Opteron 165 and Memory Divider Issue

C

covertash

Gawd
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Apr 24, 2006
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Hey everyone!

I recently had the opportunity to switch out my old Asrock 939 Dual-SATA2 board for an Asus A8N-Sli Premium board. The only other change in my system is the addition of the Corsair power supply. The rest of my specs are in my sig.

My problem is my RAM (the OCZ4002048ELDCPE-K v2.0). On the old Asrock board I was able to run the same OC and use the 133MHz (266MHz DDR) divider, which yields an effective 198MHz memory clock. However, when doing the same thing on the Asus board, the system would hang at the "Detecting IDE" stage.

I have tried loosening the timings to 3-4-4-8 2T, played with the voltages, played with the HTT divider among other settings. The only thing that worked was to reduce the multiplier down to the 100MHz (200MHz DDR) divider which yields an effective memory clock of 150MHz, but also allows me to run my stock timings of 2-3-2-5 1T.

So I have a few questions:
1) Are there any modded BIOS out there that allow more memory dividers for the Asus motherboard?
2) Am I losing any real performance by having this ~50MHz deficit on the memory clock?
3) Any ideas what the reason may be for this combination of hardware not to work with the 133MHz divider that previously worked so well on the Asrock board?

Any help you guys can offer would be greatly appreciated!
 
It's probably your board. I'd try flashing to a new or different bios, and I'm sure there has to be some modded bios's out there. You'd have to look though.
 
Hey, thanks for the response.

Unfortunately, I've tried with the BIOS that came with the board, which is the most recent official BIOS (1009), and I'm now running the latest BIOS which is beta (1302). Both do not exhibit any changes in behavior.

I've extensively tried Googling for modded BIOS as well but with no results. But if anyone can answer the following questions that would be helpful as well too:

So I have a few questions:
1) Are there any modded BIOS out there that allow more memory dividers for the Asus motherboard?
2) Am I losing any real performance by having this ~50MHz deficit on the memory clock?
3) Any ideas what the reason may be for this combination of hardware not to work with the 133MHz divider that previously worked so well on the Asrock board?
Click to expand...

Thanks for your time! :)
 
I'd guess it's just the board. Possibly a newer bios may help.

To make up for your loss, maybe you can get away with tightening the timings a bit instead?
 
Hey scoob, thanks for the response.

I have the latest BIOS that's available, although it is beta, but there is no difference.

My RAM is at the tightest timings that are available, 2-3-2-5 at 1T. So basically I'm not losing out on much with the memory clock at such a low speed of 150MHz huh? If not, I can live with it.

Any insight is appreciated. :)
 
I'm not very familiar with the timing settings in your bios, but have you tried changing any of the secondary timings. If you could post a screen shot of your bios it might help others help you.
 
Sorry I've been pretty busy as of late, but I'll have to borrow a camera from someone later on to take the pictures of my BIOS settings.

In any case, I think I've also come to the conclusion that I'm not really losing out too much on a slower memory clock. This was just the general consensus that I have gathered from some of the readings that I've done. CPU clock > Memory clock is what I've just been reading about. So again, if I'm not really losing much I'll just leave it the way it is. Anyone agree? Disagree?

Thanks for your time. :)
 
A VERY interesting development.

After lots of digging and more experimenting, I've found that these OCZ Platinums can be overclocked very nicely (something that I didn't think was possible). The mistake I made in the past was running with the stock timings (2-3-2-5 @ 400MHz DDR) at higher frequencies. Now with relaxed timings of 2.5-3-3-5 I've cranked the memory clock to 494MHz!!! :eek: Keep in mind this is all at 1T command rate too! :D So far so good with stability in Memtest and Orthos. :cool:

Thanks to everyone for helping. :)
 
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