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IP35 Pro / q6600 / 8GB G.SKILL PC6400, unstable at stock / stock cooling

K

KingGheedora

Diamond Member
I just put this system together.

First, the board defaults to these settings:

CPU Operating speed 2399(266)
External Clock - 272MHz
Multiplier Factor - x9
Estimated New CPU Clock - 2448MHz
DRAM Speed - DDR2-816

Is that normal? Those settings don't seem right to me. Shouldn't the external clock be 266? The system is not stable with these settings. I boot into Vista and I get crashes doing minor things like logging in. Or trying to start CPU-Z.

If I keep these settings but change the RAM ratio to 1:1 (running the RAM at 266MHz) it's stable.

It's also stable if I change the external clock to 266, and set the RAM/external clock ratio to 2:3 (running RAM at 400MHz).

I tried flashing to the latest BIOS, that didn't fix anything, I also tried clearing the CMOS, to no avail. I expect the board to be able to run the chip at the correct settings...


EDIT: BTW, the uguru utility is such a POS. It's hideous, they don't let you use a windows themed skin, only ugly "cool" skins that look hideous. UI is not that friendly.
 
Also, CPU-Z says 1.x (BIOS: 10) in the field immediately to the right of the "Model:" field. I'm assuming this is not the bios version, because I flashed to 11, and I'm pretty sure the board was already at 11 when I received it. The last two numbers on the bottom of the POST screen were "11" before and after the flash.

Can anyone confirm CPU-Z doesn't report the bios version?
 
Yes, I am running Vista x64.

How are people able to set their CPU voltage to settings lower than 1.3V? Is the VCore the correct setting for this? Because I can't change VCore to anything below 1.3, and there is another setting called CPU VTT, which only has three option s(1.20, 1.23, and 1.27 i believe). CPUZ reports the CPU voltage as 1.23v - 1.25v.

I just re-flashed to the version 12 bios that Gary Key linked to in one of his posts (he said it was the version that AT would be using in their mobo review), with the /wb switch. The board is still running the external clock at 272. I did get an error message on POST, after flashing, that said "CMOS checksum error." It looks like it set the RAM ratio to 1.25 so the ram is running at DDR2-666.

Running Orthos blend right now to test this out.

Can anyone else with an IP35 and a Q6600 confirm what their settings are?

EDIT: Removed some comments about CPU-Z reporting high VCore. I got the beta version that reports correct settins for C2Q's.
 
It looks like it's running stable so far, I hadn't been able to get past about 4 minutes of Orthos when it was running the ram at DDR2-816. I still don't understand why it was doing that, if anyone knows I'd be curious to know.

816MHz isn't much of an overclock. I know it would be tough to overclock a system with 2GB*4 mem sticks, but that's kind of ridiculous, it's only 2% over the RAM's spec, and a lot of other people have gotten the RAM to 500MHz (DDR2-1000). Once I verify that the board is running stable at stock, any tips for getting it stable at higher settings?
 
Just tried 333FSB, 1:1 RAM ratio, and 7x multiplier (2331MHz). Got crashes in windows. Same thing when I tried 400/1:1/6x.

I haven't messed much with voltages at all yet.
 
have you got the RAM voltage set at the mfr's recommended voltage & not the JEDEC 1.8V that the board may have set?

of late abit's BIOS have tended to set the CPU's VID as the low voltage limit but I don't know if that's true of the IP35 pro/Q6600 combo.
 
The ram is set to 1.8V, but that is the MFR recommended setting for these sticks. On the box it says 1.8v - 1.9v.

Currently testing one pair at a time @ 333MHz bus / 7x mult / 400MHz Ram (5:6 ratio):

I took out one pair and tested in the blue slots, it failed after a few minutes (computer froze). I took that pair out and put in the second pair into the same blue slots, and the computer ran for 5 hours over night. Without locking up or rebooting.

I need to test it again I think because it seems the power management settings turned off the HDD after 20 minutes. When I woke up this morning orthos said it'd been running for 5 hours but the computer was locked and seemed to be in a hibernation mode. I went into power settings advanced settings and turned off as much of the power management settings as possible.

It's a good sign though because this is the first time I've been able to run Orthos for more than a few minutes at 400MHz RAM. Will let it run while I'm at work today and see how this pair goes.

(I'm running two instances of Orthos, with each instance set to a different pair of cores, standard config...)
 
for that voltage I guess it's DDR2 800 C5?
I would stick it up to the 1.9V particularly if using 4 DIMMs but you should run memtest on the set that failed as you may have a faulty DIMM.
 
the 9x272 is normal. abit slightly overclocks the FSB on 'stock' settings.

also, you haven't specified what memory you are running and with what timings...

you may need to increase you vMCH (NB) voltage slightly. you have to realize (as you already have) that o/c-ing 8GB's is going to be quite difficult on the NB.

i say increase your your vMCH to around 1.44 and vtt to 1.31. see if this helps. if that doesn't, try increasing your vdimm to 1.95.
 
Yes, memtest sees all 8GB. How long does memtest take to run?

I couldn't really tell, i ran it for about 2 hours and wasn't sure if it had completed one pass or not, the %complete indicators were kind of confusing one moved really slow and I kept leaving the machine so I wasn't sure if that one had ever finished and restarted at zero or not. It didn't find any errors after about two hours, but orthos was finding errors after four minutes or less, so I'm trusting that more than memtest. (This is memtest v1.70, booted to MSDOS via USB flash drive to run it).
 
with memtest you need to loop test #5 for a while.

each pass will take a while since you have 8GB for it to test.

i'd say allow at least 100 passes if you want to be sure that it is stable... you can gauge how long it'll take by seeing how long 1 loop takes.
 
yes... start memtest v1.7 then hit c 1 3 5 and then i can't remember after that... but that should get you to a screen where you can select test #5 to loop
 
I came home to a login screen so the machine crashed. I checked the log and it ran for 5.5 hours. I tried loading memtest but it wouldn't run at this setting (RAM @400MHz, this is still only 4GB of ram in the board, the other 4GB are still out). I couldn't load memtest at all, it just said memtest at the top and looked like it was about to load but was frozen.

I kept upping the RAM voltage until 2.0v before I got it to load, and its running stable this way in memtest so far. about a dozen passes of test #5 and one of #8. Will test this pair further and then a little orthos before testing the other pair.
 
Put all 8GB in, and i can only run Test # 5 for under 20 minutes before it freezes up. Weird freeze though, the plus sign keeps on blinking as normal, but the rest of the system seems unresponsive and no other updates happen to the screen.

Had to change voltage to 2.05 just to get memtest to load with 8GB @400MHz.
 
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