Hopelessly out of my depth.....

Derek W

Derek W

Derek W

Soldato
Joined
1 Oct 2008
Posts
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Designing Buildings
Well here's the problem, I don't have a clue about overclocking.

I popped into the bios and set the clock to manual so i could alter the FSB and my mobo told me to put the cpu performance thing to standard rather than the turbo setting it has when the mobo was in control of everything. it also asked to put the voltages on automatic.

I corrected these and popped my FSB from 333 to 343.

The core temps raised up from low 30s to low 40s idle and rising up to 50s during load.

I thought this was a bit high but proceed to pop the FSB up to 360 so my clock speed would be a modest 3Ghz............................

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:eek::eek::eek:

At this point after changing my underwear i reverted back to fully automatic settings with the comfort of a throttled 2Ghz normal operating speed with a load at 2.83Ghz which is what my Q9550 should be at.

I'm lost about what voltage my cpu should be sitting at (fully auto VID at 1.2) while I'm tweaking the FSB, also theres something to do with a ram divider which I'm lost with as well.

In short..............................HELP!
 
For someone who doesn't hae a clue you're pretty close ;)

Take voltage off auto. It's designed to help, but it doesn't, and it can sometimes over volt your CPU.

Temp's will go up. Obviously, you want as low as possible. 80C at FULL load is tolerable, but a bit too high for me personally, and ideally you want below 70 for load, the lower the better. A chip will crash and shut off before it will actually overheat (USUALLY, don't rely on that for testing).
 
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D D Danneh said:
chip will crash and shut off before it will actually overheat (USUALLY, don't rely on that for testing).
Click to expand...

You should set your mobo to auto shut down by the time you are hitting those temps. It takes my mobo a couple of seconds to shut down nicely. I hear the beeps, then my hard drives shutting down, then the OS a second later. I regularly forget to turn on my water cooling, but have never lost data or had an OS error etc on restart after the mobo has shut down.
 
D D Danneh said:
For someone who doesn't hae a clue you're pretty close ;)

Take voltage off auto. It's designed to help, but it doesn't, and it can sometimes over volt your CPU.

Temp's will go up. Obviously, you want as low as possible. 80C at FULL load is tolerable, but a bit too high for me personally, and ideally you want below 70 for load, the lower the better. A chip will crash and shut off before it will actually overheat (USUALLY, don't rely on that for testing).
Click to expand...

JTrickle said:
The 1.55V in your screen shot is playing Russian roulette with your Q9550. Keep to 1.35 - 1.4 max.
Click to expand...

This is one of the things which I'm not sure about. I've seen in a few peoples sigs that they're using around 1.2 - 1.3v at whatever overclock. Do they just pull this voltage from nowhere? how do they know what voltages to use with what FSB and ram divider to get the system stable.

E.g when I'm running my standard system, the cpu is being throttled (which i can disable in BIOS with the EIST) the volts are around 1.16 from memory, and when i open in BIOS the vcore is around 1.23 volts.

Do i then take say 1.23v for my initial volts setting and play around with the FSB till i either need to give it a boost or can i reduce the voltage? :confused:

In relation to my temps, i recently got a new cooler (see sig) and http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17991670 and the temps looked not too bad under load just as it was without any overclocking I'm just trying to move on from out of the box speeds. I'm probably looking just to increase it up to 3.4 or 3.6 Ghz.
 
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The voltage required varies from CPU to CPU, one might do 3.6ghz on 1.25v, another might need 1.35.

For now I would set it to 1.3v and start clocking, if you get it to what you want without stability issues lower the voltage a little and then run Orthos again to test stability. If it's stable at the lower voltage, keep it there :)
 
Tried it again this time with the FSB at 360 with 8.5 multiplier and the voltage set to 1.25 although it only shows as 1.2 during prime95 test.

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Only did a short half hour test. will do a longer test tomorrow but its looking more promising :D
 
your getting there, auto volts fails at nearly anything, make sure you set cpu to VID voltage before doing anything and DRAM to right timing/volts before doing anything

For 45nm make sure you dont go over:

CPU: 1.45v
VTT: 1.4v
CPU PLL: 1.6v

Keep eye on NB, 1.5v max for your board i reckon (i would go)
 
PaulyD said:
your getting there, auto volts fails at nearly anything, make sure you set cpu to VID voltage before doing anything and DRAM to right timing/volts before doing anything

For 45nm make sure you dont go over:

CPU: 1.45v
VTT: 1.4v
CPU PLL: 1.6v

Keep eye on NB, 1.5v max for your board i reckon (i would go)
Click to expand...

OK I've had a little look on cpu z about the memory status and pulled up this for the before and after clock.

memory

ddr3 dual channel 4096 mb
DC mode symmetric

dram frequency 533.3mhz
FSB:Dram 5:8

timings 7 7 7 20

At default Clock

memory

ddr3 dual channel 4096 mb
DC mode symmetric

dram frequency 603.3mhz
FSB:Dram 5:8

timings 8 8 8 23

After Clock

Are these ok or should i be altering something in the BIOS? I've seen that I can manually alter the timings e.g if i set the timings in BIOS as 6 6 6 18 then after the clock they should read 7 7 7 20 as it is with the default settings stated earlier? also is there a way to reduce the memory clock speed back down to 533.3 or is it ok at 603.3Mhz?

This is where i get a bit lost so needing some advice. Thanks
 
What RAM is it?

Edit: Yes you can manually alter timings, FSB ratio (i.e 1:1 will have both the RAM and FSB at the same speed) and voltages.
 
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Then yeah, it's fine as it is. It's running below the default settings until it says 667mhz in CPU-z. If you want to clock further you might want to loosen the timings to default (9-9-9-24) or raise the voltage to about 1.65v.
 
Ok I've ran another prime95 stress test and heres the results @ 3.2Ghz

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Does everything look ok? I know the temps look fine to me. Dropped the cpu vcore down to 1.2375v raised the fsb up to 377 but not touched anything in memory section of things.
 
I've got my pc up to 3.4Mhz just now but I've encountered an odd problem. I plugged my ipod usb into one of the front ports on my Antec 1200 (where it was before the OC) and the pc fails to get to the POST screen. Once I've removed it and rebooted the pc works fine but it has reset everything back to the straight from box throttled settings. Should this be something to be concerned about? Going to put everything back to its OC'd settings but with the USB in the other port to see if it makes a difference tonight after work.

Has anyone else had this sort of problem with an external device being plugged in? :confused:
 
Hi there,

This happens with my PC all the time. If I ever boot the PC with the ipod plugged in, the POST screen seems to freeze until I unplug it, then the PC continues to boot up like nothing happened.

It's happened quite a few times because I keep leaving the damn thing in there! I don't know what causes it but I wouldn't worry about it :)
 
jamesgoss said:
Hi there,

This happens with my PC all the time. If I ever boot the PC with the ipod plugged in, the POST screen seems to freeze until I unplug it, then the PC continues to boot up like nothing happened.

It's happened quite a few times because I keep leaving the damn thing in there! I don't know what causes it but I wouldn't worry about it :)
Click to expand...

If i plug it into the USB port it works no problem without rebooting or failing.

I have however got a new problem. Been playing COD4 tonight and twice the whole pc has 'froze' mouse doesn't move, picture frozen and sound on a 'stutter loop' and have to reboot. The second time the pc did a 'BIOS recovery' :(:confused:
 
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