playing with AMD overclock setups

[slag]

My 2800+ was giving me some errors, so I lowered it down to 2394 mhz (9x266 mhz).
I think it may have been software related though, so I reloaded XP and will try higher tonight.

I went to microcenter yesterday and bought a chaintech znf3-250 ve board and 3100 sempron. I got the sempron up to 270 FSB, but only on cold boot. I took the board out last night and removed the southbridge chipset cooler. It was barely making contact and was passive, so I used a socket 7 cooler and fan on the chipset and attached it with arctic silver adhesive. Will try for higher speeds tonight. I bought the combo because I received a $100.00 rebate when I got my credit card there yesterday.

The stock southbridge heatsink was literally warped enough so that all of the thermal goop was still on the southbridge chip and only 4 little spots were on the heatsink where it was touching the southbridge chip. I fixed this on the Chaintech board and will check it on my Epox board tonight as well.

I'm using some corsair pc3500 BH-5 memory for this test. I have a 512 mb stick in each pc.

I'm using a venus 12 heatsink with the 2800+ and the stock cooler with the sempron. The cooler really never gets hot on either, but the thermometer on the sempron shows 46 degrees at idle whereas the 2800+ shows 31 degrees at idle.

 

[jbh129]

did the board boot with the 3100+ on the original bios? I picked up the same combo and am worried about it working

 

[slag]

The original bios on mine was 07-29-04 and so far its been the best overclocking bios as well.

To answer your question, yes, it picked up the sempron also

The chaintech board has much, much tighter voltages than my epox, even with my epox being a revision 2.2.

 

[jbh129]

Please keep me updated on your impressions and results as this is my first build and my first try at overclocking.

 

[slag]

Ok, so I played around with my sempron tonight

To recap, here is my hardware:

1x512 Corsair PC3500 BH-5 memory

Super Flower 550 watt power supply

80 gig, 8 mb cache WD hard drive

Chaintech VNF3-250 VE board

Retail Sempron 3100+

Stock AMD heatsink/fan

Here's where I am at now 100% stable. Bios shows 1.65 volts, Sandra shows 1.7. I think its closer to 1.66 or so

STABLE

Pretty nice for a cheap chip and board. It feels so much faster than my p4 @ 3.25 ghz ever did. I only have 1 agp card in the house and its in my 2800+ box, but I'm going to swap it in here sometime soon to check out some games.

few more pics..

This is a screenshot slightly slower than above, but the speed difference is very very minimal

sandra

EDIT: added another pic... Also wanted to add that the stock southbridge cooler went bye bye. It wasn't working at all since it was warped. I replaced it with an active cooled socket a low profile cooler with fan and it made all the diff in the world. Prior to my replacing the southbridge cooler, sometimes it would boot up at 265 mhz fsb, sometimes not. After I replaced it, it ALWAYS boots up to the current FSB of 278 mhz. I'm somewhat scared to try 279 mhz

CPU-Z

 

[jbh129]

thanks. could you explain what parts I would need to replace the southbridge cooler and a simple walkthrough? Also, I bought some corsair xms pc3200. Should I keep it or upgrade to pc4000?

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: slag
Prior to my replacing the southbridge cooler, sometimes it would boot up at 265 mhz fsb, sometimes not. After I replaced it, it ALWAYS boots up to the current FSB of 278 mhz. I'm somewhat scared to try 279 mhz

That's odd. I find it gets scared to boot when the CPU or RAM are close to their limits. I'm running right now at 8x305 MHz (so I can get ~200 MHz RAM by running it 2:3... I wish I had BH5, but I'm a cheap bastard I'll take the performance hit when I'm only paying $120 for a gig) and it boots every time there. Runs stable Prime95, even with the stock heatsink on the bridge chip. Kinda wierd that yours would have boot issues at 265 MHz when mine is fine at 300+ MHz. I mean, I know there is variability in clock speeds, but that much of a gap seems a bit large.

 

[slag]

I took a pic of my southbridge cooler after I took it off. I'll post the pic tonight. There is literally only a few contact points on it of thermal grease. It was very hot to the touch also. The cooler I put on it doesn't even get warm now.

 

[Concillian]

Am I correct in assuming the title should read vnf instead of znf?

 

[jbh129]

what is a good replacement cooler and fan for a southbridge? do regular cpu cooler/fans work?

 

[slag]

Yes. I bought a $4.99 low end AMD socket A cooler with fan and had to dremel just a a small bit away to miss a clock crystal, and it works very well.

 

[jbh129]

I got my system set up last night and ran into a problem. I cannot get the onboard audio to work and I am also getting post code 96 when my system starts. Other than the sound it works fine. I havent connected the included sound card. Could not doing this cause a problem? Also, does anyone know what 96 means? The book is no help to me as it says build MPS. Not a very user-friendly instruction manual. Any help much appreciated.

 

[jbh129]

I am currently running at 300x8 for a 2400 cpu speed. My memory is still at 200 as I havent had time to OC it yet. I am getting about 60 degrees C under load with 1.6vcore. Is this a reasonable temp?