ men on the field duking it out).
I think it reached something like 48º or maybe 50º, but I haven't seen the numbers themselves.
I used SiSoft Sandra 2005 and ASUS Probe to look for my temperatures, and finally, the BIOS Hardware Monitor, of course.
The highest temperatures came from the BIOS, so I took the temps mentioned here from what I saw there.
Well well...nothing special to ask for here. I just wanted to share all this with you guys.
What do you think of these humble changes to cool a 3500+ NewCastle ? (=oD
It's still running at stock speed. At 2.2 Ghz. And I want it to stay there. But I wanted to get some "more performance potential" without touching the CPU frequency.
So I slowly changed three (so far, might be more, later) things in my BIOS, and done one thing physically.
First, I heard about the famous 2T Command. That, if either Disabled, or set to 1T (if "1T" is actually showed in the options), it'd do 1T Commands, meaning faster operations (that's what I heard, and saw in a thread). So I disabled it, and then it was stable, and blazingly fast, to my tastes anyway.
Then, I went back to the BIOS, and I wanted to change one of the basic Memory setting (CAS latency, RAS to CAS delay, RAS precharge and TRAS). I chose to modify TRAS first, as suggested by a friend. It was set at 8 Clocks, by default. In fact, it was 3.0-3-3-8 by default. So I changed the TRAS to 5 Clocks right away. And to my surprise, nothing bad happened ! Stable.
Then, I Enabled the Bank Interleaving. I also heard it's supposed to be a good thing to enable when using Dual-Channel, and, of course, identical DIMM's. And it's my situation.
Physically, I re-applied AS5, and finally removed the reference thermal thingy. With a MUCH better result in terms of temperatures. I applied it as suggested by an article I saw from a link posted somewhere around here in the boards. Just a little in the center, and then going in circle, bigger and bigger, until all the surface is covered with only a thin amount of it. Well in fact, I decided to make it so all the surface is covered with AS5. The article said only the center. But hey...I don't trust void spaces in between where some air could easily get to, and help my CPU over-heat faster.
And, finally, I decreased the VCore voltage from 1.500 to 1.450.
First, I tried to decrease it to 1.425, but I thought it was maybe too much of a difference, so I've set it a bit higher to 1.450.
It's only a difference of 0.050, but it did help reduce the temperatures, both in idle and load states.
All that, combined with good wires / cables management inside the tower, abd both side panels removed.
Now my 3500+ NewCastle idles between 35º to 36º Celcius, and reaches up to (according to what I've seen so far) 44º to 46º Celcius on load. I multi-tasked a lot, ran an Anti-Virus scan, one Spyware scan, one Registry cleaner scan, plus a DVD movie (Matrix Reloaded !) and finally, Rome: Total War (I stared an off-line game for the purpose of testing, had something like 6'000+ men on the field duking it out).
I think it reached something like 48º or maybe 50º, but I haven't seen the numbers themselves.
I used SiSoft Sandra 2005 and ASUS Probe to look for my temperatures, and finally, the BIOS Hardware Monitor, of course.
The highest temperatures came from the BIOS, so I took the temps mentioned here from what I saw there.
Well well...nothing special to ask for here. I just wanted to share all this with you guys.
What do you think of these humble changes to cool a 3500+ NewCastle ? (=oD
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