Winchester OC Help!

[Elfear]

I'm getting a little frustrated with my unstable ocs. I think it may be the board and the ram not playing nice. I can run it at 2.53Ghz (230x11) but every once-in-awhile my rig crashes while playing HL2. I tried lowering the multiplier to x9 and raising the FSB to 260 with no luck, even after I loosen the ram timing to 3-3-3-10. It doesn't even get into WinXP at those settings. I've been told that the AV8 has a built-in AGP/PCI lock but I'm not sure if its working. I tried setting my AGP/PCI to 7:2:1 (235/68/34) but it still crashes.

I've tried everything I can think of in the bios settings (fast writes, Vlink, AGP transfer rate, AGP calibration, etc) but nothing really helps. I raised my voltages to 1.5 on the Vcore, 2.8 on the Vdimm, and +1 setting on everything else except agp.

Do you think I just have a crummy board and I need to go with an MSI Neo2 Plat.? Or am I just missing something here? This is the second set off ram I've tried, the first being a gig of OCZ PC3500 EB and I really don't feel like buying another to be compatible with this board. Any thoughts?

 

[Icepick]

Try running your RAM at 2T instead of 1T. Make sure HT is set to 4x when your FSB is under 250, 3x when the FSB is over 250.

 

[Elfear]

I tried both of those suggestions and it's still tempermental. How do you like your Neo2?

 

[alexXx]

did you set your ram to run lower? you dont need ram running @ 230mhz on an a64 system

 

[CheesePoofs]

Have you tried running prime95 or some other torture test? I'd try that at your OC, and if it crashes try it again at the stock settings. If it crashes at stock too try running memtest and see if it actually is the mem.

If your having ram problems, it could be because of the CPU, becuase the A64's have the mem controller on the proc. I built an A64 computer for a friend he was having weird problems that could only really be ram related, but new ram didn't help. we rma'd the cpu and now it works great.

Anyways, good luck on getting that going.

 

[Elfear]

How do I set my ram lower? Do I change that in the Advanced Chipset Options under dram settings?

I tried running Prime95 under both a blend torture test and the small FFT test. Both crashed in a few minutes when oced to 2.53GHz. I haven't tried it at stock for any length of time so maybe I'll try that. I'll give memtest a go too.

 

[CheesePoofs]

You should definately run prime95 at stock, because if its not stable at stock, then your parts (probably just cpu) are bad and need to be replaced.

 

[Icepick]

Originally posted by: Elfear
I tried both of those suggestions and it's still tempermental. How do you like your Neo2?

I love this motheboard. The only thing I would change about it is the active cooling fan over the chipset. I'd rather have a silent heatsink there.

How do I set my ram lower? Do I change that in the Advanced Chipset Options under dram settings?

In BIOS enter the DRAM settings area. Change the divider from 200 (1:1) to 166 (5:4).

 

[Sparky19692]

To change Ram go to "advanced" the the first one can't think of the name I'm at work anyway after that memory look for lock should be the second one down set it to limit. then change the limit to ddr333.

 

[superkdogg]

Make sure you have bios 1.4(?) [double-check me on that] and the lock should be working. Mine lock is on the same board. Don't use the ratios for overclocking, stick with the fixed setting. The memory setting you're looking for is under Advanced Chipset/Memory or something like that. Change it to 333. Are you sure that you changed the HT setting to 3 or 4x? Don't mean to be insulting, but at the point of you system hangup that's a likely culprit-plus Abit calls it like LDT or something stupid like that.

 

[Elfear]

I ran Prime95 for a few hours with no errors at stock (204MHz fsb for the Abit). The ram passed all 7 tests 3 times when I ran memtest.

I'm using the 1.7 bios.

I did double check that I've been changing the right thing for the Hypertransport and it is the LDT Bus Frequency that I'm changing.

I can try and change to ddr333, but shouldn't ballistix be able to handle a 260MHz fsb let alone a 230MHz fsb?

 

[CheesePoofs]

when you are overclocked, try lowering the ram to 200mhz (ddr400) and see if it passes all of those tests.

 

[Elfear]

I'll try running Prime95 at 200Mhz. Which test should I run; small fft, large fft, or blend?

 

[zakee00]

blend, for at least 5 hours. 8 is good.

 

[Elfear]

Ok, well i did a little more testing and tried to narrow down where the bottleneck is. I lowered ldt to x3 and the ram to ddr266. I was able to run a 275 fsb (ldt freq.) under Prime95 at stock voltage.

I then raised the ram back up to ddr400, set the fsb to 230, ldt at x4, multiplier at x8, and stock voltages. It was stable at this speed but when I tried raising it to 235 fsb, prime95 fails after a few minutes. I tried raising the vdimm voltage up to it's max with no change in stability. I tried loosening the ram timings to 2.5-3-3-10 and 3-4-4-10 but to no avail.

So is my ram the problem? I read very good reviews on this ram so I'm a little disappointed that it's kind of a turd. I have some PC3200 HyperX that I can try but I know it's not as fast as Ballistix is supposed to be so I'm a little hesitant.