DFI UT nf3 250 Overclocking?

[twodeko]

i was wondering if anyone here has toyed with the DFI's nf3-250 board. its sitting in my front hall and i will install it tonight (at work now), but if anyone has tips or advice please pass them my way!

hardware...

3400+ Clawhammer
2x 512 Mushkin v2 lvl2 TCCD
DFI UT nf3 250
Stock HSF
9800pro

thanks!

twodeko

[edit] btw, i have 2x SATA raptors which have caused some trouble in the past with overclocking but i hear this board is fully locked

 

[ashmedai]

Tip #1...one Raptor usually works better than two.

Other than that, there's some good info on DFI-Street. It's an A64 remember so the latency's more important than the raw clock rate on that TCCD. Everest is your friend.

Some nice guides in my sig.

 

[tsuehpsyde]

I beg to differ with Ash on this, as I love my raptors in a raid 0. You just have to make sure they're on locked sata ports, which on my board are #3 and #4. And on that clawhammer, if you run two sticks your memory controller is gonna crap out around 240MHz-ish unless it's better than most. Also, with one stick, I can go up to 265MHz but not 270MHz.

And TCCD isn't bad, but it's not the greatest....I wouldn't pay almost $300 for G-Skill unless you really want 1:1 on a chip with low multipliers...I'd rather dump that cash into OCZ VX myself. I just got my TCCD because it was $215 for both sticks. So obviously me and Ash disagree again.

 

[ashmedai]

I actually have a RAID 0, use it for video encoding where it helps a little. Plus I didn't have anything better to do with the old drives last time I got bigger ones.

And while I have a decent amount of petty cash I don't have so much that I'll go spending $200 or $300 on memory that I can get for $100, especially not when there's no such thing as 1:1 on A64 anyway. You can run a 1/01 memory ratio (usually shows as 200) but the funny thing is, that's not the memory divider itself, it's used in the calculation to determine the divider - which runs off of the CPU itself, not the HT clock. A 1:1 memory divider on an A64 would mean the memory is running at the same speed as the CPU, which isn't happening any time soon with DDR.

TCCD's good enough stuff all right, but it specializes in clock speed over all else. It'd be going straight in my 2.4C if I had any, my A64 wouldn't really have much use for it.

 

[twodeko]

aah thanks for the replies!

as far as the TCCD, i have 2 256mb sticks of BH5 mushkin but at around 180 on newegg the other day... i couldnt resist the TCCD and got that instead of some G.Skill that was equally priced with BH5.

i dont have the raptors raided, i used to but now they are their alone with one running windows and another linux. so far so good, but finding that locked SATA controller was always a pain and i found out with my arrays being corrupted from high HT speeds on the SATA controller.

as far as 240... on my last mother board i couldnt seem to bring the ram much past 210 and had no idea why. always had to throw in a divider past high HT speeds, but i guess a 166 divider would give me 200mhz at 240 bus speed which was where the ram should be crapping out any reason why it does that?

what have people been getting for clock speeds on a clawhammer these days?

 

[ashmedai]

Hehehe...Linux on a Raptor. Sweet.

Memory divider != memory ratio.

On A64 you can control the memory ratio, which is used to calculate the memory divider (and thus the resulting memory speed). It's all hanging off the CPU clock and not the FSB since they changed everything around with the HT architecture as well as the on-chip memory controller.

CPU Speed / Memory Divider = Memory Speed.

CPU Speed = HT clock x CPU multiplier

Memory Divider = round up the result of ( CPU multiplier / Memory ratio )

So for example, that 3400+ Clawhammer gives you up to an 11x multi, right? So using that multiplier...

240MHz HT clock * 11x multi = 2640MHz CPU speed.

11x multi / (166/200 ratio) = 13.25 rounded up = 14.

So you're running a divider of 14 for a memory speed of 188MHz. Nothing like what you're used to hearing about on Intel, eh?

Not sure what Clawhammers are normally capable of, but 2.64GHz would seem pretty respectable.

 

[twodeko]

thank you very much!

im trying to figure out all the DFI memory settings now, quite a bit to tweak!

 

[tsuehpsyde]

I can bench my 3400+ Clawhammer CG @ 2.6GHz with 1.7v, but I had her REALLY cold, and any higher and she complained and more voltage caused problems too for some reason....idunno, by the time I got to benching she started getting fussy.

But then again, my clawhammer doesn't really scale well....