help getting 3800x2 past 2.35ghz

ocukcustomer · 24 Mar 2006 at 14:25

Edit: done! see below...

Hi,

After reading every guide I have come across, I need to accept that I'm now out of my league and need to ask help from the masters.
I have ballistix memory at relaxed timings. My motherboard is Asus A8N-E.

My settings in the bios are as follows:

Ram clocked at 333mhz
HT at 4x
CPU at 235mhz
Vcore at auto (whatever that is).

Here's the story: I am able to get up to 235mhz using the above settings and things are pretty stable with temps at 40C under load. One core is doing prime torture and the other core is doing superpi, I'm taxing it and it's all good.

BUT.... when I tried to raise the CPU to 1.4v I got to windows but after torture test it hung. I tried 1.45 and it would not post properly and told me to go back into the bios (polite motherboard isn't it?)

What do you think the problem is? Any advice for getting past 2.35ghz?

KillBoY_UK · 24 Mar 2006 at 17:34

it took me 1.5 v to get into the 2.4ghz levels and 1.6v to get my cpus limit of 2.55ghz on watercooling(one more 1mhz makes it unstable and i don't want to rase the voltage higher) on my old Xp-120 heatsink 2.35ghz was my old limit with 1.4v temps were in the low 60's with both cores maxed out , overall u seem to have a crap stepping like me , do you have to steping numbers to hand

BruceLee · 24 Mar 2006 at 17:42

I know my 3800 would run fine at 2.5 on 1.4ish volts, but running two instances of prime or super pi would give errors on one core.

Vcore is the voltage for your cpu, i would suggest you raise it a bit to 1.45 or something.

Also your mem should be able to run faster than that.

Also check your PCIE/AGP/PCI locks are on, as in running in async mode.

ocukcustomer · 24 Mar 2006 at 17:56

Yo,

Thank you for all your input.

Managed to obliterate the barrier! Damn this is addictive... we are talking faster than 4800x2 speeds for tiny money!

Here's the stable (been torturing both cores all day) results:

Memory: 416mhz, with timings of 2.5-3-3-8
CPU: 2.5GHZ
Vcore is 1.4
Core: Toledo

To achieve these overclocks, I set the memory to 333 in the bios and HT to 4x. Of course I had to use memtester86+ a few times to find a happy ground for the memory.

My routine was as follows: underclock the memory so it isn't a factor... set HT at 4x, then go up by 10mhz each time for the cpu till I reached my target of 2.5ghz. This is a Bus speed of 1000mhz, which is ideal. I then clocked the ballistix ram as tight as I could, and the final speed of the ram is 208mhz (416 DDR).

Lovely stuff... gives a sweet superpi 1 million of 33 seconds.

Nearly forgot: Temps are 35 ish idle and 47ish when both cores are tortured, however if you torture both cores AND run 3Dmark, you will be adding heat from the graphics card, and in this case (x800XT) it reaches an all time high temp of 52C.

Mobo between 31C and 35C.
I posted more detail in the official thread for overclocking 3800x2.