e4300/asrock dual vsta new build report

[henryford]

hi all, upgraded my p.c last week replacing my dfi lanparty nf2 ultra/ athlon xp2800 barton with the asrock dual vsta/e4300, i also purchased freezer 7 pro and a zalaman vf900 the rest of my rig (2x512 geil pc3200, 80gb sata hd, x-fi music sound card, ati 1950 pro 512mb agp, philips brilliance 200w tft, logitech 5-1 speakers,antech 450w psu) i re-used. the build went without a hitch and i installed a clean xp pro/ sp2 and drivers ect. booting into the bios first time, i had to disable on board sound and set the ram to 200 manually. i left the rest on default while i installed all my software/ games, i ran this setup for a couple of days and imediatly noticed a differance in gaming perfomance so i ran 3d mark 05/06

old rig new rig


3d05 6945 9534

3d06 3886 4838

i am now slowley overclocking , can someone put me right if i have got any of these settings wronge, as i have not done any overclocking since my socket 7 athlon 850mhz @ 1ghz . its the memory readings im not sure about, bios settings are

cpu/pcie autosync
dram freq auto
dram volt auto

i have got the fsb set to 260mhz giving me the cpu @2354 ive had this running for a couple of days, i will try and push it to 300 later but i want a second opinion on the memory readings.. the bios reading for the memory has gone down to 166(ddr333) not ddr400 and cpuz says i have one stick at 200 and one at 166(if im reading it correctly), the ratio is 8/5 dose this sound about right ?
a quick note on my cooling, the vf900 is very good reaching around 35c after benchmarking at its lowest rpm, ive got cool n quiete enabled in the bios and the freezer 7 pro is quite noisey. its running around 1000 rpm and the cpu temp idles around 24c and 32c after benching, this seems very low. is there a way to reduce the cpu fan speed further ?

thanks for reading.. i hope i hav'nt bored you to tears !!!

 

[br83taylor]

Thats a pretty impressive overclock there. You are the first person i have seen to post about this CPU/motherboard combo with a decent overclock. Well Done. There is a fair bit of talk about this motherboard in this threads below however i don't fully believe some of the things written in there.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17610938

and some more on the E4300 here

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17680797

(you could also post you results in there).

I don't have this board, but i do have an Asrock board which has similar options and i believe the settings in the bios mean the following

cpu/pcie autosync

This is the setting with the options , auto, CPU,PCIE,sync, and CPU,PCIE,async?

This is basically the setting for the PCI-lock, Don't select CPU,PCIE,sync as this will increase you PCIE speed along with the FSB, and you will limit you overclock severally. For async you can select what PCIE and PCI speeds you want, they should be 100 and 33 respectively. I have use this setting, rather than auto.

dram freq auto

This setting controls the ratio between memory speed and FSB. for the auto setting the bios should look at the memory SPD and change this ratio to the one that fits best. The other option is to manually set the ratio's (normally cause the SPD settings can be conservative).

Now the E4300 has a default FSB of 200 (quad pumped to 800) so to me the ratios you can select are 1:1 (ddr400), 6:5 (ddr333) and 3:2 (ddr266).

So i think for an FSB of 260, the memory will be running at the following speeds

ddr400 = 260*1/1= 260 or ddr520 (ie this probably won't work with your memory) - this might be why the bios dropped the setting to 166?
ddr333 = 260*5/6= 216 or ddr432 (this probably would work with loose timings)
ddr266 = 260*2/3= 173 or ddr346 (should work with tighter timings)

i think the talk on a ratio of 8:5 is when the default FSB is 266 (eg E6300). and you want to select ddr333 but i don't think that applies to you as your default bus is 200.

if you want to find the max CPU speed, i would use the ddr266 setting to try an eliminate the ram from being the bottlenext. you can optimise the ram speed afterwards.

dram volt auto

this is an option to change the voltage of the memory, now the asrock motherboards don't have much scope for this (other settings are high, normal or low). in theory more voltage might help you get your memory to run faster.

you can't have the memory sticks running at different speeds, so i think something is up there, try using sisoft sandra and see what memory speeds that thinks it is.

sorry for the long post, hope it helps, let us know how far you can go. up to 300 fsb???

 

[henryford]

thanks for replying to my thread, it has cleared things up for me and i can now have another fiddle with overclocking a bit further. i will install sisoft sandra to check my memory first, it is a bit strange as it came as a boxed pair, i think i need to sort that out first.

thanks for your help, i will let you know how i get on asap....i got some cpuz shots dose this confirm i have two odd sticks of memory ? do theese screen shots make sense before i overclock a bit further ???