GA-945P-S3 overclock

[magreen]

Anyone have any experience overclocking the e4300 on the GA-945P-S3 board? I think it might be the smart budget choice for the e4300.

I'm seeing most people getting 2.8 - 3.1 GHz on the e4300 with stock or basic air cooling, which means 300-350 FSB. Now I've heard the GA-945P-S3 can handle up to 350 FSB, and maybe without the FSB holes that budget P965 boards can have in the 300-400 FSB range. And at ~$80 it saves a few bucks over the budget P965 choices... TForce965PT and GA-965P-S3. They clocked it up to 350 FSB with an E6700 in this review at neoseeker (and that was CPU limited, not MB limited... 10x multi = 3.5Ghz, stock cooling).

 

[nyker96]

if this could do 350 then it'll be able to max out e4300.

 

[tapir]

Hey yeah I have this board, an E4300 and 2GB Corsair PC2- 6400.

I got to 285mhz FSB with no problems at all, then I slapped a 3$ 40mm fan on the northbridge and tried for higher. The thing is, there's a wall at 300MHz FSB. I don't know how else to describe it... if you set the FSB to 350MHz it dials down to 298MHz and boots that way. Kind of frustrating since you know the chip could fire itself up to 3ghz+ if only there was a way to get around the wall. I have heard that there's an issue with the 945P chipset that you have to overclock the PCI-e bus in order to get high FSB. But I have played around with the whole setup for hours and hours (probably 4-5 hours) and no luck getting past the wall, no matter what.

Maybe someone could e-mail these guys who supposedly got the board to 350MHz and see what's up. I tried just about everything with different mem. ratios and such, and I tried F2 F3 and F4 bioses.

 

[magreen]

That's strange. Seven user reviews at Newegg reported 340+ FSB, three of which reported 360+ FSB.

 

[nyker96]

Originally posted by: tapir
Hey yeah I have this board, an E4300 and 2GB Corsair PC2- 6400.

I got to 285mhz FSB with no problems at all, then I slapped a 3$ 40mm fan on the northbridge and tried for higher. The thing is, there's a wall at 300MHz FSB. I don't know how else to describe it... if you set the FSB to 350MHz it dials down to 298MHz and boots that way. Kind of frustrating since you know the chip could fire itself up to 3ghz+ if only there was a way to get around the wall. I have heard that there's an issue with the 945P chipset that you have to overclock the PCI-e bus in order to get high FSB. But I have played around with the whole setup for hours and hours (probably 4-5 hours) and no luck getting past the wall, no matter what.

Maybe someone could e-mail these guys who supposedly got the board to 350MHz and see what's up. I tried just about everything with different mem. ratios and such, and I tried F2 F3 and F4 bioses.

so what's the speed of the DDR2-800 running at? I'm sure you on some short of divider right?

 

[slag]

Originally posted by: nyker96
if this could do 350 then it'll be able to max out e4300.

huh?

a lot of 4300 processors do well in excess of 350 mhz fsb.

 

[tapir]

I have it set at 300 FSB x 9 = 2.7Ghz, then I have the mem ratio set to 2.66 x 300 = 800MHz memory, my Corsair is rated for 5-5-5-12 so I usually set it to that, I think it works fine at 4-4-4-12 though, have only tried 2T not 1T.

I've scoured the 'net looking for some explanation, but so far the only thing I can come up with is that 1066 FSB default processors don't seem to have this problem with the "wall" at 300MHz FSB. I don't see why this should matter but it is kind of a finicky board. I tried playing around with different mem. ratios in conjunction with adjusting the PCI-e freq. but most of the time I just fail to POST at odd FSBs.

Of course I could try the F1 bios but the F2 bios doesn't recognize E4300 properly so I don't know if I want to... I don't know why they would make subsequent BIOSes "worse" at overclocking anyway.

 

[nyker96]

cool looking like your running everything pretty optimally. most people using 965 only running 4300 to about 3 I think due to high voltage needed to go higher. Your board is doing pretty well.

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: tapir
I have it set at 300 FSB x 9 = 2.7Ghz, then I have the mem ratio set to 2.66 x 300 = 800MHz memory, my Corsair is rated for 5-5-5-12 so I usually set it to that, I think it works fine at 4-4-4-12 though, have only tried 2T not 1T.

You didn't mention whether you tried it at 1:1 memory ratio, i.e. 2 x 300 = DDR 600 memory. At a 2.66 memory multi you're overclocking your RAM if you go above 300 FSB.

 

[tapir]

 

[tapir]

Yeah the board has 1.50, 2.00, 2.50, 2.66, 3.00, 3.33, and 4.00 multipliers, and when trying to go above 300 FSB to 305 or 310 or 333, i've messed around with all the ones that seemed logical.

The one thing I think I ought to try is messing with EIST and virtualization settings, I tried that before but didn't really know what did what and all that seemed to happen was my performance would go to a crawl in Windows.

overall I am pretty happy with a 50% overclock from this motherboard, when the conroe chipsets mature a little bit, I will probably eBay this for $40 and try to get a nice 650i or 975x board on the cheap, and then grab a nice aftermarket cooler and shoot for the moon. Since I use 64-bit vista it would be a PITA to change my motherboard now and lose $100-150 in the process just for another 400-500mhz and some extra mem bandwidth

 

[india7]

Hi tapir,
can you please tell me what your settings are?
I can't get this board to overclock a bit!
I have the GA-945P-S3 rev 1.0 and BIOS F4 and an E4300.
I set FSB to 266, memory to 2x (=>533) - my memory is noname but DDR2-666, so i don't see a reason it would not work.
But everytime i change a little bit it will not boot.
Please, what are your exact settings in the BIOS M.I.T.-screen?

 

[tapir]

I don't have time to boot and copy every single thing by hand right now so I will just tell you the results of my findings in general.

To get the board to 266 I believe I set the PCI-e to auto, manually set the VCORE to stock or maybe one or two notches over, +0.1V on the FSB or chipset, manually set my DDR2 to 5-5-5-12. I believe the most important setting is PCI-e to auto. I can only boot at very low or random FSB if I manually lock it to 100 or 101. Some others have had success locking the PCI-e from what I've read over the net. I was able to get it to 266 and 285 without many issues with no fan on the chipset, a $3 fan got it to 300MHz fsb where it hit the wall which I still have not gotten around...

I left C1E, EIST and all of that completely to itself.

I'll try to copy you on the BIOS settings in the near future but my biggest piece of advice is to keep the PCI-e locked up. You could also try messing with different mem dividers. No reason you shouldn't hit 266 fsb easy.

 

[Spatulator]

I have this board and I had problems using the 3.33 divider with my budget 667ddr2 memory. 3.00 and 4.00 work fine. Im wondering if this might be what is keeping you from going past 300fsb. Im oc'ing a pentium d with this board till I can afford a c2d so Im not pushing the fsb limits at all.

 

[tapir]

Well I use the 2.66 memory multi at 300FSB but I'm fairly certain I've tried the 2.50 and 2.00 and the strange "2.00-" multipliers as well when trying to get past 300fsb. Someone on another board told me to try using +0.3V on the chipset but that didn't get me past the wall either. I have DDR2-800 so I can't experiment with higher memory multipliers at high FSB. I'm pretty happy with the 2.7GHz that I have anyway, my biggest problem right now is trying to get my applications to run smoothly in Vista-64-bit. :frown:

india7 not sure if you have tried any of these settings yet but AFAIK I gave you all the ones that I had to change. PCI-e to auto and try some different FSBs and maybe some voltage on the chipset or RAM. You can also try running with only one of your DIMMS at a time as they may be able to go higher in single-channel mode than dual-channel if they are not a matched pair. :thumbsup:

 

[india7]

Hi tapir,
thanks for the feedback!
Will try this as soon as possible.

 

[india7]

hmm, not the success i had expected.
these are my experiences so far:
(FSB, PCI-E, Multiplier, DRAM settings)
200, auto, 3.33, 5-5-5-15 - OK. (These are the stock settings, but forced instead of auto)
200, auto, 2.5, 5-5-5-15 - OK.
210, auto, 2.5, 5-5-5-15 - OK.
220, auto, 2.5, 5-5-5-15 - OK.
233, auto, 2.5, 5-5-5-15 - NOK! POST ok, but Windows does not boot
233, 100, 2.5, 5-5-5-15 - NOK! POST ok, but Windows does not boot

:-(
any hints on how to proceed from here?

 

[tapir]

I recently found out that if you set the mem ratio to "2.0-" you can use the PCI-e lock correctly. You may want to give that a try soon. Did you try going right to 266?

 

[india7]

Ok,
the good news is i successfully booted at 266, 100, x2.0-, 4, 4, 4, 12 !!
The bad news: Orthos prime95 stress tests failed quickly, and after some additional stress testing the screen suddenly went black and the machine rebooted.
So i don't call this a stable overclock.
I really don't understand that hype about the E4300. Finally, overclocking this proc is NOT that easy....
Or am i the only one to get a bad sample?

 

[tapir]

It could be your memory, CPU, any number of things. You can always try using SPD timings or adding some voltage to your DDR2 or the chipset. I usually give my FSB +0.1V. But this isn't the greatest motherboard for overclocking ever but it should run at 266 since it's a stock speed.

 

[india7]

That's what i expected. But shoot!
Another unsucessfull try:
266, 100, x2.0-, 4-4-4-12-15.6, +0.1VDIMM => no boot, fallback to default values.
266, auto, x2.0-, 4-4-4-12-15.6 => boot ok, Orthos fails after a while. Best result so far.

 

[Spatulator]

The northbridge gets incredibly hot. Try removing the dried up crud under it and using some as5.