Overclocking Maximus Formula

[sniffsunder]

I'm venturing into the complicated world of overclocking as a bit of a newbie, although I have done a small amount of tweaking in the past. I've read a few of the overclocking guides found on the internet and all of them say that the first and most important thing is to lock the PCI BUS at 33MHz and the PCI-E BUS at 100MHz.

I've found the setting in the BIOS for locking the PCI-E BUS but cannot seem to locate the setting for the PCI BUS, can anyone point me in the right direction and also tell me if there are any other important settings I should look at before I venture any further. I've also read that Spread Spectrum and Legacy USB should be disabled.

Thanks

Sniffs ......

 

[sniffsunder]

I've been merrily tweaking my BIOS for a couple of days now and seem to be getting the hang of some of the settings for this board.

I've kept DRAM:CPU Ratio to 1:1, locked the multiplier at 8, CPU and PCI-E spread spectrum to disabled and PCI-E BUS at 100MHz. But last night I ran into a bit of a limit when increasing the FSB BUS to 450MHz, at this setting the system locked up and wouldn’t boot into Vista so I reduced the frequency in 5MHz stages until I managed to get Vista loading OK @ 425MHz. However, at this frequency the system performance isn’t satisfactory; in fact it’s not much better than at stock settings, all temperatures seem OK and well below limits.

DRAM:CPU Ratio: 1:1
Multiplier: 8
FSB BUS: 425MHz
CPU Frequency: 3400MHz
Memory BUS: 425 (850MHz)
Memory timings: 4.4.4.13
DRAM Voltage: 2.1v

Surely I can push this baby further than this, is it time to start increasing voltage, are there any other settings I should be looking at, has anybody got any tips.

Thanks, Sniffs ………

 

[andyr]

Hi , if your using a qx9650 cpu then why not go for 400 x 10 , that would be a better clock to start with , your nb volts should be approx 1.5 - 1.55 to get fsb higher than 425 , if you have the non se version and air cooled nb watch your temps , also cpu pll volts probably needs to be higher in the region of 1.6
dont know what is safe volts on air for your cpu but checkout the other threads and see what people are giving them.