** Official MSI P6N SLI-FI & Platinum NF650i Owners Thread**

AFK_Matrix said:
Yeah i know but if it clocks better....
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Thing is, it won't clock better than the Asus could when both are on watercooling. MSI uses tighter internal timings than Asus, so you get a faster machine for a given Megahertz but you can't push the megahertz as far.

For me, I want a machine using less than 100W when idle. I'm not so bothered about overclocking if it exceeds that - also, I want stability above all other else. To double your power consumption for an extra 10% or so of speed isn't worth it for me.

If you're going to remove the heatpiping, you might as well get a SLI-FI and save the £25. Same board without the heatpiping (unless you really like eSATA).

Cheers,
Niall
 
I agree with you ned14 on the less power used the better, it is worth thinking about how much power we use in our computers, for like you say only a small increase in performance.
Strike the right balance between overclock and power consmumption.

Also ned14, another nice overclock with by the sound of it a better bios.

My p6n sli platinum arrived today. Very pleased so far, plenty of cables (rounded ide and floppy) and accessories in the box - a quality package. :)
In my opinion worth the extra over the other 650i boards.

I will be setting everything up over the weekend.
 
Great board got mine on friday cost me £104 delivered.
Very impressed so far but defo needs a new bios like all boards.
 
Final overclocking settings

I thought I'd post my final, fully orthosed for six hours, overclocking settings. But first things first, here is my new computer and just how much faster it is than anything else currently officially available. Just to remind you, here is the hardware I bought for £515 in March 2007:

MSI P6N SLI Platinum NF650i motherboard £98
Intel E4300 Retail £100
Geil Value DDR2 2GB PC6400 Dual Channel Kit 800MHz (5-5-5-15) £106
Seagate Barracude 7200.10 320Gb NCQ £60
Club 3D ATI Radeon X1300PRO Silent Heatpipe 256MB £47
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler £16.50
Corsair HX Series 520W Modular PSU £67.50

BestOverclock.png


Vcore was bumped by +0.05v to be stable at 3.2Ghz. The 650i NB is very nearly stable at FSB 1600 at stock 1.25v, but even at 1.45v it occasionally died after four hours or so of orthos. It appears completely stable at 1.5v, but the heatpiping does become rather hot at this voltage so I added the bundled NB fan but rewired the 12v into the 5v supply instead to lower its RPM from a rather noisy 8000 rpm to a nearly silent 3800 rpm.

I am especially happy with the Geil Value DDR2 2GB PC6400 Dual Channel Kit 800MHz (5-5-5-15) which only cost £106. Overclocking it to 4-3-3-8-16 with only a +0.1v (to 1.9v) addition I think is amazing for such cheap memory. That kind of overclock is normally Micron chips rather than Infineon ...

Lastly, the above configuration uses 102W idle 156W busy. Enabling C2E lowers the idle to 97W but then the bottom multiplier on the E4300 is 6x so there's only so far it can go. The max temperature reached was 53C according to the motherboard and 76C according to Intel's Themal Analysis Tool. I have enabled smart fan for 40C and below, so when idle the machine becomes almost silent.

I may post again with results from the v1.22 BIOS when it comes out. I really hope that this BIOS will allow a 1T command rate as even with looser timings this is faster than tighter 2T timings. Until then, enjoy your MSI P6N motherboard and I hope you found my posts useful!

Cheers,
Niall
 
Nice clock.

I don't think it's possible for a BIOS upgrade to allow the RAM to clock 1T rather than 2T as I'm pretty sure that's a function of the RAM specification, rather than the BIOS. It would be good if it could be tweaked in BIOS though.

It's still excellent RAM performance though, I would have to agree.
 
ned14 said:
I am especially happy with the Geil Value DDR2 2GB PC6400 Dual Channel Kit 800MHz (5-5-5-15) which only cost £106. Overclocking it to 4-3-3-8-16 with only a +0.1v (to 1.9v) addition I think is amazing for such cheap memory. That kind of overclock is normally Micron chips rather than Infineon ...
Click to expand...
You'll never guess what happened last night, or rather early this morning ...

I was trundling along doing stuff at about 7am, and suddenly the machine blue screens. So on reboot I run Orthos and it fails within a minute.

"But this thing ran Orthos without fault for six hours last night?!?!?" I thought ...

But think about it. What's different at night time and day time? Solar radiation. What does solar radiation do? It makes electrical signals noisy!!!

Loosening the timings to 4-4-4-12-16-2T with no voltage change from 1.9v did the trick. Left it bench testing all day today during sunshine. I did think I was being rather lucky before, just goes to show .... nevertheless, still a very respectable overclock for cheap memory.

Sorry for any misrepresentation caused.

Cheers,
Niall
 
WJA96 said:
I don't think it's possible for a BIOS upgrade to allow the RAM to clock 1T rather than 2T as I'm pretty sure that's a function of the RAM specification, rather than the BIOS. It would be good if it could be tweaked in BIOS though.
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Well Anandtech found that the Asus 650i board would allow 800Mhz at 1T but the MSI 650i board needed 2T. From my own testing, mine will do 750Mhz at 1T with no issue but has issue at 800Mhz no matter the voltage. I didn't test it much, but backing off the timings to cas 6 seemed to work but of course that removes the point of using 1T. Ideally, we'd like cas 4 AND 1T like the Asus board.

I'm still considering maybe to bump my multiplier up to 9x and lower memory to 720 to yield 3.24 Ghz. Worse bandwidth but similar latency with 1T. The 1.5v on the NB does concern me slightly.

Cheers,
Niall
 
ned14 said:
Well Anandtech found that the Asus 650i board would allow 800Mhz at 1T but the MSI 650i board needed 2T.
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Hi - when I saw your post I got VERY excited! Unfortunately I can't find a direct comparison - the ASUS P5N-E SLi board was tested with OCZ Flex XLC (2x1GB), 2.30V (Micron Memory Chips) and the MSI P6N SLi Platinum was tested using OCZ Flex XLC PC2-6400 (2x1GB) (ProMOS Memory Chips) so unless there's another back-to-back test, I'm going to have to remain disappointed as my belief (it's the RAM, not the motherboard) would say that the Micron vs ProMOS RAM was the thing that made the 1T vs 2T difference rather than the board. The only way for me to know for sure would be to buy an MSI P6N SLi, so I suspect I now have to do that for the sake of my sanity :rolleyes:

If there is a direct comparison then could you save me a bit of cash and time by posting it? Otherwise I'm off to the OcUK competitors for an MSI board!
 
BIOS can also make a difference as it affects a lot of memory timings for the board e.g. afaik both abit & MSI tend to run fairly agressive sub-timing settings in their BIOS.
so really you have 3 variables - BIOS, mobo design & RAM.
 
WJA96 said:
... say that the Micron vs ProMOS RAM was the thing that made the 1T vs 2T difference rather than the board. The only way for me to know for sure would be to buy an MSI P6N SLi, so I suspect I now have to do that for the sake of my sanity :rolleyes:

If there is a direct comparison then could you save me a bit of cash and time by posting it? Otherwise I'm off to the OcUK competitors for an MSI board!
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Whoops! You are entirely correct - I had thought that they would surely use the same memory etc. to keep the variable factors constant, but then I'd be wrong! :(

If it's any help, my memory will do 4-4-4-12-16-1T at 760Mhz and 1.9v. It's close enough that better memory would probably work.

Cheers,
Niall
 
ned14 said:
I'm still considering maybe to bump my multiplier up to 9x and lower memory to 720 to yield 3.24 Ghz. Worse bandwidth but similar latency with 1T. The 1.5v on the NB does concern me slightly.
Click to expand...

I decided to go with this in the end as it made cooling much easier. Previously the case temperature was getting very warm despite my many fans sucking air out - NVidia's chipset seems to consume several extra watts for every 0.25v increase and it doesn't seem to understand consuming less power when it's less busy.

So I lower the FSB to 1512Mhz which only requires 1.35v on the NB, both of which mean that the chipset gets a LOT less warm. You might think that a funny number, but then half that is 756Mhz for the RAM. At this speed my RAM is stable at 4-4-4-12-16-1T and with the 1T it is actually just as fast as (actually slightly faster than) 2T at 800Mhz.

The funny 1512Mhz is because /4*9 = 3.4Ghz on the nose and it seemed like a nice round number. To get this stable requires +0.2v on Vcore which sadly greatly increases power consumption. Nevertheless, when idle with speedstep enabled it STILL consumes only 100W and 44C (according to TAT). When fully loaded, it consumes a truly impressive 212W yielding a 89C core temperature (according to TAT) which of course causes occasional emergency clock throttling (as the core temperature breaks 90C).

This clock throttling effectively makes 3.4Ghz my maximum - I could go higher, but my processor would actually become slower as it overheats. I have tried divx encoding and such and because they rely on main memory, they never exceed 80C or so and thus no throttling. I think it'll be just fine for normal usage. It's certainly rock solid stable anyway ... and this time I orthosed it during sunlight to be sure! ;)

Sandra 2007 benchmarks:

Int=31597 MIPS
Float=21337 MFLOPS
Memory=7655Mb/sec @ 66ns latency

That 66ns latency is better than the previous best of 69ns latency with 2T command rate. 1T really is impressive in the synthetic benchmarks!

So that's that then.

Cheers,
Niall
 
One MUST disable C1E in the BIOS to get anywhere at all. This is buried in the BIOS options.

Cheers,
Niall[/QUOTE]


hi all got my new rig up and runing, but got a strange prob i noticed that in cpuz my multi was at 6x so a bit of reserch on these forums tells me i need to disable seepstep and c1e? ive done speed step (altough its not called that on this board) but for the life of me i cant find c1e,ive been though the whole bios and i just cant see it please does anyone know how to find this???? thanks martin
 
tomo2big said:
One MUST disable C1E in the BIOS to get anywhere at all. This is buried in the BIOS options.

Cheers,
Niall
Click to expand...


hi all got my new rig up and runing, but got a strange prob i noticed that in cpuz my multi was at 6x so a bit of reserch on these forums tells me i need to disable seepstep and c1e? ive done speed step (altough its not called that on this board) but for the life of me i cant find c1e,ive been though the whole bios and i just cant see it please does anyone know how to find this???? thanks martin[/QUOTE]

Press F5 or maybe F4 (I think F4 changes the colour scheme) in various screens to show hidden options. I think C1E is in the CPU options off chipset options. Wherever the option to enable/disable the execute bit is.

Cheers,
Niall
 
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