AMD Athlon 64 x2 Brisbane Post-OC Questions

[MrHood22]

Hi, i'm a little in the dark in OCing.

Basically, I needed a budget CPU so I got this for $60 on the egg.

Stock: 2.1ghz Dual

OCed: 2.81ghz Dual

Now I'm happy with the results but i'm not sure if the way I got them is a good way.

Basically the only thing I did was...

Go into "Ai Booster" which is a OCing utility that I got with my Asus Mobo.

I set my external frequency at 281 and then my CPU multi at 10. So 281 x 10 = 2.81ghz.

I then set my HT Multi to 3x and my FSB is 845.

I then set my CPU voltage at 1.50 but it usually reads 1.53-1.56v

That's basically it.

That seems to easy to be true, is that a "cut corner" OC or is it the OC that will get the full deal out of my cpu.

Now my temps are very low i think. 30c at Idle and 50c at max. It's not reading it wrong because
a) ALL of my temps are very low, including my thermometer that is rigged up to my LED display
b) it's cold down here so the temps being low is believable

What i'm getting at with my temps is, I have room to OC move don't i?

Thanks

[holli4pirating]

Have you checked to see if you can maintain stability with a lower voltage? I find balancing the OC and the voltage to be the most time consuming part of the process (or maybe second to memory tweaks).

Or if you can push the OC farther with reasonable temps and volts, there's no reason not to go for it.

[MrHood22]

Ahh ok. Should I just run Prime95 Small FTT's overnight?

What do you think would be a good place to try to set the volt at?

Do I have to do anything with my Ram?

[holli4pirating]

I prime using in place, and overnight should be fine.

Start with what you have the volts at now. Keep dropping it by one setting until it's not stable. Then set it up by one. Go up till it's stable overnight.

For the ram, you want to balance low latencies with fast timings. If you don't really know what you're doing, I'd suggest leaving it on auto.

[MrHood22]

Wait so does that mean I have to run it overnight for like 8 days or something?

Should I just start off by running it for like 5 minutes and keep lowering it?

We'll say at 1.4 it's stable in 5 minutes but at 1.35 it won't run for 5 minutes so therefore I would put it at 1.4 and run it over night?

OR

should I put it high then run it overnight and if that's alright run it the next night. Then repeat?

[holli4pirating]

Wait so does that mean I have to run it overnight for like 8 days or something?

Should I just start off by running it for like 5 minutes and keep lowering it?

We'll say at 1.4 it's stable in 5 minutes but at 1.35 it won't run for 5 minutes so therefore I would put it at 1.4 and run it over night?



That should work. Maybe more like 15 mins on the initial runs and the increments should be smaller than .05

[MrHood22]

Alright, well i'm running In Place FTT's overnight.

I set the Voltage down to 1.5 in Ai Booster but it's reading as 1.54. How can I tell what it really is running at? Also, how can I tell what my rails are running at because my 8800GT isn't doing as good as it should and I want to see if the 12v rail is lacking.

[MrHood22]

Well I had it on overnight and it ran for 9 hours and 27 minutes until it got an error where the rounding was .5 and it was supposed to be less then .4.

Does that mean I up the voltage?

[MrHood22]

bump

Any hints on where I should go from here?

[holli4pirating]

I was traveling; hence the delayed response. Up the volts if temps are ok. Otherwise drop the FSB.

You also might want to loosen the ram timings to make sure that's not what's causing the error.

[MrHood22]

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/amd64-4000/11.html Would that work?

The part I was looking at was:
"I ran the processor at 1.5V, the memory at 2.7V with 2.5-4-4-8-2T timings and the HT multiplier at 3x. Using a 9x multiplier and a 300MHz memory bus allowed us to reach 2.7GHz with a very high maximum memory bandwidth."

Also, can someone post a link about RAM and how to OC it/what part it plays? I don't understand OCing ram at all.