Is it time to give up?

[rrng]

Hello everyone, this is my first post here. Can anyone help with my troubles?

All a bit disappointing really, for my first overclock...

Stable at cpu - 225 at auto vcore (1.5v)
cpu - 230 - +0.025v, stable
cpu - 234 - + 0.5v won't pass 10 minutes of Prime.
It's like it hits a wall at this point.
All with 166 mem divider (also tried lower). HT set to 4X (also tried 3X). PCI express/SATA are locked. Temps not raising above 40C.
Tried raising the dimm volts, but no joy. Same with chipset.
Tried changing memory timings and no joy.
Don't want to put any more vcore - I was only aiming for a mild overclock of 2.4 Ghz, and don't really want to stress things too much (did try 1.6V but didn't help). Does this just sound like a poor chip? It's E6 revision Venice, which I've heard are not as good as E3, but thought I would get better than this?

tried also getting the memory to overclock better at 1:1:

won't go past 220mhz with 2.9 V, again don't want to put any more volts in. Memory will run at 1T 2.5-3-3-6, tried 2.5-3-3-7, 2.5-3-3-8 and finally 2.5-4-4-8 - which caused a blank screen and reset when starting prime.

Ah well. Have I done anything wrong or am I just unlucky?
Specs are:

A64 Venice E6 3200 with Gigabyte G-power pro cooler
Epox 9NPAJ-SLI
OCZ Premier 2 X 512
Tagan TG480-U01

Thanks.

 

[Anime_Fan]

3 things come to mind when reading this

Whats your chipset voltage?
CPU is a possible (Dud)
Your board isnt good for OCing


My guess is the later

3200+ Venice should be easily able to hit at least 250FSB with average cooling.

Speaking of that what are your temps

 

[N H O]

the board is a very nice overclocker, PCStats was able to get it up to 324mhz htt while hexus was able to get it to 314mhz, so the board shouldnt be a factor

 

[rrng]

Temps are around 40 at load with fan at highest.
chipset is 1.5v, 1.6v makes no difference. The board does 240mhz with a lower cpu multiplier (didn't try more).
Lowering the cpu multiplier and everything is OK. So I guess this points towards the CPU?

 

[N H O]

it could be the cpu, but errr hav u tried using clockgen?

 

[rrng]

I've got clockgen installed but not used it to overclock - just to check that things were locked/agreed with my BIOS settings..
Any advantage of using that over BIOS directly?

 

[wadec22]

I've got clockgen installed but not used it to overclock - just to check that things were locked/agreed with my BIOS settings..
Any advantage of using that over BIOS directly?

No advantage there. Sounds like a dud CPU. Great mobo.

 

[rrng]

oh well. that's what I was thinking. pretty bad luck.
cheers.