Overclocking the AMD 3700+ San Diego

[GamingDaemon]

As you can see by my rig, I am trying to overclock the AMD 3700+ San Diego with the MSI K8N SLI mobo. For some reaosn, I am limited to upping the FSB to just 230MHz. The bios limits me to 1.4v, though I can increase it by 3.3 or 6.6%. When I do that, it won't boot. Further, I can touch any of the memory settings either. The only thing I can do is increase the FSB to 230. Anything else and it won't boot.

Is this right? All I am getting now is 2511MHz on the CPU. TIA!

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: GamingDaemon

As you can see by my rig, I am trying to overclock the AMD 3700+ San Diego with the MSI K8N SLI mobo. For some reaosn, I am limited to upping the FSB to just 230MHz. The bios limits me to 1.4v, though I can increase it by 3.3 or 6.6%. When I do that, it won't boot. Further, I can touch any of the memory settings either. The only thing I can do is increase the FSB to 230. Anything else and it won't boot.

Is this right? All I am getting now is 2511MHz on the CPU. TIA!

When you increace the FSB you are also increacing teh memory speed. Your memory is running at DDR460. You have to add a memory divider (somewhere in your BIOS) to slow down the memory. You need to do a little more reading about FSB, multiplies and dividers.

The typical method for learning to overclock is to "Read the Stickies"
Here's a few. DO NOT read them all, you'll go stark raving mad! Pick one or two that appeal to you and read the "general" sections about OCing.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=263753
http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/bios2/6.shtml
http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20823
http://i4memory.com/showthread.php?t=327
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=795444

 

[GuitarDaddy]

I think there is a trick on the MSI boards to lock the PCI bus, I think it maybe to set the PCI manually +1

 

[GamingDaemon]

Wow! Thanks guys. Yes, I do have much to learn!

 

[GamingDaemon]

Originally posted by: Billb2
The typical method for learning to overclock is to "Read the Stickies"
Here's a few. DO NOT read them all, you'll go stark raving mad! Pick one or two that appeal to you and read the "general" sections about OCing.

One weird thing though...Before overclocking, my 3DMark06 score was 1724 but after changing the FSB to 230MHz, it was 1438. What?

Scratching head...

Anyone know why?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: GamingDaemon

Originally posted by: Billb2
The typical method for learning to overclock is to "Read the Stickies"
Here's a few. DO NOT read them all, you'll go stark raving mad! Pick one or two that appeal to you and read the "general" sections about OCing.

One weird thing though...Before overclocking, my 3DMark06 score was 1724 but after changing the FSB to 230MHz, it was 1438. What?

Scratching head...

Anyone know why?

More than likely that means the O/C wasn't completly stable.

 

[GamingDaemon]

Yes, I'm guessing it wasn't stable. I am seeing some weirdness when I play Oblivion, yet F.E.A.R. works perfectly.

Also, when I tried nVidia's nTune, I could OC the HTT to 240MHz (up from 230 which I could never do in the bios), but it seemed a little unstable too.

From my reading, and I've spent over 8 hours reading now, I am somewhat limited by my memory which is DDR400/PC3200. Therefore, I really can't do much to overclock this processor unless I lower the LDT/HT from 5x to 4x or 3x. Is this right?

Or should I just turn on the dynamic adjust in the BIOS (MSI K8N SLI-F mobo) that does a dynamic overclocking up to 11%?

TIA

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: GamingDaemon
Yes, I'm guessing it wasn't stable. I am seeing some weirdness when I play Oblivion, yet F.E.A.R. works perfectly.

Also, when I tried nVidia's nTune, I could OC the HTT to 240MHz (up from 230 which I could never do in the bios), but it seemed a little unstable too.

From my reading, and I've spent over 8 hours reading now, I am somewhat limited by my memory which is DDR400/PC3200. Therefore, I really can't do much to overclock this processor unless I lower the LDT/HT from 5x to 4x or 3x. Is this right?

Or should I just turn on the dynamic adjust in the BIOS (MSI K8N SLI-F mobo) that does a dynamic overclocking up to 11%?

TIA

Yes lower the LDT/HT to 4x for up to 250fsb, above that lower it to 3x, but that doesn't affect ram. You also need to set a ram divider, also sometimes refered to as "max mem clock" or something similar. The divider options should be like 200,166,133,100, etc..., you should use 166 or 133.

You will most likely get better results O/Cing manually than using the dynamic adjust.

Most 3700+'s will hit 2.7ghz without a vcore increase, but with a little bump in vcore you should be able to go a bit higher. My 3700+ does 2.8ghz with 1.55v

 

[GamingDaemon]

Ok, so if lower the LDT/HT to 4x and the divider to 166 or 133, then I should be able to go above 203MHz for the HTT, right?

Also, my board lets me adjust up to 1.4v, but when I try to add additional voltage using the provided percentages (3.3%, 6.6% etc.), ti does not boot. Am I jsut limited to 1.4v for the vcore?

 

[Noubourne]

Be careful with that voltage man. 1.4v x 6.6% is already 1.5v. If you select much of a higher percentage you could fry your chip pretty quick if you don't have good cooling. 8% should be 1.512, 1.4v x 10% would be 1.54.... no clue what your options are but to be safe try to stay at or below 10% overvolting of the 1.4v setting.

Carefully calculate the voltage you're selecting and try not to use higher than about 1.55 if you're on air.

Also, you should only be overvolting in response to an overclocking speed ceiling. As in you slowly increase your HTT up, eventually you'll get errors and the CPU won't let you boot in/run SuperPi/gives some other error, then you would increase voltage by .025 and try again to see if adding voltage buys you any higher clockspeed.

You DO NOT just increase voltage willy-nilly to see how much you can give it. That will just end up killing your chip. Only increase volts when you're trying to buy more Mhz out of your CPU.

 

[kman79]

Hey. I also have a AMD64 3700+, mine is at 2.75GHz. It'll go higher, but I didn't want to push her too hard.

I haven't OCed anything in a while, I've just set this and forgotten about it. From what I remember though, LDT/HT should be set closest to the product of 1000 by multiplying your FSB by the LDT. Exampl is if your running your FSB at 250, LDT should be set to 4. If your running it at 230, you could run it at 5.

If you need a higher FSB but your memory can't go higher, thats when you run a divider.

This is the post that helped me the most

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=28&threadid=1497607&enterthread=y

Good luck with it.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: GamingDaemon

Ok, so if lower the LDT/HT to 4x and the divider to 166 or 133, then I should be able to go above 203MHz for the HTT, right?

Also, my board lets me adjust up to 1.4v, but when I try to add additional voltage using the provided percentages (3.3%, 6.6% etc.), ti does not boot. Am I jsut limited to 1.4v for the vcore?

Yes

No, the problem is the voltage must match the mhz, to much vcore with a lower mhz also causes no boot. Go as far as you can on stock vcore then once it becomes unstable, but up the vcore 1 notch at a time

 

[GamingDaemon]

I am wondering if I am just limited by my mobo (MSI K8N SLI-F) and memory (DDR400/PC3200). Because of the 1000MHz boundary, I would have to lower the HT to 4x, and also the memory speed to 133 or 166 to compensate for the higher HTT values (> 230MHz). Therefore, when I boost my CPU speed, I must also lower my memory speed.

Therefore, is my PC, as a whole, any faster?? I'm just not sure...

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: GamingDaemon
I am wondering if I am just limited by my mobo (MSI K8N SLI-F) and memory (DDR400/PC3200). Because of the 1000MHz boundary, I would have to lower the HT to 4x, and also the memory speed to 133 or 166 to compensate for the higher HTT values (> 230MHz). Therefore, when I boost my CPU speed, I must also lower my memory speed.

Therefore, is my PC, as a whole, any faster?? I'm just not sure...

Yes it will be faster. Memory speed on A64's mean almost nothing, and HT speed means even less, CPU speed is king. For example 2.4ghz with mem @ 150mhz(DDR300) will easily beat 2.2ghz with mem @ 200mhz(DDR400) in everything except sythetic memory bandwidth benchmarks

I will add however; Overclocking the CPU will improve FPS in gaming very little, video card is everything in gaming. But for CPU intense apps like video editing/encoding/rendering and scientific apps, overclocking helps alot

 

[Bobthelost]

CPU is king, with a64 chips dropping the memory speed a bit makes far less than increasing the clock speed.

But if you want to test it then it's easy enough to do, get DVD shrink, find a movie and then time how long it takes to compress it using each setting, go with the faster of the two.

 

[GamingDaemon]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy

Yes it will be faster. Memory speed on A64's mean almost nothing, and HT speed means even less, CPU speed is king. For example 2.4ghz with mem @ 150mhz(DDR300) will easily beat 2.2ghz with mem @ 200mhz(DDR400) in everything except sythetic memory bandwidth benchmarks

I will add however; Overclocking the CPU will improve FPS in gaming very little, video card is everything in gaming. But for CPU intense apps like video editing/encoding/rendering and scientific apps, overclocking helps alot

Interesting. Well, I just used the eVGA Step-Up program to go from a nVidia 7600GT to the 7900GT KO. Given the following:

• Your comments about video cards being everything
• I use this PC just for gaming not video editing
• I just bought Oblivion

Maybe I should just use stock settings (READ: stable settings), forget about overclocking, sit back and enjoy

On the other hand, I am obsessed with overclocking -- it seems like such fun. Sighhhh.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

I agree, overclocking is addicting and very fun. I overclocked the heck out of my rig the first couple of months and was always tweaking the settings and running benches. After I got bored with it, I turned it down to a very modest overclock and haven't touched it since