Old A8N-SLI Premium Overclock

[cdcushman]

Lost my overclock when replacing CMOS battery, doh, having trouble getting the ram back up to speed.

Per my signature, I am currently running a mem value of 133 to bring down the 300 FSB to stock DDR400. Any attempt to raise the voltage (2.9-3) and raise the mem value to 166 fails miserably.

It's been a while since I got into the specifics of ram overclocking...

Anyone wana help? Additional suggestions? Much appreciated.

 

[lopri]

Your sticks don't like high voltages. Over 2.8V will rarely improve anything. Changing the divider to 166 will raise the memory frequency to 250 MHz (DDR500). If your memory is rated DDR400/2-3-2-5, there is no way it will do DDR500 without changing timings.

So loosen timings. Try something like 3-4-3-8 and see if that works. The lowest it will do is 2.5-3-2-5 if it is capable. 3-3-3-8 or 2.5-3-3-8 may be more realistic goals. You may also need to loosen 'Max Async Latency' and 'Read Preamble' values as your HTT is 300.

Again, higher voltages will likely hurt overclocking attempt with those sticks. Try to keep it around 2.6~2.7V, 2.8V max.

 

[cdcushman]

Thanks for the info!
Started with worst case and ran the following scenarios to no avail
3-4-3-8 2.8v Read Preamble 9.5 Max Async Latency: 11.0
3-4-3-8 2.75v Read Preamble 9.5 Max Async Latency: 11.0
3-4-3-8 2.7v Read Preamble 9.5 Max Async Latency: 11.0
3-4-3-8 Autov Read Preamble 9.5 Max Async Latency: 11.0
3-4-3-8 Autov Read Preamble 4 Max Async Latency: 6
3-4-3-8 2.8v Read Preamble 4 Max Async Latency: 6

Anything else I can do to squeeze some more juice outa these babies?
Can I just shove some DDR500 in there, i bet thats cheap now?
What about higher DDR?

Much Appreciated.

 

[Allio]

250MHz is a pretty significant (25%) overclock for DDR400 RAM. Did you used to run it at that speed? Unless the sticks were rated for it I'd be very surprised if they'd be able to do it at ANY voltage or timings.

DDR of all types is expensive these days, like 3-4x the price of an equivalent amount of DDR2. I'd imagine the extreme-overclocking stuff, if it even exists, would be priced astronomically. You'd probably be able to do a full platform upgrade for less money. I seriously doubt you'd see any noticeable performance increase by getting your memory above 200MHz anyway. Don't sink any more money into this system.

Edit: I see like 2% improvement in framerates between DDR400 and DDR500 on an AMD system.

Double edit: found a review of your sticks and it looks like they probably should be able to do 250MHz without much trouble. I'm not sure why they're not, but I wouldn't spend much energy trying to find out why. There's just no benefit to it.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I have the same motherboard with a 3800+ running at 2.5 GHz rock solid. I have the RAM dialed back to 166. On this type of system it's all abut the CPU speed.