Overclocking question

[icelazer]

I haven't been much into the overclocking realm since my p3 700 cb0 with a peltier and alpha hsf that went bad unexpectedly, but I do have a question for the current experts.

I have an athlon 4000+ san diego in an asus a8n-sli premium with dual bfg 7800gtx and 2gb of that new ocz 500MHZ DDR 2.8v 3-3-2-8 coming in today. I'm currently using the retail hsf on the athlon and it's running stably with my cheap ram at 12x215. I would like to not overclock the video cards, the pci bus, or the sata controller but I would like to take advantage of the faster ram.

On A64 processors, if it's designed to do 12x200 does that mean it should also be able to do 9.5x250? Would that be my best bet? I've read a few overclocking guides that mention fsb/ddr ram dividers, but I don't see explicit divider settings in my bios. To get the current overclock, I have the RAM set on the ddr400 setting and the cpu fsb at 215, but Sandra shows the ram also at 215. Any advice would be appreciated. I'm not trying to push my system to the very edge, but it would be nice to get to 2.6Ghz and take full advantage of the new ram on stock air cooling without too much risk. Does 10.5x250 seem realistic?

Thanks for any help

 

[spiritwalker2223]

Do you see any 5/6, 3/4 or 133, 166 etc? But you don't need that if your running your FSB at 250 and want your ram at 500. You should see a lock for your PCI-e/PCI bus in your bios, that'll keep your harddrives.. etc running stock speeds.

Your computer looks pretty good, except for your crappy ram. 3-3-2-8 @ 500 is pretty high latencies. You'd be better of with DDR400 @ 2-3-3-6.

 

[icelazer]

I don't see any dividers or numbers like that at all. I do see a pci-express setting (leaving it at 100) and a pci setting (leaving it at 33.33). But if the cpu is 12x200 will it run at 9.5x250 or 10.5x250? The first leaves the overall clock rate about the same, but does the higher fsb with lower multiplier put a difficult load on the cpu? I thought the 3-3-2-8 wasn't bad for 2gb of ram? My motherboard doesn't support the ocz vx gold high voltages, and that's about the best I could find for 2gb of ram (reason = battlefield 2). Is the expectation it would run at ddr400 2-3-3-6?

 

[2kfire]

Which motherboard do you have? That would help a lot since someone on here more than likely will have the same one and can tell you exactly what settings to change etc.

 

[icelazer]

I believe the longwinded nature of the original post clouded certain facts, it's an Asus A8N-SLI Premium.

 

[daggermeerkat]

Refer to this thread for the memory dividers

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=29&threadid=1670922&enterthread=y

 

[ElTorrente]

Originally posted by: icelazer
I believe the longwinded nature of the original post clouded certain facts, it's an Asus A8N-SLI Premium.

I used to have that board before switching to my current DFI.

In the BIOS, it doesn't actually say "RAM divider", the adjustment is instead "max RAM speed" or something like that. Set your at DDR333 (it might be labeled "166"), and go from there. Download CPU-Z to check your speeds once in Windows.

Just give your RAM about 2.8-2.9volts (VDIMM), and try CAS 2.5 if possible.

 

[2kfire]

Sorry, I COMPLETELY missed the part where you CLEARLY stated the motherboard model . I think you should easily be able to do as you suggested, run 9.5*250 and just work your way up from there. One more question: is the ram rated at 1T or 2T command rate? That setting makes a bigger difference than any of the others.

 

[icelazer]

Not sure, I don't have the package yet, and the OCZ website doesn't say.