First time overclocking

MG42Maniac

MG42Maniac

MG42Maniac

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Lymington
Hi,

I recently got a new setup (see sig). I deliberately picked components I thought would allow me to overclock to 2.4GHz - 2.6GHz with not too much trouble hence the DFI board, artic cooler and semi decent RAM. Now i've only ever overclocked a video card ( simple move of the slider :p).

I get the basic idea of how clock speed is made up. I.e HTT x Mulitplier. If I have looked it up right the 3700+ has a 11x multiplier so to get to 2.6Ghz I need 236 HTT. I know my RAM won't do stock timings @ 236Mhz so do I run a divider or loosen the timings? I ideally want the best performance. I had a very quick look through the BIOS but could not see a divider option, but then i'm not very familiar with my new BIOS. I did find the options to set the memory timings and I think they are set to auto?

I also went into BIOS and under Genie settings and raised the HTT from 200 to 205 giving me a clock speed of 2255MHz. I assume this is how you overclock an AMD64, I've read up on a few guides on the net but none of them seem to give you a good guide with pics. I don't really want to mess around with volts as i've never overclocked before unless it really is simple and safe.

Also about stability, I will most likly **** myself if sirens go off inside the case so what stability tests would you recommend? I know the usual is Prime 95 but if there anything that will really test for stability that does not take hours? Also does the DFI motherboard lock the PCI frequency by default?

If anyone could give me some pointers I would be most thankful

Edit: The stepping for my CPU is: KACAE0552FPBW, i've seen people getting 2.8GHz with a KACAE stepping but i've no idea under what circumstances.
 
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Thanks for the advice.

I read through th DFI stickies which I found to be of good use. This is what I plan to do when somene confirms its right that is so I don't damage my hardware :)

Unfortunatly silly me forgot to buy a floppy drive so I can't update my bios :( Was there something worth having in the 623-3 BIOS?

Anyway If I use a divider to run the RAM at 180MHz that effectivly underclocks the RAM from 200 Mhz to 180Mhz while still preserving a 2.2GHz total clock. If I now move the FSB from 200 to 220 that will give me 2.6Ghz? ( 12 x 220?) But would the HTT be too high at 2200MHz, so should I drop down the multiplier?
 
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Ok cheers I used a program called 'winflash' to download NF4LDB14.ZIP.
Flashed it using the program and I assume i'm know running the latest BIOS. First thing i'm going to do is drop the RAM down to 180MHz and start raising the HTT.
 
Ok little update to make sure i'm doing things ok.

I dropped RAM to 180MHz and increased HTT to 210 and got this:
23ghz3fw.jpg



Am I right in thinking all I need to do is keep moving up thr HTT in steps of 10MHz and running stress tests after each 10MHz?
 
Ok cheers now at 2.4GHz so i'm happy but i would love to hit 2.6GHz. I am assuming random restarts, freezing, BSOD etc indicate an instable system. Regards to Super PI what size test would you advice?

CPUZ gives this

I am getting to the point now where my RAM is back upto 201MHz so sohuld I drop it down from 180Mhz to 160Mhz?
 
Ok Ran 3DMark 01 and my scores gone from 28.5k to 30.6k so thats shown a nice healthy increase. I'm gonna try for 2.6GHz now. Would now be a good time to take the HTT multi down to x4 as I am hitting the 250HTT mark if I go to 2.6GHz.
 
Success!
26ghz9dy.jpg


I don't really want to go any further i've reached my target of 2.6GHz. Now I need to make sure shes rock solid. Do I need to add some more juice to the CPU to ensure its stable? I was thinking of running a 16M Super PI and all the 3dmarks. Would that ensure its stable?

Only thing i'm not liking is this:
ntune9sc.jpg

It appears i've gone over the red line...
 
Ok i've got it at 2.6GHz and it was prime stable for the 6 hours I ran it for. I also ran all of the 3dMarks afterwards and it was totally fine, I think upping the CPU Volts to 1.45 did the trick.
So i'd just like to say thanks to everyone who helped me out :)
 
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