Hiring an experienced overclocker

[Odhran]

Hi Guys,

I know that everyone here is more than willing to help noobs like me with their setup and overclocking problems and I think that's absolutely wonderful, but I'm having real trouble and I need some personal help.

Basically I've bought a decent rig (P5N32-E SLI, Q6600 G0, 2GB Corsair Dominator PC2-8500C5 DDR2, Tuniq Tower) and it runs very well in stock mode with low temps on the CPU (18C) and MB (23C).

I've followed the overclocking guides, downloaded all the software and tried my hand at pushing the limits of the rig. I can't seem to get any stability for overclocks above 2.5GHz and it's starting to annoy me slightly. Last night, I needed to reset the CMOS via jumper because the machine wouldn't even get past the BIOS boot after one of my attempts.

So, I need someones help. Someone who knows what to change without royally screwing up everything. Someone who considers themselves a guru when it comes to overclocking. Someone who lives near Crouch End in London, or can make it there without trouble.

For the help of this individual, I'm willing to pay £100 regardless of success or failure. Personally, from my point of view, this could be a very well spent £100. I could manage to get 3.2GHz from my setup and be very happy, heck - even 2.8GHz would be fantastic! The maximum I've been able to manage on my own is a measly 2.5GHz, so I've got plenty to hope for.

Then again, I could just have some duff equipment and it may be the case that 2.5GHz is the highest I can go to ... who knows. The point is that I've got £100 that says you can't do better - prove me wrong.

Thanks.

 

[Odhran]

I'm off this week but you would have to travel upto banbury with your rig and i would'nt even charge you £100.

That's very kind of you, but I'm afraid I have no means of transporting the rig.

 

[Odhran]

Odhran,

i would take you up that. Email is in trust, configure your trust and you can get in touch with me.

Have near enough the same setup as you, and pretty confident, you could be running at least the 3ghz mark 2997mhz at least. Unless something is seriously wrong with your rig.

Great! I'll get in contact with you and we can arrange to meet.

 

[Odhran]

My brother a few months back went with a near identical set up to yourself with a Q6600 and a P5N32-E SLI plus! I have no doubt in my mind that that mobo is pants for overclocking as that same Q6600 can do 3.4ghz easy in my motherboard

I also did some googling and it seems lots of people are having problems with that mobo with all bios revisions

Hmmm ... not good.

Thanks for the head's up though.

 

[Odhran]

Sounds like it could be a good challange then lol

To be honest i always personally go for intel chipset based mobo's.

Replied to your mail matey, also what psu and graphics card setup are you running.

My PSU is the Enermax 1000W and the graphics cards are 2 8800GTX in SLI mode.

It strikes me as odd that the motherboard would not be able to overclock seeing as it's marketed as an enthusiast board with 'Extreme Tweaker' and various other overclocking software packaged with it. What's the recommended board then? The P5K?

 

[Odhran]

Your probably in an FSB hole.
Take the FSB to 1333, don't mess around with anything lower.
That will give you 3ghz.
Core voltage can remain on default.
Give it a little bump if prime tests error out.

Also be careful with the memory settings.
What you think is 1:1 isn't.
Make sure you set linked and synced.
If it doubt unlink and run the memory clock at 800

Give it a try.

I did also go straight to 1333 on the FSB too. Complete lock and I needed to reset the jumper on the motherboard.

I also did linked at that value, and unlinked with mem set to 800. No joy.

I can't wait until monday

 

[Odhran]

Why not spend the 100 quid on a better motherboard.

Which one? The P5k?

Edit: Also, I'm looking to learn a thing or two by this - learning by instruction is very valuable imo.

 

[Odhran]

I've found the last couple of BIOS revisions quite unstable.


1201 is what seems to be the best for me.

I can't find a 1201 BIOS ... 1205 is the closest on the ASUS site. Is this the one?

 

[Odhran]

Well, tonight DataMonkey is calling over to help. I'll post here with results and I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Hey, at least I'll learn something in the process!

So outside of a P5N32E, I should get the P5N-T for SLI overclocking that works out of the box ... thanks for the tip - I'll look into it.

 

[Odhran]

The Results

Firstly, a huge thanks for Datamonkey, who called over and taught me so much about what actually affects what in terms of voltage changes and turning off redundant stuff on my motherboard. For the knowledge alone it was worth the money.

So ... moving on, what actually happened? Well, the bad news is that the P5N32-E SLI is a crap motherboard for overclocking. We found it impossible to keep it stable at anything above 2.7GHz (300MHz FSB, x9).

The good news, on the other hand, is that my processor is excellent. It's running nice and cool at load (about 42C) with stock voltage of 1.225V. My memory is also great too and the power supply is top notch too. It seems that the only duff component is the motherboard.

It's an awful shame really because the board itself is very easy to set up and use and recovers quite well from crashes. A few times when we were running quite high NB and SB voltages it stopped recognising the IDE bus, and there was also the time when we upped the FSB to 333MHz and it stopped posting (which required a jumper switch change) - but other than that, it was pretty good.

Looking at most other posts on the subject, using the MB without SLI, it's possible to go pretty high - although this is the exception rather than the rule. With SLI, the next highest report was 2.93GHz. Not good.

I'd like to hear from others at this point about the P5N-T and SLI. I'm going to do more reading today on the subject.

 

[Odhran]

Is the RAM running unlinked?

Yep ... unlinked, running at 1066Mhz with 5-5-5-15 timings. The ram is PC-8500, so that is the default speed. As was mentioned before, the crashes and halts seem to happen when it kicks in the IDE bus or the USB.

About the P5K ... my understanding is that it won't run SLI graphics cards - is this correct?

Also, thanks for the screenshot of your settings - but again, you're not running SLI so I'm not sure if this could also be an issue with it booting windows.

I'll still play around a bit, but tbh its not looking good for this board. I have my eye on the striker 2 780i board - but will wait until I see some hard facts about its ability in SLI mode.