Overclock limited on Asus premium with Opt 144

[man_from_uncle]

I have written a similar post in the motherboards section and got a fairly useful relpy, but I am still unsure if i have maxed out my overclock or if there is still some room to push. So I thought i'd look for a second opinion.

I have a Asus A8N-SLi premium, an Opt 144 and 2x1gig of XMS3500LL. I am currently hitting a ceiling of 2.6ghz at 9x289 with a 166 divider and x3 HTT multi. I know from trial and error that the ram can cope at 250 easily enough and the processor is currently both prime and superpi 32m stable, so I figure it can go at least a bit further. Temps are low too. However if I push the HTT from 289 to 290 it just won't boot. I can get back to the set up but not to windows.

I am guessing that it's the motherboard that has hit its limit but I am not sure. I have heard of people getting 300+ fairly regularly so I am wondering if there is a setting or a BIOS revision that lets you go further.

Thanks for the help.

 

[man_from_uncle]

Thanks for the responses guys. I had a bit of a tinker last night with the intention of trying just one last time before flashing to 1009. I tried again with higher volts, setting it to the board max of 1.55, and what do you know? the imaginary barrier of 289 disappeared! I tested it in small increminets to start with and did superpi 32m at each step. Once i got to 2.7 i tried a few larger steps and settled with superpi 1m as it was getting late. I got 32m down to 29 mins 2 sec (at 2.69ghz) and 1m down to 29 secs (at 2.73ghz). In fact I manged to get to windows at 312x9 and even did the FEAR performance test once before I got a blue screen.

I am going to prime all day now at 2.6 and if that works i'll prime tomorrow at a little higher.

So far I am very very pleased with each and every component.

 

[man_from_uncle]

stan, if you want to lower the divider you need to alter something call memory index (or something). It defaults at 400 and you'll want to lower it to 266 (which is 133). Personally i found lowering it to 333 still kept me stable with my XMS3500 at pretty good timings and lowered my superpi 32m time by nearly 3 mins compared to running 266. Whatever other peoples experiance, keeping the ram running as fast as possible has certainly given me a VERY significant boost.

I am also using RAID, RAID 5 in fact, using the silicon image sata connections. So far no problems at all. It does require a particular update to the standard 3114 silicon image drivers though. Can't actually remember what that is, but i know it must be pretty straight forward as it gave me no problems in the slightest.