First overclock, comments please..

Commers · 19 Jun 2006 at 11:54

I've been having lots of fun getting to grips with the black art of overclocking with my Opteron 146 and Radeon X1900 (see sig for full spec). Here's the result:

I did manage to get the HTT up to 290 with a x10 multiplier on the CPU and 1.55 vcore but it'd only run Prime95 for an hour before coming up with errors. But this 2.82ghz overclock seems to be stable, running Prime95 for five hours with no errors. CPU is cooled with an Akasa Evo33 (had a bad experience with the Freezer64 Pro) and temps are ~36c idle and ~45c load.

Overclocked X1900 runs 3DMark05 with no problems, temps kept under 70c through using ATITool to increase fan speeds.

Any suggestions for further improvements?

Defcon5 · 19 Jun 2006 at 12:20

whats your ram voltage and what ram is it? could try and go for cas2?

Commers · 19 Jun 2006 at 12:23

See sig for RAM make and model. RAM voltage is currently at 2.75. Haven't tinkered much with the RAM apart from putting it on a 166 divider to account for the massive HTT overclock.

So would increasing the voltage increase my chances of getting it to CAS2?

stigggeh · 19 Jun 2006 at 12:25

Commers said:
See sig for RAM make and model. RAM voltage is currently at 2.75. Haven't tinkered much with the RAM apart from putting it on a 166 divider to account for the massive HTT overclock.

So would increasing the voltage increase my chances of getting it to CAS2?

have you tried going to a 133 divider and pushing the cpu more ? i assume you have put the HT multi on 3x now.

Mikebert4 · 19 Jun 2006 at 12:52

That RAM should be able to cope with 2,3,2,6 or somthing (i forget the exact figures)

basically, more volts = more stable.

for example, my System (running XMS Pro 3200) did 2.5,3,2,6 1T at 2.7v but wasn't prime stable for more than about 30 seconds

Upped voltage to 2.9 and it's completely stable

however (theres always a however) the all-consuming worry of modern computing is heat and as a rule 'more volts= lots more heat'

so perhaps a fan over the RAM if you're touching 3v, i've got crazily good airflow in my case so i'm ok at 2.9v (i'm fine all the way to 3.2... but i'm not risking more on this RAM)

Commers · 19 Jun 2006 at 16:35

Thanks for the feedback all.

I experimented with the RAM divider, eventually getting a successful POST and boot-up by dropping it down to 100 to get CAS2, whilst pushing the HTT to 300. I had to increase the CPU voltage to 1.55 and the RAM to 2.95 to get any sort of stability though.

HT multiplier has been kept on x3.

I reckon cooling is the limiting factor for me at the moment - I daren't push the CPU and RAM over 1.55 and 2.95. So for the time being, I'm sticking to my original 280 HTT / 166 RAM divider overclock as it seems to be the best compromise between performance, heat and stability.