Help going faster

John24 · 4 Jul 2010 at 02:50

This is my first OC so appreciate some baby steps, all I've done so far is to change the Reference clock to 244 which gives me 3.17GHz, any higher and it seems to boot but the screen is blank. I'm scared to change anything else as I don't know what I'm doing.

I want to see how far I can push it without damage then just find the highest stable clock on stock volts and leave it on that. Any help doing this is much appreciated, so what shall I change first?

My hardware:
Athlon II X4 620
ASUS M4A785D-M PRO
1 x 2GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 PC2-6400C5
1 x 1GB Cheap no brand (not sure if I should just take this out)

Frozennova · 4 Jul 2010 at 04:54

First you want to set all of your voltages manually so check your ram specs for default volts and timings. You then need to drop your HT Link speed to 1.8ghz(8x).

My 620 does 3.2 on stock volts, however mine is actually a locked Phenom II so may well clock better than yours.

If your mothrboard supports ACc you will want to try enabling it to see if you can unlock the L3 cache on your chip

John24 · 4 Jul 2010 at 16:00

Now it'll only go to 2.99GHz and that's not stable, crashed while typing this.

Unfortunatly it's a CADAC so no L3, I did try it anyway but no luck. Where/when did you get yours out of interest, I got mine from here in november.

Cheers

Frozennova · 4 Jul 2010 at 18:16

Bought on members market, which previous owner also got of the members market

My CPU settings

I'm running my ram at 1.7v as it need the extra due to being clocked 150mhz or so higher than stock. and i think +0.0125v on the NB,SB and CPU-NB

John24 · 4 Jul 2010 at 23:25

If I can get close to that I'll be happy. My RAM is DDR2 so 1.8v is the default I think, will try 1.9v and see if that helps.

Cheers

John24 · 5 Jul 2010 at 00:01

Well it did help a bit but still can't get close to 3.17GHz.

Where are all the overclocking gurus?

HW91 · 5 Jul 2010 at 07:42

how much slack is there on the cables which connect to the outside of the PC?

just asking because it's possible that when you increase the clocks, the fan speed increases, effectively vibrating your PC away from the cables which can cause all kinds of electrical problems

Frozennova · 5 Jul 2010 at 08:59

Do you only plan on running stock volts through your chip as mine easily 3.6 and i can benchmark at 3.8

Marine-RX179 · 5 Jul 2010 at 11:22

I say you should check if your PC really use more than 2GB of ram...if not, you should just remove the cheap 1GB ram, as it is slower timing which drag down the timing of the Corsair, as well as it might affect overclocking with non-matching rams.

John24 · 5 Jul 2010 at 14:10

HW91 said:
how much slack is there on the cables which connect to the outside of the PC?

just asking because it's possible that when you increase the clocks, the fan speed increases, effectively vibrating your PC away from the cables which can cause all kinds of electrical problems

This made me lol a little bit, it is a valid point though I suppoose

There is plenty of slack and fan speeds are fixed, temps are sensible and I keep an eye on them.

frozennova said:
Do you only plan on running stock volts through your chip as mine easily 3.6 and i can benchmark at 3.8

As I said in the OP: "I want to see how far I can push it without damage then just find the highest stable clock on stock volts and leave it on that."

Marine-RX179 said:
I say you should check if your PC really use more than 2GB of ram...if not, you should just remove the cheap 1GB ram, as it is slower timing which drag down the timing of the Corsair, as well as it might affect overclocking with non-matching rams.

I did wonder if that would be better, I can live without the 1GB stick, I just put it in there so I could asign the IGP more RAM untill I can afford a 4GB kit.

The trouble is it can do 3.17GHz if I just change the reference clock and leave everything else on AUTO, as you can see in the above screenshot. But as soon as I start setting everything manually it struggles to do 3GHz.

It's probably because it's not setup right because I don't know what I'm doing, if I knew what all those settings mean and the consequenses they have on the system and each other I could at least match the AUTO OC.

Is there anywhere that explains all these settings? The manual is useless, I suppose googleing each one might explain a bit.

Cheers