Overclocking log

L31mr0d

Been itching to get overclocking on my new system for a while. Will post benchmarks and results as I go along.

Here is my 3Dmark06 score at stock voltages and default BIOS settings.



My system specs are:
Enermax Liberty 400w
2 x WD Caviar 250GB SATA2 16MB
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diago
Asus A8N-SLI
TwinMOS PC3200 1024MB
BFG NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI-E

Here is my Sis sandra stock results:

awhir

good idea for a sticky.

Dooom

I remember back when I overclocked my whole system, at current the 55's at 2.8 stable as hell (air), GTX's 35% oc'd, RAM's running at bouts 450mhz.
But I just ran out of things to do after that. It's been quite a while since I've run any benchies aswell.

I may get money to get this new system soon...X2 4800 + X1900XT + some fancy RAM + watercooling = fun again.

Btw, Benchies!

B00MSTICK

What are you waiting for? Clock that sucker!

L31mr0d

The 6800 Ultra i'm running at 400Mhz core & 1300Mhz memory. Thats about the best i'm going to get out of it at stock cooling as I seem to be getting artifacts going anywhere beyond that.

The first increase i made was to just do a conservative increase of the HTT from 200 to 220 just to seem if my system temps would shoot up. No real technical reason for this, just getting a feel for how the system's going to respond to being overclocked. I'm running stock cooling on the AMD and i have 2x80mm intake fans, a 92mm exhaust fan and a 120mm exhaust fan on the PSU, plus a side 80mm fan blowing air onto the cpu fan and mobo.

Here are the changes:
HTT Multi.: 4
vcore: 1.45
HTT: 220Mhz
CPU Multi.: 11
RAM Divider: 1:1

and here are the benchmark screenshots, I ran OCCT to test stability of this change, at full load the temperature hit 40'c-42'c, and idled at 31'c

L31mr0d

Next I wanted to find the limiting clock of my RAM.

Here are the changes:
HTT Multi.: 3
vcore: 1.45
HTT: 230Mhz
CPU Multi.: 8
RAM Divider: 1:1
RAM Core: 2.6v
RAM Timings: 2.5-3-3-11 2T

So as to not let the CPU limit the RAM i underclocked it. I hit the ceiling at 460DDR, any past this and i was getting BSODs all over the place. So i left it at 460DDR which showed no errors in memtest after 10hrs.

I tried tightning the timings to 2-3-3-11 2T and this was also giving me BSODs so I settled that this was my bog standard, TwinMOS RAMs limit.

I then wanted to test the CPU at a HTT of 230Mhz.

Here are the changes:
HTT Multi.: 4
vcore: 1.45
HTT: 230Mhz
CPU Multi.: 11
RAM Divider: 1:1

This gave me a CPU Freq of 2530Mhz, a HTT of 920Mhz and the RAM at its limit of 460DDR.

B00MSTICK

Whats your RAM voltage? 2T is nasty

L31mr0d

Ok I was going to increase incrementally, but i'm a bit of an impatient overclocker (this is a day of overclocking and stress testing, i hope to be at my systems limit by tomorrow )

I had planned to test my system at 2.6Ghz, but as the system wasn't showing much, if any temperature spikes at 2.5Ghz, i went to 2.7Ghz

Here are the changes:
HTT Multi.: 3
vcore: 1.5
HTT: 270Mhz
CPU Multi.: 10
RAM Divider: 5:6 DDR333 (for my system DDR450) a drop of 5Mhz but...
RAM Timings: 2.5-3-3-11 1T :eek: ... I went for 1T
RAM Core: 2.65v (i don't even know if that extra .05v will make a difference)


I ran memtest86, test 5, 6 and 8 for 20 passes each (from reading around these seem to be the most relevant stress tests for errors) No errors. I then ran OCCT, no errors. During OCCT the system at full load hit around 47'c. I promised myself i wouldn't venture much past 50'c on a 90nm core, so i was glad it settled at that. At idle it sits nicely at 39'c.

My only worry with these changes was the 1T setting on the RAM, before my system would randomly restart itself, spewing out some spurious errors in the log, i assumed it was my RAM set at 1T so I changed it bacl to 2T just to be safe. But it passed all the tests this time, so it might of been something else that remains to be seen.

Here are the screenshots, i'll run 3Dmark06 tomorrow to see what improvement there has been. I'll probably leave my system at 2.7Ghz for a while, at least until i get a better cooling setup for the CPU. I'll but a table together of the benchmark improvements. I'm actually amazed at the improvement 1T gave me. At present settings my RAM is shifting an extra 2000MB/s over the stock settings.

conzy

Nice overclocks so far;)

1T kicks ass:D

You got a nice San diego like mine;) Mine does 2.8ghz at 1.42vcore and now I am at 3ghz at 1.47:)

What stepping is the CPU?

awhir

conzymaher wrote:

Nice overclocks so far;)

1T kicks ass:D

You got a nice San diego like mine;) Mine does 2.8ghz at 1.42vcore and now I am at 3ghz at 1.47:)

What stepping is the CPU?

your at 3ghz with that cooler never new it was so good.

conzy

Yup;)

Its the low vcore, 40 degrees full load.

Now if it was at 1.6vcore it would be a very different story:D

And there is still alot of Ocing left in him, I might try for 3.2ghz soon

L31mr0d

I'm not really sure what you mean by stepping? It has a stepping of 1 in my CPU-Z screenshot, and a revision of SH-E4 (wtf?) I don't understand what this is actually telling me, i thought these where just revisions made when bugs where found with this particular type of CPU. What relevance does it have to overclocking?

I found this document on AMDs website, but its obscure as to what exactly the codes mean

Here is my 3Dmark06 score, oh yeah, an overclock of about 20% on my CPU and an increase in performance of my RAM of 50% and I get an extra 250points in 3Dmark, i thought at least i'd break the 3000 mark, ah well.

conzy

3d MArk isnt really good indication of CPU improvement.

The CPU score is ignored in the results, and the only reason the score increased is becasue it helped out the GFX card a bit more.

The CPU revision is, well the revisions that were made to it:D The new venices are E6 where as the slightly older ones were E4

The stepping of the CPU is like its date of birth, mine is KAB2E and i dont know what week it was made.

They sought after Opteron stepping is CAB2E........

Anyway, Aquamark3 is a dated benchmark, but gives a seperate CPU and GFX score and it will show better improvements

L31mr0d

but is there a reason to take the stepping into consideration when OC'ing? I think the only reason the 3Dmark score for my graphics card went up was because i was clocking it at 425 core and 1200 memory

conzy

No, Its just like Wine:D <(Bad example:o )

Some revisions / steppings are better than others:D

Your one seems good

gline

1st thing.... i'd say u need a better Psu
also i have an opteron 144 coming up soon (rma from amd ).. pm me if your interested in testing b4 u buy (should be seeing 2.8ghz+ on stocking cooling)

u used prime95 for 8-12 hours for finding max overclock yet??

gline

L31mr0d wrote:

but is there a reason to take the stepping into consideration when OC'ing? I think the only reason the 3Dmark score for my graphics card went up was because i was clocking it at 425 core and 1200 memory

yes stepping usually determines how much you can OC
also i'd agree... mainly the reason for the increase in score is the gfx oc
time to get WC or artic cooler

conzy

1st thing.... i'd say u need a better Psu

He just bought a 400watt enermax Liberty with 2 20amp 12v rails, His PSU is not at fault

conzy

Whats wrong with 2.7ghz?:D

Did you find your Max OC yet?

And what cooling are you using

L31mr0d

I lowered the vcore to 1.43 and my load temp dropped 5'c. At full load it hits around 43'c. I'm going to try 2.8Ghz probably today and see if it remains stable. I'm using stock cooling and a few extra fans in the system. They must be working since my system temperature rises a few degrees when i turn their speed down.

I'm not interested in a new CPU just yet, ive only had this one a few months. Maybe if I push this one too far i'll give you a shout. I haven't hit this CPUs limit yet, I just like to leave a few days between overclocks to make sure the temperature stays stable

I found this linke as well: Athlon 64 OC Optimizer it's pretty basic, but it saves a few seconds doing the calculations myself.

BabyEater

Thats not a bad chip you have there my Opteron 144 will only do 2.9GHz at 1.74 volts so it really is the luck of thje draw you could get a new chip and it might suck

conzy

1.74volts:eek: :eek:

Thats Lethal, I hope you dont run it 24/7 at that voltage:(

BabyEater

well thats just testin at the minute to see what i can get. I am using a water chiller with coolant temp at -10 at the moment it can go colder ( probably around -18 is the coldest i have seen). On normal water it done 2.75 GHz at about 1.6Volts not positive as i cant really remember, but any more than 2.75 required a big voltage jump.

L31mr0d

Yeah like you said, luck of the draw. I'm surprised myself. The RAM has been the biggest surprise though, can't believe the performance i'm getting out of bog standard RAM. The temps have shown little or no sizeable increase, so i'm thinking a few 4000+'s slip through and get marked down as 3800+ and 3700+. I wonder what the cut off point is? If its performance or temperature of the chip?

L31mr0d

Ok I think I might be reaching the limit of my CPU now. I tried out a few settings today, and the first 2 either wouldn't boot or would lock up my screen when running OCCT.

I tried settings of:
260 x 11 = 2860Mhz
HTT x 3
RAM Divider: 5:6 (DDR432) ... the system crashed after 10 minutes

then tried:
281x10 = 2810Mhz
HTT x 3
RAM Divider: 3:4 (DDR402) ... would boot only every few times

so i'm presently at:
312 x 9 = 2808Mhz
HTT x 3
RAM Divider = 2:3 (DDR401) ... which lasted OCCT and has been running on my system for about 2 hours.

Do you think I should drop back to 2.7Ghz, which was allowing me to get DDR450 on the RAM, would the extra 100Mhz CPU speed make up for the loss in speed on the RAM?

BTW my system temps are at 39'c - 41'c idle with these settings.

Would the drop of only 2Mhz from clocking at 2810 to 2808 have really added that extra stability? I'm not really sure why the CPU is working at 2808 and not at 2810?

awhir

god you can get 2.8 with that ram your o lucky.

L31mr0d

What? no i'm getting 2.8Ghz with my CPU... the max i can get out of my RAM is DDR460 at 2.5-3-3-11 1T.

awhir

i think 2.8 or 2.7 is well enough for now dont go any further and melt your cpu with the stock cooler.

conzy

Leave it at 2.8ghz with the slightly lower ram speed.

CPU speed is most Important and DDR450 isnt anything to brag about:D

2.8ghz and stock ram would be best IMO;)

L31mr0d

Just wondering. What BIOS setting would affect the temperature of the chipset on the mobo. I mean it has a fan on it so i'm guessing it suffers from heat, but is there anyway of overclocking it? I'm not really sure what it does, as i assumed it was the northbridge until i was told the northbridge is now on the die (doh!)

conzy

The Northbridge is not on the die, just the memory Controller which used to be on the northbridge.

Its the chipset that determines the overclockability of the board, the harder you OC the more strain there is on the Chipset and it gets hotter,You can increase voltage to help it out just like CPU overclocking, but I have never wanted/needed to do it.

Once its below ~50 on am Nforce 4 chipset it will be fine.

Also just to confuse you a little more, in Nforce 4 motherboards the Southbridge and the northbridge are in the Chipset:D

gline

up the voltage on the chipset to help OC your system

L31mr0d

do you have to physically mod the mobo to up the chipset voltage?

conzy

No, there is an option in my the BIOS on my DFI anyway to up voltage up to 1.8volts, 1.5 is stock I think.

What board do you have? I cant remember:o