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Overclocking my 955 BE ; Halp

D

duncandun

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 13, 2005
Messages
171
Hey guys.

Let me just post my system specs to get it out of the way:
Phenom II x4 955 BE C2
Asus M4a77td MB
4gb ddr3 1333
asus 7870 CUII
brand new xigmatek Gaia

So, the last 4 days before yesterday were interesting. Starting on saturday or friday my machine was having some incredibly high temps(max I saw was 100C) that I'm guessing weren't accurate or something because I'm pretty sure my CPU would have burned out at those temps for as long as it was at it.

Fast forward to yesterday, I got my new HS/F in the mail and put it on. Temps are down to 28-30C at idle stock. I have it OC'd to 3700(18.5) and its idling at 37.

So my problem is this:

I was able to get a not-really-stable(enough to get into windows, mess around, watch a few episodes of twin peaks, run wprime @ 6 threads no errors several times) 3.9 GHZ with 2.8 NB 2.2 HT and my ram @ 1066.

This morning when I went to test it with prime95 it crashed roughly 3-6 seconds after starting every time. 1334-1732's, small and large FFTs, anything sent it directly to a blue screen.

All of my crashes in windows end with a blue screen(or the new w8 bluescreen frowny face thing).

Now, I reset everything and started over with only underclocking the ram and am sitting at 3.7 GHZ @ 4.0 Vcore(which seems really high).

I'm afraid to run prime because I'm pretty sure its just going to crash. I'm getting a little tired of it, when I first put this machine together (4 years ago) I tried to OC and could never get it stable. Not sure what i'm doing wrong, but its frustrating.

Any tips or ideas would be great.

Edit:

So i ran prime95 and It crashed like I guessed it would. So when I restarted, I changed my Vcore to 1.55 (which is actually ~1.5 almost exactly on my motherboard, I guess due to droop. Fluctuates between 1.492 and 1.52 but stays at 1.504 mostly). Got into windows, ran p95 and low and behold It was stable for 3 runs of 1344-1792k on 4 threads for 3 minutes per.
Heat was good too, never went above 55C with all cores at 100%. That feels nice.

Anyway, any suggestions for how to proceed? should I just start lowering the voltage by one notch and testing it every time till i find the threshold? or should I bump up the multiplier till its no longer stable at 1.5v?

Also, how should I overclock the NB/HT stuff? I read that the phenoms dont get much out of overclocking unless the NB is also overclocked. This seems to support why yesterday when I initially got 3.9ghz I had no improvement in FPS when playing TLS on Dolphin emulator.

By the way, the whole reason I'm even overclocking is so I can play my wii collection in glorious HD through dolphin. I've been getting pretty terrible performance and attributed it to my CPU(which seems to be holding me back in other games as well(Arma/Dayz, BF3, etc). My GPU is rarely utilized more than 70%.

Anyway, thanks again! any tips about NB/HT overclocking and stuff would be amazing at this point.
 
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That was a little long and I zoned out but I skimmed over it so I'll say that your CPU/NB might be the probl. Drop it back down to stock settings and concentrate on getting 3.9 stable. 3.8 might be as far as you can go though because most 955's top out at 3.8 so you might be asking too much of it.

3.8 Ghz core and 2600 MHz CPU/NB would still be very capable and no difference performance wise between 3.9 and 2800.
 
MacLeod said:
That was a little long and I zoned out but I skimmed over it so I'll say that your CPU/NB might be the probl. Drop it back down to stock settings and concentrate on getting 3.9 stable. 3.8 might be as far as you can go though because most 955's top out at 3.8 so you might be asking too much of it.

3.8 Ghz core and 2600 MHz CPU/NB would still be very capable and no difference performance wise between 3.9 and 2800.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Yeah... sorry about the length.

Im going to try and bump up the NB, but I don't seem to have a NB votlage control in my bios. The only thing I could guess would be it is the Chipset Over Voltage.

Anyway, gonna play around with it and see what happens.
 
Also knock the HT down to 1800 or 2000 at most. While FX chips benefit from a HT bump, Phenoms do not and it can buy you some headroom.
 
MacLeod said:
Also knock the HT down to 1800 or 2000 at most. While FX chips benefit from a HT bump, Phenoms do not and it can buy you some headroom.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I've got the NB at 2600 and it is stable in windows though I have yet to test it with p95 or intelburn.

I'm hoping it passes, that would be great.

Also, think I could bump my ram up to 1066 from 800? Would this cause stability issues you think?
 
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