Propus examined

[blackhawk]

got the 620 in an asus matx mb and only upped the fsb to 210, so confusing back with amd now to get them stable

my two BE 4 cores both overclock well though for me, stability most important

 

[planes12]

Yeah I meant northbridge.

Using a beta BIOS for my mobo, my top CPU overclock was 3.85 ghz, but that was with NB and RAM not overclocked much at all. Overclocking all three, I am sort of limited to either 3.8 ghz or 3.75 ghz depending on how stable I want to be and how much voltage I want to pump through the chip.

Given your temps, yeah, you may be at your limit. I don't know what OC features your board has so it's a little hard for me to give you additional advice on how to stabilize your system at 3.7.

Do you have the option to change your CPU-NB or NB voltages, and can you change your NB multiplier? The default multiplier should be 10x for this chip.

Hey sorry for the delay getting back to you. I thought I laid down a post here but I dont see it. 3.8 would be great.
3.7 would fine too. Really, Just doing this for kicks and giggles because 3.5 is pretty good and really my next upgrade will
be to a SSD. My W7 for cpu is 7.4 and HD is 5.9. SO what does that say.

AMD Athlon II X4 630
Windows 7 (Build 7600)
CPU Arch : 1 CPU - 4 Cores - 4 Threads
CPU PSN : AMD Athlon II X4 630 Processor
CPU EXT : MMX(+), 3DNow!(+), SSE (1, 2, 3, 4A), x86-64, AMD-V
CPUID : F.5.2 / Extended : 10.5
CPU Cache : L1 : 4 x 64 / 4 x 64 KB - L2 : 4 x 512 KB
Core : Propus (45 nm) / Stepping : BL-C2
Freq : 3500.16 MHz (250.01 * 14)

MB Brand : Gigabyte
MB Model : GA-MA78LM-S2H
NB : AMD 780G rev 00
SB : AMD ID439D rev 00

GPU Type : NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM v1.1)
DirectX Version : 11.0

RAM : 4096 MB DDR2 Dual Channel
RAM Speed : 416.7 MHz (3:5) @ 5-5-5-15
Slot 1 : 2048MB (6400)
Slot 1 Manufacturer : Corsair
Slot 2 : 2048MB (6400)
Slot 2 Manufacturer : Corsair

 

[DrMrLordX]

Hey sorry for the delay getting back to you. I thought I laid down a post here but I dont see it. 3.8 would be great.
3.7 would fine too. Really, Just doing this for kicks and giggles because 3.5 is pretty good and really my next upgrade will
be to a SSD. My W7 for cpu is 7.4 and HD is 5.9. SO what does that say.

So how hot does your CPU run at 100% load at 3.5 ghz? And does your motherboard's BIOS support the following voltage adjustments?

CPU-NB
NB

Also, what vcore are you using to keep the chip stable at 3.5 ghz?

 

[planes12]

50 degrees. Yes it does

 

[DrMrLordX]

Okay, to get my chip stable, I pretty much had to keep it below 52C or it gets stupid. Cinebench R11.5 was so heat-sensitive on this chip that I actually had to lower vcore at speeds of 3.7 and higher to get it to run (and if I did that, other apps became unstable).

Heat really seems to bother these chips.

My guess is is that your chip is going to bug out if you let temps get much higher. It *should* be safe to run it at temps up to 72C, but there's no guarantee that it will want to be stable while you're doing it.

Have you tried overclocking your NB yet? If you dropped the NB multi to leave it near 2 ghz, NB and CPU-NB voltages won't help you stabilize your system. That's only if you're trying to OC the NB and the cores at the same time. You probably shouldn't go past 1.3v on either setting.

 

[planes12]

Okay, to get my chip stable, I pretty much had to keep it below 52C or it gets stupid. Cinebench R11.5 was so heat-sensitive on this chip that I actually had to lower vcore at speeds of 3.7 and higher to get it to run (and if I did that, other apps became unstable).

Heat really seems to bother these chips.

My guess is is that your chip is going to bug out if you let temps get much higher. It *should* be safe to run it at temps up to 72C, but there's no guarantee that it will want to be stable while you're doing it.

Have you tried overclocking your NB yet? If you dropped the NB multi to leave it near 2 ghz, NB and CPU-NB voltages won't help you stabilize your system. That's only if you're trying to OC the NB and the cores at the same time. You probably shouldn't go past 1.3v on either setting.

thanks. Ill see what I get and let you know.

 

[planes12]

Well I did try 255 X14 3.6 and it seems to like this speed as well.

Ran full load for about 20 minutes and it also seems to love 50c for temps too.

Not sure how to change NB or any other setting but 3.6 is better.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Well I did try 255 X14 3.6 and it seems to like this speed as well.

Ran full load for about 20 minutes and it also seems to love 50c for temps too.

Not sure how to change NB or any other setting but 3.6 is better.

Hey, 100 extra mhz is nothing to snort at. There should be an NB multiplier in your BIOS.

 

[planes12]

Hey, 100 extra mhz is nothing to snort at. There should be an NB multiplier in your BIOS.

There is but it shows x5 x10 and similar not sure what that means

 

[DrMrLordX]

Okay, the Northbridge has a speed equal to the multiplier times the HTT. 10x should be the default.

If you have 200 HTT and an NB multiplier of 10x, then your NB speed is 2000 mhz (2 ghz).

What is your current HTT speed, and what is your current NB multiplier? That will tell you how fast you are running your NB.

 

[planes12]

How fast should the NB run?

Had to scale back to 3.5 as 3.6 showed errors.

Funny though. After I went back to 3.5 the temps didnt go above 43c after five hours of prime which is weird because before it was around 5oc.

I used quite a bit of ceramic paste on the Hyper 212. Maybe it needed time to set right?

 

[DrMrLordX]

It is possible that your paste cured some, though ceramic pastes usually only take 12-25 hours to cure (at least based on how long AS Ceramique takes to cure). You may be experiencing changes in ambient as well.

That being said, 43C is a pretty damn good temp.

Okay, based on your previous posts, if you were using the 14x cpu multi and you've scaled down to 3.5 ghz, then your current NB speed should be 2.5 ghz. Not bad!

Okay, here's what you need to do.

You need to use the "isolate and consolidate" system that Zebo devised back in the old A64/X2 days. What you're going to do is try to slow down every part of your system but one thing (CPU, RAM, NB) and see how fast you can get that one thing to run. Generally speaking, the first thing to test is the cores, and you can isolate that by lowering your NB multiplier some (try 7x) and your RAM multiplier (not sure how the multipliers are listed in your BIOS, but the lowest multiplier I could use on my system was 1:2.66 . . . 1:2 crashes no matter what). Set your CPU to its highest multiplier (in your case, 14).

Then keep pushing htt speed higher and higher until you can no longer get your CPU stable. Set your vcore to whatever speed you were using to reach 3.6 ghz (you are setting vcore manually, no?). Or you can use something like 1.45v to 1.5v or whatever keeps your temps at 50c or lower.

I use prime95 blend for CPU stability (and NB/RAM stability, see below).

After that, it's time to isolate your maximum NB speed. Run your CPU at a low multiplier (10x is a good one) and your NB at its maximum multiplier (10x). Keep your RAM slow (and you may want to loosen timings on it . . . 10-10-10-28 2T is good). Set CPU-NB and NB to 1.3v (you can go higher, but that's about as high as you should go really) to make sure that voltage isn't a problem, and just to be on the safe side, make sure to run a bit of extra voltage through your CPU (I used 1.37v for NB/RAM isolation). If your chip is anything like mine, you may be able to run your NB as high as 2.9 ghz (10x, 290 HTT), but there are no guarantees. Then increase HTT speed . . . now, I don't know how you are testing stability for your cores, but I used Prime95 Blend and it seemed to do a good job of stressing everything on this chip. Unstable cores would cause a bluescreen and a reboot, while unstable RAM/NB would cause Prime95 to error on one or more threads without a bluescreen. Anyway, try to find the maximum NB speed at which your system will still boot, and then see if you can run Prime95 Blend. Just do 5 minute tests until something errors, then back HTT off a bit and try to get it to run for 24 hours straight.

We'll worry about RAM later.

If you haven't been setting your voltages manually, now would be a good time to mention that.

 

[planes12]

Thanks for taking the time to explain. This will take a me a few days to dig into but I will post results when I do. And no I didn't set manual voltage but will.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Thanks for taking the time to explain. This will take a me a few days to dig into but I will post results when I do. And no I didn't set manual voltage but will.

Okay, cool.

And that would explain your temp decrease when dropping clockspeeds. If you are using some kind of auto-overclock feature, the board is going to push your vcore up as you increase core clockspeed.

Setting voltages manually is highly recommended.

 

[nyker96]

sorry just want to plug for my x4 620 which I love so much. It's a nice little chip that by most benches runs like Q6600 or +-10% to it in various benchmarks. great for most virtual machine/compilation/h264 encoding/web browsing work I through at it. for $100 just can't beat it.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Nothing wrong with that. Propus is currently the cheapest path to four physical cores. Things will change soon . . . but Propus will have fulfilled its purpose.

 

[planes12]

IMHO Propus is the best ptp chip of the last 10 years. But soon we will have a 6 core from AMD which will drop right in our AM2/3 chipsets.
The 620 for 88 bucks and just think a year ago the Q6600 was a couple hundred bucks.

 

[Dadofamunky]

New member here. hope you dont mind me chiming in. Microcenter had a deal I couldn't pass up. Propus 630 and a GB MB for 106 after 10$ rebate. Basically, the MB was free.
Just finished OCing and have it at 3.5 GHZ.

It would not pass Prime with anything but the voltage at about 1.465 which is the setting the MB put it at. RIght now i have the memory under clocked to 667.

I think its pretty impressive for a 99$ cpu.

Gads, you just can't go wrong with a deal like that! MicroCenter is teh awesome (at least the one near me is).