P4 3.0. How high on air?

unkel

Had my P4c 3.0 @250FSB for a while on my Abit AI7 (865) mobo with a matched pair of GEIL PC4000 2.5,4,4,7 and a matched pair of OCZ EL PC4200 2.5,4,4,7 with Zalman 7000CU and Zalman heatpipe on 9600 pro in Thermaltake Xaser III Lanfire with Zalman 400W PSU, audigy2, Philips DVD+RW, Optorite CDRW, 2*Samsung 160GB SATA in RAID0

Had some stability issues, one of them was a regular freeze-up when booting into xp pro, so switched down to 230FSB. That made the freeze-up less frequent but still occurring - even @ stock 200FSB they occurred. Found out a few weeks ago that applying very latest drivers for my audigy2 solved the issue. Need to find some time do get back into overclocking it a bit more

From several forums and reviews I've found that my mobo is most likely to be my bottleneck. It looks like half of them seem to do near 300FSB and half are stuck on or slightly under 250FSB. Mind that's prolly the limit for my cpu as well

BTW temps are fine on light use with the Zalman on lowest setting and during prolonged heavy use with the Zalman on a medium to high settings with 3 casefans on minimum, 1 very quiet one on maximum and the Northbridge fan down from 5600 rpm to about 4000 rpm - noisy bugger

Adeptus Titanicus

Hey Unkel, glad you popped onto the thread. I had seen you had a good overclock on another thread a while back, but I couldn't find it again since I began my experiments. afair, the Asus will do up to 400, not that I'd ever get remotely near that, but it's reassuring.

Mine only seems to lock up once Prime gets going, so I really suspect the memory is limiting me when I go to 1:1. Might ask the Ram Guy on OCZ about timings at this FSB for the 3700...

I'd be interested in your results if you go and try again for the 250.

Re cooling, yeah, the Zalman does a great job doesn't it (as long as the fan is spinning ).

unkel

Originally posted by Adeptus
I have the RAM at 2.85, the max the mobo will allow. THe RAM is rated for 3.0 without invalidating the warrenty

That's a pity, it might have been possible to run your ram at 1:1 @3.0V. Mine is running at up to 500MHz, but it's rated for that, so no need for overclock really. My ram does not really like tight timings, get all sorts of problems with memtest, also stability is poor. Once you reach these speeds on a p4, the fsb (at 1:1) seems to help system performance a lot more than tightening the timings. This ain't the case on AMD! Most PC4000 memory and higher is actually rated cas3. I've seen a few posts on abit forums where people gained performace by actually slackening the times to 3,4,4,11. Haven't tried that yet

Had the vcore on 1.725V though. Have had it to 1.8V for a bit just to see what it did. Sure enough, increasing the voltage to the cpu will shorten it's life, but it's impossible to say by how much. It's likely it will not affect the economic life of the chip at all (cpu's being obsolete and virtually worthless after a few years). No risk of frying the cpu either as the p4 just slows down when it gets too hot

Originally posted by Adeptus
the Zalman does a great job doesn't it (as long as the fan is spinning ).

Had a shock experience a couple of months ago when I looked through the window of the case and noticed that the fan wasn't spinning :eek:

Had just messed with a cable in the case and must have accidentally pulled out the power connector from the mobo. It must have been off for about a minute :eek:
Needless to say I was very glad it didn't fry the chip. At the time I wasn't aware of the slow down technology built into the p4

leeroybrown

Had a shock experience a couple of months ago when I looked through the window of the case and noticed that the fan wasn't spinning

Something similar happened to a friend's Zalmann (Flower) with the overhead 92mm fan. A piece of cabling came loose and got caught in the fan blades stopping it completely. He has an AMD XP1600 and through sheer luck he was sitting in front of the PC and noticed that something was wrong. When he rebooted and checked the temperature in the BIOS it was through the roof. I've seen a P4 with a broken fan work fine for months with occasional poweroffs whenever it overheated but an Athlon surviving is pure luck.

unkel

Originally posted by leeroybrown
but an Athlon surviving is pure luck.

Indeed it is :eek:

I did touch the heatsink afterwards and it was very hot alright. Guess the 773 grams of cupper saved your m8

BTW I usually have the BIOS setting activated that the system shuts down when the CPU reaches a certain temp, usually 80 or 90 degrees

Adeptus Titanicus

Originally posted by unkel
BTW I usually have the BIOS setting activated that the system shuts down when the CPU reaches a certain temp, usually 80 or 90 degrees

Might start doing that myself, although the Aerogate sirens scare the **** out of ya when it hits 65. Talk about panic-inducing!

unkel

Originally posted by Adeptus
the Aerogate sirens scare the **** out of ya when it hits 65

Just set it to 80, you should normally not get this and if you do (prolly fan failing) it should scare ya

unkel

Did some prime 95 running last night. Got 12 hour stable, by the time I stopped it this morning, on 3.6GHz have to use 1.7V vcore and default memory timings. Had 3 out of 4 noisy case fans on quiet and also the NB HSF. Had to set Zalman 7000CU to full to cool the chipset + case. Not needed for cpu, but this way it is a lot quieter than using the case fans :eek:

It boots and runs fine in xp @3.8GHz, but prime 95 not stable, not even at 1.75V and 3dmark 2001 hangs at some point. Would slacken timings from 2.5,4,4,7 to 3,4,4,8 or 3.4.4.11 help?

Might try 250 again with a few different settings, or might try late 240s at some point, but don't like the noise already

Will probably let it sit back at 230, nice and quiet