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- Joined
- 29 Jan 2007
- Posts
- 727
...and I couldn't get the thing stable at 400 FSB.
I tried everything, vcore, vtt, cards in and out, different slots, but randomly the machine would hang, BSOD, HDD access would slow to a crawl (there was the clue) and have boot issues.
Two days later of testing (running stress benchmarks), reading the web, playing with sensible voltages and you know what it was?
The darn ICH Southbridge voltage. The last thing I would have thought of. It defaulted to 1.5v and I'd left it on AUTO thinking a motherboard that officially supports 400FSB would set it accordingly - but it needed 1.58 to be fully stable at 400FSB. 1.5V was fine for the standard 333.
Now, using a Q9450, I can simply set the FSB to 400 using it's old school jumpers with all other voltages default (vtt 1.20, vcore 1.18, Northbridge 1.1 etc) except the ICH at 1.58 and it's totally stable. I think the board must be undervolting the Southbridge chip or the chip is just a bad example and required more volts.
All this flippin time testing. Honestly, who would have suggested the ICH voltage? Never heard of that holding people back on such a modest overclock, especially when the darn board is meant to support 400 FSB.
I tried everything, vcore, vtt, cards in and out, different slots, but randomly the machine would hang, BSOD, HDD access would slow to a crawl (there was the clue) and have boot issues.
Two days later of testing (running stress benchmarks), reading the web, playing with sensible voltages and you know what it was?
The darn ICH Southbridge voltage. The last thing I would have thought of. It defaulted to 1.5v and I'd left it on AUTO thinking a motherboard that officially supports 400FSB would set it accordingly - but it needed 1.58 to be fully stable at 400FSB. 1.5V was fine for the standard 333.
Now, using a Q9450, I can simply set the FSB to 400 using it's old school jumpers with all other voltages default (vtt 1.20, vcore 1.18, Northbridge 1.1 etc) except the ICH at 1.58 and it's totally stable. I think the board must be undervolting the Southbridge chip or the chip is just a bad example and required more volts.
All this flippin time testing. Honestly, who would have suggested the ICH voltage? Never heard of that holding people back on such a modest overclock, especially when the darn board is meant to support 400 FSB.
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