E8600 & Biostar TPower I45 - amirite?

[Rainmaker]

Basically I've had the following setup since last year:

Biostar TPower I45; E8600 (Q822A435); 2x 2GB OCZ Reaper DDR2 PC2-8500; XFX GeForce 8600; OCZ Vendetta 2 120mm CPU HSF

I had 4.xGhz stable out of it once, but it was a fluke I think and ran hot as heck. My first overclock attempt btw, and I get the impression the TPower I45 wasn't the best noob board to pick

I gave up in the end and went back to stock. Now I've decided to play around again and started with vcore around 1.3v in the bios, North/Southbridge (same setting in this bios) at around 1.5v and FSB around 1.5v also. I was always failing even a minute of Prime, Orthos etc and temps were into the 70s.

I let the mobo do an 'automatic' clock to see if that gave me any pointers, and it gave me 3.6Ghz at what I thought was impossibly low volts. That set me thinking maybe I should try lower juice for my own manual clock, and see what happened. I basically set it in the bios to:

Multi: 9x
FSB: 445
CPU voltage: 1.2v
NB/SB voltage: 1.096v
FSB voltage: 1.104v
DDR2 voltage: 1.872v (was 2.19v as suggested by OCZ)
RAM at 890MHz and 5,5,5,15

This allowed me to run LinX for 3 full rounds without hiccup, and temps stayed in the 60s. Yes, I know 3 rounds isn't exactly proven stable, but previously (at the higher volts) it was failing inside 30 seconds and getting into the 70s.

Am I starting to do it right now? I'd forgotten to grab a screenie before LinX stopped btw, so I just restarted it for a min to grab one to show you. It HAS passed 3 rounds and I'll leave Orthos running overnight to see how it goes.

Any suggestions? Bonus points and a cookie if you can recognise the bird, too... Thanks in advance.

 

[95thrifles]

Yeah youre more along the right lines, but tbh you should be able to get 4 very easily, I expect your board can cope with this on auto, set your multiplier back to auto (10x) and your FSB to 400, you should be able to leave everything else on auto.
If it does fail, ensure DRAM voltage is set to what its rated for (prob 2.1 - you mobo is prob undervolting this to 1.8) and ensure that your DRAM freq is less than or equal to 1066 (as you increase your FSB this increases unless youve unlinked)
If it still fails then start notching up the VCore by a notch or 2, but I doubt it would fail
Thats actually a pretty decent board you got there

 

[Rainmaker]

Thanks, I'll give that a go later. I've had Orthos running small FFTs since 7.30am this morning and no errors so I definitely got this one right (for a change). I'll try it on 10x400 later and if that holds I'll see how much I can get out of it. 4.5Ghz would be nice!