Well, 2 months ago I knew my dying PIII (700Mhs) needed to be replaced/upgraded so i started researching the forums here. I determined with your help that the best performance bang for the buck system i could buy was a A64 S939 (3000+ winchester, Abit AV8, 512M Value RAM, 6800 GPU, NEC 3500, 80G SATA HD, X-infinity gaming case w/420W Power Supply) which i purchased prebuilt and tested for $970 (not bad).
1 month ago i received my new rig and was happy with the stock performance and was afraid to overclock at that time because i never did it before. After researching this site OC forum and a couple others i finally decided to take the plunge last night and try to OC my system.
From the research i found the AV8 has AGP lock problems when the HTT gets over 250-260M so i decided to go with the 8:2:1 devider instead, and since i was using PC3200 Value Ram (3 3 3 8 1T) I would go with a 2:3 mem devider (thanks to the mem sticky here). Following are my settings i changed to make my OC a sucess:
1. Changed AGP from 6:2:1 to 8:2:1
2. Was able to leave all voltages at stock thanks to Winchester core on my 3000+.
*** EDIT - Even though my stability with prime was looking good initially , because i passed two separate 4 hours tests, when i tried to test longer then that 1 got a rounding error in hour 5. I was depressed at first, but then just took the advice of others here and increased my Vcore voltage from stock 1.4 to 1.475V, and increased my DDRVDD from stock 2.65 to 2.7V. Well i am glad to say this seems to have done the trick because as i am typing this in my browser i am 14.5 hours into a prime torture test and still counting!! ***
3. Changed HTT from 200 to 278 which took my 1.8Ghz 3000+ up to 2.5 Ghz ( > 3800+).
4. Changed DRAM from 400 to 266 (2:3 Divider so at 278 HTT my PC3200 value ram is running at 178Mhz)
5. Changed LDT Multipler from 5x to 2x (did not try 3x because people in the forums said 3x had problems with Abit AV8 mobo and 2x benchmarks showed no negatives in performance).
I have tested Prime torture test stable for 4 hours and seem to be 3D stable also (ran 3dmark03/05, Far Cry, and AH2 Flight sim with no problems for about 4 hours). I think I am stable, but over the next couple of days i will run some 12 Hour sessions of Prime torture test just to make sure.
With Stock settings (1.8 Ghz) my SuperPie 1M took 46 seconds. With my new OC (2.5 Ghz) i cut 9 seconds off my time and now run 1M at 37 seconds.
Just wanted to say thanks to everyone at this forum, without getting the confidence from reading these threads I would have never tried to OC my system. Not to bad for $970, i have a new budget PC that performs like a $2000 + Allien rig. Now i know why you guys like OverClocking so much.
My next project will be to OC and softmod my 6800 so it performs closer to a 6800GT (time to research and learn Riva Tuner )
And Thanks to the great Hot Deals Forum here, i just replaced my 17" monitor with a 19" for $67. Starting to really like this place!!!!!!! No more squinting trying to ID boagies while playing AcesHigh2 Combat Flight Simulator.
1 month ago i received my new rig and was happy with the stock performance and was afraid to overclock at that time because i never did it before. After researching this site OC forum and a couple others i finally decided to take the plunge last night and try to OC my system.
From the research i found the AV8 has AGP lock problems when the HTT gets over 250-260M so i decided to go with the 8:2:1 devider instead, and since i was using PC3200 Value Ram (3 3 3 8 1T) I would go with a 2:3 mem devider (thanks to the mem sticky here). Following are my settings i changed to make my OC a sucess:
1. Changed AGP from 6:2:1 to 8:2:1
2. Was able to leave all voltages at stock thanks to Winchester core on my 3000+.
*** EDIT - Even though my stability with prime was looking good initially , because i passed two separate 4 hours tests, when i tried to test longer then that 1 got a rounding error in hour 5. I was depressed at first, but then just took the advice of others here and increased my Vcore voltage from stock 1.4 to 1.475V, and increased my DDRVDD from stock 2.65 to 2.7V. Well i am glad to say this seems to have done the trick because as i am typing this in my browser i am 14.5 hours into a prime torture test and still counting!! ***
3. Changed HTT from 200 to 278 which took my 1.8Ghz 3000+ up to 2.5 Ghz ( > 3800+).
4. Changed DRAM from 400 to 266 (2:3 Divider so at 278 HTT my PC3200 value ram is running at 178Mhz)
5. Changed LDT Multipler from 5x to 2x (did not try 3x because people in the forums said 3x had problems with Abit AV8 mobo and 2x benchmarks showed no negatives in performance).
I have tested Prime torture test stable for 4 hours and seem to be 3D stable also (ran 3dmark03/05, Far Cry, and AH2 Flight sim with no problems for about 4 hours). I think I am stable, but over the next couple of days i will run some 12 Hour sessions of Prime torture test just to make sure.
With Stock settings (1.8 Ghz) my SuperPie 1M took 46 seconds. With my new OC (2.5 Ghz) i cut 9 seconds off my time and now run 1M at 37 seconds.
Just wanted to say thanks to everyone at this forum, without getting the confidence from reading these threads I would have never tried to OC my system. Not to bad for $970, i have a new budget PC that performs like a $2000 + Allien rig. Now i know why you guys like OverClocking so much.
My next project will be to OC and softmod my 6800 so it performs closer to a 6800GT (time to research and learn Riva Tuner
)And Thanks to the great Hot Deals Forum here, i just replaced my 17" monitor with a 19" for $67. Starting to really like this place!!!!!!! No more squinting trying to ID boagies while playing AcesHigh2 Combat Flight Simulator.
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