Help with OC'ing Opteron 144 please.

Zephyrus

Zephyrus

Zephyrus

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I ordered my new rig which will arrive tomorrow morning and after reading some of the speed some people have been getting out of their opterons i think i just 'must' over clock this.

Problem is this hardware is totally new to me. I'm used to just upping the FSB on my old 2.4 Celeron and Gigabyte G-SIMLH board :p
So i'd like some advice on what to do with this set up ie what to change and whatnot.

Here's what i have coming tomorrow...

CP-141-AM AMD Opteron UP 144 San Diego 1.8GHz 1MB Cache OSA144DAA5BN / CAB2E 0548EPAW (Socket 939) - Retail (CP-141-AM) 1
£99.95 £99.95
CA-005-HP Hiper HPU-4K580-MK Type R 580W Modular ATX2.2 PSU - Black UV (CA-005-HP) 1
£54.95 £54.95
CA-027-AN Antec SLK3000B Midi Tower Case - No PSU (CA-027-AN) 1
£27.50 £27.50
GX-037-PC PowerColor ATI Radeon X850 XT 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-037-PC) 1
£123.95 £123.95
BFG RNF4U nForce4 Ultra (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-000-BG)
Price: £64.95

Oh and the memory is only Corsair value 333 PC2700 i salvaged from my old system and the cpu will be running with the stock cooler/fan for another week or 2 till i can afford to upgrade these.

Even just advice on OC a decent amount without stressing the system too much at least until i get better memory and cooler.

Cheers, in anticipation :p
Zeph.
 
OW the RAM will hold you back.

Cutting to the chase: RAM divider to 133, VLDT to 1.4V if you can in the BIOS, VCore to 1.55-1.6V, up the HT frequency to 300 and lower the HT multiplier to 3. That should be a reasonable start :)

Kenny

BTW...Overclocking gets more fun as you figure it out- the best way to learn is to mess about and learn under your own situations and ways of figuring stuff out what works and why. The fastest way to learn about what doesnt work is to break something though. My wallet learns faster tha my head. :(

K
 
Sounds simple enough :)

Roughly what sort of speed should be the outcome of those settings?

Lol when i first heard about overclocking i spent hours with my old celeron in and out of the bios ;)

Tomorrow morning when City Link ring the doorbell cant come soon enough :D
 
300x9=2700MHz. :)

If that doesnt boot first time, try 288x9= 2600MHz. If that doesnt work... lets not think about that :) better installing windows and all your patches etc first tho.

Kenny
 
Right everything has arrived and all in one piece :)

But the opty has no thermal paste, is this right? Someone told me on another thread that it would come with the paste already applied :confused:
 
it should already be applied to the copper base of the heat sink that comes in the box, dont forget to remove the plastic cover though :P
 
Right finally getting around to being able to play around with this now. Had problems for hours when setting up the tower yesterday due to the RAM i used from my old tower. For some reason Windows was unable to copy some files and kept getting the blue screen during install and having to start again. Maybe i did something to it while transferring between machines :confused: Then to top it off by the time i had everything installed and updated it was time for work :(

Right anyway, having to use an old stick of 512 and a 256 both PC2700 till new memory comes tomorrow. Should i wait to start overclocking till the 1gig stick arrives tomorrow or won't it make any difference? And should i still set the ram divider to 133?
 
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Definatly wait untill yoiu get your new ram. That old PC2700 stuff will run far too slow to be able to do anything significant overclocking wise.
And yes use the 133 divider, although depending on what RAM you have bought, and depending on what you are going to overclock to, you may be able yo use the 166 divider.
 
It's corsair value ram i've bought, the old stick i had was the same and never had any problems with it till now and i had it for a while. Only difference is that this stick will be pc3200.

Funny thing is that the stick that caused me problems on the install works perfectly in another pc, havent tried putting it back in the new tower though.
 
New memory hasnt arrived yet. But i want to start overclocking this now. I've gathered together 1.5gigs of pc2700 from other pc's in the house, 1gig stick and a 512 stick.

I'm in the bios just now on the other comp but i dont see a setting for memory divider. I'm in the DRAM configuration screen it gives the info as follows...

Timing mode : Auto/Manual
Memclock Index Value (Mhz) :200Mhz (is this the divider i have to set to 133?)
Cas# latency (Tcl) :2.5
Min RAS# Active Time(Tras) :8T
RAS# to CAS# delay(Trcd) :4T
Row precharge time (Trp) :2T
User Config Mode :Auto/Manual
x Bottom of 32-bit[31:24] IO :B0
x Read preamble value :6ns
x Async latency value :6ns
S/W memory hole Remapping :Disabled
MTTR mapping mode :Continuous

A little help on what to change here would be much appreciated.

Cheers
Zeph.
 
K404 said:
OW the RAM will hold you back.

Cutting to the chase: RAM divider to 133, VLDT to 1.4V if you can in the BIOS, VCore to 1.55-1.6V, up the HT frequency to 300 and lower the HT multiplier to 3. That should be a reasonable start :)

Kenny

BTW...Overclocking gets more fun as you figure it out- the best way to learn is to mess about and learn under your own situations and ways of figuring stuff out what works and why. The fastest way to learn about what doesnt work is to break something though. My wallet learns faster tha my head. :(

K
Click to expand...

Ignore what i asked about dividers, should have read up before asking :p

I'm having a bit of trouble translating what you told me to my bios.

VLDT - I dont have an option for this in the bios unless it could be called something else.

VCORE to 1.55-1.6 - Would this be the option for CPU Voltage Regulator?

HT Frequency to 300Mhz - options in my bios for HT frequency are.....1x,2x,3x,4x,5x and auto, this would translate to being the HT multiplier?. I have an option 'CPU Frequency' which would let me change to 300Mhz, i assume this is the eqivalent to what you mean?

Forgive me if these are n00bish questions, but i'd like to get everything straight in my head with what i am doing rather than changing values and not having a clue.
 
If you want to get a good clock, it's usually best to try with only one stick of RAM, if you want more then you should have a matched pair. (which I hope is what's coming). If you run dividers on the one stick you wont limit the clock you get, you can just keep finding the HTT (FSB) limit for the chip/motherboard. once you have this, bang in a divider that you know your RAM will run at. When your new RAM turns up you can find the new limit.

What the old 333 RAM (on a divider) will do will limit the memory bandwidth so your benches will look a bit slow. A64's are stunning even when coupled with old RAM.
 
HT multiplier will have values of 1x to 5x yea.

your option to increase something to 300 will be the HT frequency- changing that is the basis of most overclocking.

I guess VCore could be the same as CPU voltage regulator.

Its hard to know for sure without having used that BIOS- I wish all the BIOS makers would call things the same!

Kenny
 
OK tried firing it up at 2800Mhz, 1.55V and divider at 133... no go, as soon as i started the torture test on prime95 system shut down.

So i put the voltage back at stock... same scenario.

Next time i tried voltage at stock and 2200Mhz and divider still at 133. I completed the benchmark on prime 95 and i ran the torture test for 3mins with no errors. Temps started at 32C and raised to 37C. Should i just keep raising HT frquency now till the torture test fails straight away or should i keep it running longer?

Oh and is the divider on the memory going to lower performance on games?

screen18ua.jpg
 
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You should really try to take stuff a little more methodically before jumping around and changing more than one thing at a time. It really is the best way to be sure.

Have you found the HTT limit for the motherboard/chip, and memory, these will let you know what it is you are heading towards.

Is the memory divider going to impair performance? It will in some if they like a lot of memory bandwidth. you will have to try it to be sure, though much of what I have read say that higher HTT numbers are better.
 
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