i7 920 with 12 Gigs Ram

T

TheQuestor

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2004
Messages
130
Ok as I have said in the other thread I have a P6T-Deluxe, i7 920 and G.Skill DDR3 1600 Memory. Fine.
Today I recieved my other 6 gigs of ram [after running for the last 4 months on just 6 gigs fine] and I popped it in and all hell broke lose.

Clock reset and it would not hold an overclock.

I took out the new 6 gigs and everything went back to normal.
Took out the old 6 gigs and put in the new 6 gigs and everything works as normal.

Updated the bios [which I KNEW was going to cause hell because Asus and Bios updates SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!] and as expected bork bork bork.

I was finally able to get the system stable again with my normal QPI settings of 210 and memory timings of 8.8.8.20 but now it says it is 3.98 Ghz instead of 4.0Ghz. Oh well I can deal with that more or less, but I still can not overclock with all 6 slots populated. Has anyone else had this issue?

2nd bite tonight. My Windows 7 MCE machine had a HD 4350 in it and it well sucked. laggy in MCE but everything worked. I removed the card and tossed in a new HD 4670 and the damn onboard nic died. Man some days I hate computers. The 2 upgrades I was really looking forward tonight both failed miserably
 
Six slots populated limits the memory speed to 1333. Correct me if I'm mistaken.
 
Your OC's WILL change when you go from 6 to 12GB. You will need to go thru the entire process of determining your NEW stable OC's. In all likelihood, your new OCs will be lower. I had to do the same in my sig rig when I went from 6 to 12.

 
capreppy said:
Your OC's WILL change when you go from 6 to 12GB. You will need to go thru the entire process of determining your NEW stable OC's. In all likelihood, your new OCs will be lower. I had to do the same in my sig rig when I went from 6 to 12.

Click to expand...

QFT. As soon as you add (or remove) RAM, you have to find that stable sweet spot all over. Might also have to loosen the ram timings or decrease the frequency in some cases.
 
I may just keep the 6 gigs since I have yet to run out of memory even in Vista :eek: And my Beta testing is fine with 6 gigs in Windows 7. I would hate to think I would have to lose speed to gain memory which gains me no speed at all at this point. Thanks for the feed back all and keep it coming :)
 
TheQuestor said:
I may just keep the 6 gigs since I have yet to run out of memory even in Vista :eek: And my Beta testing is fine with 6 gigs in Windows 7. I would hate to think I would have to lose speed to gain memory which gains me no speed at all at this point. Thanks for the feed back all and keep it coming :)
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Have you tried to find a good point with all 12GB present? I'd personally hate halving my RAM over a couple hundred MHz.
 
Loosening the timings will have no real world difference. Yes in artificial benchmarks, you'll see a difference (maybe depends on the benchmark), but honestly going from Cas 7 to Cas 8 (or 8 to 9 as I can't tell from your sig) is not going to amount to a hill of beans. If however you have applications that could use 12 vs 6GB of ram or you multi-task large progrms, it would behove you to spend the time and find that sweet spot. Honestly, it shouldn't take you that long to find it. It's the "final" P95 run that takes the longest time just to confirm your settings are good. You will find very quickly (as you've already indicated) if a setting isn't good enough.
 
Yeah. Part of the reason I am at 3.89. I'm under water, but the 920 (with HT on) does get pretty dang hot.
 
capreppy said:
Yeah. Part of the reason I am at 3.89. I'm under water, but the 920 (with HT on) does get pretty dang hot.
Click to expand...

I had to change back to my oldest water block because of heat. My newer block got so hot one night that my machine shut down and i could barely touch the water block, the tubes were so hot they were like jello. I honestly thought my pump died and with it my cpu. But after letting it cool down a while and switching out water blocks it went back down to about 120 idle and 150 load which is crazy hot lol. Now that I think about it, I guess it is time to order a block designed FOR the i7 :( damnit, isn't there going to be a time that I don't have to buy something for this rig? If I didn't get so much damn enjoyment out of it I'd sell it and buy a wii or something :p
 
When I went from 6 GB of Corsair DDR3-1600 to 12 GB, I had to make some small and minor changes to get everytyhing rock stable again. Like 0.2-0.5 V here and there. :)
 
like everyone else said, you'll have to lower you OC a bit, loosen your ram timings and/or add some voltage
 
silverstonec2d said:
like everyone else said, you'll have to lower you OC a bit, loosen your ram timings and/or add some voltage
Click to expand...

I was able to get it to work but ONLY after downgrading my bios. The board shipped with 0805 which isn't even listed in the downloads section :( And against better reasoning I went ahead and updated it to the latest 1206 and it was bad. My USB devices would not initialize until Windows loaded which means I had to stick on a ps/2 keyboard so I could even get into the bios. DRAG!. So on a whim I downgraded to 0905 and now my USB works again, AND I was able to get this thing stable @ 20x200 but had to lower my memory to 1194. Which sucks. I left everything else on auto and it feels pretty much the same as it did before which is good.
Voltage is high for my liking on CPU but again it is the auto setting on the MB
Strange thing is the ram is 1600 @ 9.9.9.24 but it defaults and runs awesome @ 8.8.8.20.

cpuz-cpu.jpg

cpuz-mem.jpg

taskmgr.jpg
 
Lowest I can get it to boot with is 1.320 :( While it is better than the 1.424 it isn't THAT much better and I tried all the way from 1.100 v to 1.320. It wouldn't post at 1.1 it posted at 1.150 but not boot Vista, it would boot Vista @ 1.200 - 1.310 but it would crash durring the loading sound but 1.320 seems pretty good. I haven't load tested it yet, but it hasn't crashed yet which is a good sign.

I have another 920 coming on Monday and will play with that chip a little to see if it will boot with lower vCore.
 
TheQuestor said:
I know but it is what the mb sets for default for the oc. and it runs rock solid. I May play with it a little and see if I can lower it and keep this thing stable.
Click to expand...

You should definitely consider lowering it to keep the heat down and to minimize the risk of too much voltage. The goal is always the highest stable overclock at the lowest voltage possible.
 
PC_User said:
You should definitely consider lowering it to keep the heat down and to minimize the risk of too much voltage. The goal is always the highest stable overclock at the lowest voltage possible.
Click to expand...

In the 10+ years I have been seriously overclocking my cpu's I have yet to have one fry one me :p Even my old Dual AMD 2100+. I have water cooled since then as well. so heat really isn't that much an issue for me. What I worry about is premature electronic migration at high voltages though and while I was able to lower my vCore .11v I was hoping to be able to lower it even more. It only droped about 2 degrees F which isn't jack :( So I am ordering a Swiftech Apogee™ GTZ Universal CPU Waterblock as soon as they get back in stock. I'm hoping it will drop my temps down another 15 degrees F over what I have now which is a POS Thermaltake block, it works, but not as well with the i7 as it did with my old Q6600 :p
 
TheQuestor said:
In the 10+ years I have been seriously overclocking my cpu's I have yet to have one fry one me :p Even my old Dual AMD 2100+. I have water cooled since then as well. so heat really isn't that much an issue for me. What I worry about is premature electronic migration at high voltages though and while I was able to lower my vCore .11v I was hoping to be able to lower it even more. It only droped about 2 degrees F which isn't jack :( So I am ordering a Swiftech Apogee™ GTZ Universal CPU Waterblock as soon as they get back in stock. I'm hoping it will drop my temps down another 15 degrees F over what I have now which is a POS Thermaltake block, it works, but not as well with the i7 as it did with my old Q6600 :p
Click to expand...

Higher volts = higher temps = potential less OC....

Simple as that.
 
i think 3x2gb is the new 2x1gb for the x58 platform :-P 6gb gives me the same effective o/c as 3gb when it's split into 3 chips

Some people's i7 temps are really high. I dunno why mine are so much lower - even in prime95 testing i don't go above ~65c with my noctua cooler - but i see many people reporting temps over 80c! It takes more than 30 minutesto get temps to 65 - 10 minutes of full load results in ~61-63c on all cores. Then again, my windows cpu-z vcore is more like 1.31v. The temp variations are extreme, and i don't think it's stepping based; my 920 has a packing date of 11/26/2008!
 
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well, LinX does cause higher temps..but only by about 4c. Max is 69c with LinX...
i guess it could just be that my case has better airflow than alot of other people's who are reporting higher temps...
 
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