Am I better off waiting until the Summer..?

thesnowdog1971

thesnowdog1971

thesnowdog1971

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Have just recently bought and built a machine from the parts in my sig, and am thinking about overclocking. One thing I'm worried about at the moment though is getting a nice and fluffy overclock when it's freezing buggering cold and then having my new baby burst into flames as soon as Summer is here lol.

My machine is reasonably fast enough as it is at stock speeds (although I have started to overclock my 4870 with ATI Overdrive slightly) but I've got that unexplainable feeling that I want to crank it up a couple of notches to get a better framerate for the likes of Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and Crysis. :eek:

My flat in the Winter is freezing cold, and in the Summer is baking hot...so should I just wait until the weather heats up a bit before I start tinkering around with it..? :confused:

How much damage to all the bits and pieces I've got will overclocking do..? I've seen in my motherboard BIOS that there's a temperature 'OMG MY MACHINE IS BURNING!!!' cutoff point which with the Rampage Formula is automatically set to cut off at 90C as default. I thought that was a bit high so have set that to 70C as far as I remember. So will I be okay overclocking and running until the temp gets too high and my machine shuts down before doing any real damage to the thing..? :confused:
 
Well.. overclock it as much as you like now, when you start to notice temps rising, pull back your overclock slightly..

And yes your motherboard should stop the cpu burning out, 70 is a rather conservative 'omg temp'.
 
phil675 said:
Well.. overclock it as much as you like now, when you start to notice temps rising, pull back your overclock slightly..

And yes your motherboard should stop the cpu burning out, 70 is a rather conservative 'omg temp'.
Click to expand...

+ 1 have some fun with it now and see what you can get then if the temps get too high in the summer drop it back a bit.

With your rampage you can save OC profiles so you could even have a winter profile and a summer one if you wanted? I tend to drop my oc back a bit in the summer but not that much!
 
Okay, have had a quick look at the Rampage Formula BIOS and am not too sure what to leave on Auto and what to set to Manual. I know that I have to set Ai Overclock Tuner from Auto to Manual to get things going, and I'm assuming that CPU Ratio Setting should be set to 8.5 and I increase the FSB Frequency from 333 in small increments starting at 340 and going up in steps of 5.

But what about all the DRAM Frequency and other DRAM stuff? Should I leave all of that stuff on Auto..?

I'm also not too sure about voltages for everything. I've run CPU-Z and it says that at stock speeds the Core Voltage is 1.128, and pC Probe is telling me that my SB is 1.07, SB2 (?) is 1.52, FSBT is 1.17 and NB is 1.33. So do I just find the corresponding voltages in the BIOS and change them from Auto to the voltages that PC Probe is giving me..? Or do I leave it all to Auto and let the BIOS take care of it all..? :confused:
 
I haven't seen an Intel chip burn up in a long time. They tend to throttle right back and send NOPs rather than burst into flames.

It's easy enough to kill it with too much voltage though.
 
Set all the voltages to their standard settings in bios....bios tells you what the normal value is at right hand side.

Set your memory timings manually but leave the rest of the memory ones on auto (for now).

You should be able to overclock quiet a bit before you have to start upping the various board voltages to keep it stable.
 
I'm having a few problems with this I'm afraid. I've set the following:

Ai Overclock Tuner to Manual
OC From CPU Level Up to Auto
CPU Ratio Setting to 08.5
FSB Strap to North Bridge to Auto
FSB Frequency to 333
PCIE Frequency to 100 (default)

DRAM Frequency to DDR2-800MHz
DRAM Command Rate to Auto
DRAM CMD Skew on Channel A to Auto (and can't change it, it's disabled)
DRAM CMD Skew on Channel B to Auto (as above)
DRAM CLK Skew on Channel A to Auto
DRAM CLK Skew on Channel B to Auto
DRAM Timing Control to Manual

I've left everything else on the default timings (5-5-5-15 which is correct for my memory) and Auto, set the CPU voltage to 1.125 which is the closest to the 1.128 that CPU-z gives me and disabled the Speedstep and other bits and pieces as detailed in the Overclocking guide.


The problem I'm having is that whenever I change the FSB Frequency the DRAM Frequency gets higher in value. Isn't this supposed to stay at 800MHz until I start to overclock the RAM..? I tried starting Vista x64 and got a BSOD and it said something about win2k.sys but the text wasn't there long enough for me to read. I'm assuming it's something to do with my RAM not working at 800MHz like it's supposed to be but am not too sure :confused:

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks in advance :)
 
if your running 4 sticks of that geil black dragon 800Mhz ddr2 stuff you might have to throttle the ram back to 667 in order to get stable. also raise the NB volts a little and ram volts a little.
 
Gunda said:
if your running 4 sticks of that geil black dragon 800Mhz ddr2 stuff you might have to throttle the ram back to 667 in order to get stable. also raise the NB volts a little and ram volts a little.
Click to expand...

But every time I raise the FSB the RAM MHz goes up. Is there any way of locking the RAM Frequency so that it stays at 667 or 800MHz..? :confused:
 
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