- Aug 29, 2005
- 18
- 0
- 0
Recently purchased my computer upgrade (lost old Anand pw) with the following componets:
DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice DH-E3 w/ Zalman 7000B-AlCu HSF
GeiL PC3200 2.5-4-4-8 2x512 RAM
Gigabyte x800 SilentPipe (400/490 default)
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 100GB SATA (On sale at BB when I got it for $60)
Uhm, really the only thing that's left is the Case, CD-ROM and floppy.
I let the system kind of "burn in" for at least a week not doing any overclocking and making sure all the various componets were functioning.
I conducted what I would consider a lazy man's overclock, which is I took the various memory dividers that the Ultra-D provided and proceded to pump up the HTT whilst keeping my memory at 200MHz. Doing this I found the highest (seemingly) stable overclock to be 285x9 = 2565MHz @ 1.36v (BIOS is set to 1.4, it reads as 1.36 in both BIOS and CPU-Z). The next step 300x9 = 2700MHz wouldn't even make it to windows.
One thing I noticed as I bumped up the HTT and lowered the memory divider was that my timings started to tighten when set on auto. Eventually at the higher dividers it would get down to 2-3-3-6 (11 Trc, from 12, last thing CPU-Z identifies). The tighter timings didn't seem to affect stability at all so I was rather happy with that as I bought this memory as it was the cheapest I could find on newegg with heat spreaders at the time (its about $15 more now, I bought it before the rest of the parts because I incorrectly diagnosed my old computer's problem as a ram issue, it was actually the northbridge overheated). This was pleasntly surprising.
The CPU has been tested twice in ~10 hour overnight Prime95 Blend tests and various shorter tests when I will be away from the computer. The memory has had the above tested as well as a Memtest86+ for a ~10 hour overnight test. I did try overclocking the ram a tad at 2-3-3-6 however 210MHz (the only setting I tried) caused immediate Memtest86+ errors in test 5. This might be cutting it a bit close according to the quick and dirty overclocking guide I had read earlier as 210*.95=200 meaning I'm close to my limit.
One thing I noticed when I set the overclock the latest time (I had been having various problems that I have attributed (hopefully) to the nvidia IDE drivers corrupting my first windows install) I noted that I forgot to set my LDT/HTT ratio from Auto. Its perfectly stable this way but CPU-Z doesn't list this ratio so I don't know for sure if its running at 285x3=855MHz or 285x4=1140MHz. Does anyone have a way to identify this?
As far as the video card goes it is a completely unoverclockable card core wise. Even a bump of 1.5MHz causes the graphics to do wierd things and ATI's VPU Recover to trigger and do a reset. I am not sure if there is some artifical limitation or if the chip is just at the limit of its capabilties. I don't believe it to be heat as it causes problems within 5 minutes and by that time its reached no more than 75C (it has reached upto 89C depending on airflow, being passivly cooled it definatly runs hot). It is perfectly stable and I haven't had any graphics problems or lockups. With good airflow it plateaus at roughly 83C after roughly 30 minutes of CSS.
Overall I'm very happy with my overclock. I bumped the CPU up 43% while still remaining at stock voltage (as voltage didn't help within an 135MHz range anyhow). The ram is operating at stock clockspeed with good timings for value ram. How many more overnight Prime95 tests would you all recomend I do? Anything else you would recomend I do to test stability of the various parts?
And thanks to everyone whom helped me decide which parts to purchase beforehand
(origional login ShmooDude).
EDITED: Did a complete rewrite
DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice DH-E3 w/ Zalman 7000B-AlCu HSF
GeiL PC3200 2.5-4-4-8 2x512 RAM
Gigabyte x800 SilentPipe (400/490 default)
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 100GB SATA (On sale at BB when I got it for $60)
Uhm, really the only thing that's left is the Case, CD-ROM and floppy.
I let the system kind of "burn in" for at least a week not doing any overclocking and making sure all the various componets were functioning.
I conducted what I would consider a lazy man's overclock, which is I took the various memory dividers that the Ultra-D provided and proceded to pump up the HTT whilst keeping my memory at 200MHz. Doing this I found the highest (seemingly) stable overclock to be 285x9 = 2565MHz @ 1.36v (BIOS is set to 1.4, it reads as 1.36 in both BIOS and CPU-Z). The next step 300x9 = 2700MHz wouldn't even make it to windows.
One thing I noticed as I bumped up the HTT and lowered the memory divider was that my timings started to tighten when set on auto. Eventually at the higher dividers it would get down to 2-3-3-6 (11 Trc, from 12, last thing CPU-Z identifies). The tighter timings didn't seem to affect stability at all so I was rather happy with that as I bought this memory as it was the cheapest I could find on newegg with heat spreaders at the time (its about $15 more now, I bought it before the rest of the parts because I incorrectly diagnosed my old computer's problem as a ram issue, it was actually the northbridge overheated). This was pleasntly surprising.
The CPU has been tested twice in ~10 hour overnight Prime95 Blend tests and various shorter tests when I will be away from the computer. The memory has had the above tested as well as a Memtest86+ for a ~10 hour overnight test. I did try overclocking the ram a tad at 2-3-3-6 however 210MHz (the only setting I tried) caused immediate Memtest86+ errors in test 5. This might be cutting it a bit close according to the quick and dirty overclocking guide I had read earlier as 210*.95=200 meaning I'm close to my limit.
One thing I noticed when I set the overclock the latest time (I had been having various problems that I have attributed (hopefully) to the nvidia IDE drivers corrupting my first windows install) I noted that I forgot to set my LDT/HTT ratio from Auto. Its perfectly stable this way but CPU-Z doesn't list this ratio so I don't know for sure if its running at 285x3=855MHz or 285x4=1140MHz. Does anyone have a way to identify this?
As far as the video card goes it is a completely unoverclockable card core wise. Even a bump of 1.5MHz causes the graphics to do wierd things and ATI's VPU Recover to trigger and do a reset. I am not sure if there is some artifical limitation or if the chip is just at the limit of its capabilties. I don't believe it to be heat as it causes problems within 5 minutes and by that time its reached no more than 75C (it has reached upto 89C depending on airflow, being passivly cooled it definatly runs hot). It is perfectly stable and I haven't had any graphics problems or lockups. With good airflow it plateaus at roughly 83C after roughly 30 minutes of CSS.
Overall I'm very happy with my overclock. I bumped the CPU up 43% while still remaining at stock voltage (as voltage didn't help within an 135MHz range anyhow). The ram is operating at stock clockspeed with good timings for value ram. How many more overnight Prime95 tests would you all recomend I do? Anything else you would recomend I do to test stability of the various parts?
And thanks to everyone whom helped me decide which parts to purchase beforehand
EDITED: Did a complete rewrite