Phenom II 940 w/ Crosshair II

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DarkTemplar

n00b
Joined
Aug 27, 2008
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Hi guys. I did see Firebug's thread a couple down, but didn't want to hijack his so I started my own. I'm trying to OC my new Phenom II 940. Here are my system specs and below I'll go into greater detail as to what my problems have been. In a nutshell, I need some assistance from anyone, preferably someone with my same motherboard, who's overclocked before and could provide some light into the giant Tweaker menu inside the Crosshair II BIOS. Thanks in advance!

AMD Phenom II 940BE w/ Sunbeam Core Contact Freezer
ASUS Crosshair II Formula
8GB (4x2GB PC1066 Corsair Dominator)
EVGA GTX 260 FTW
3 x Seagate SATA II hard drives
1000W Coolermaster PS (Came with Stacker 830)

I’m barely squeezing out a 3.6GHz overclock on that bastard and it doesn’t seem that fast at all. I might have to downclock the memory and see if that makes a difference. I guess PC1066 memory is just PC800 memory OC’d. In any event, running 4 sticks at max speed can be bad for the memory controller… according to some forum posters anyway. I’m going to do a bunch of research on it today and see if I can’t get to that elusive 3.8GHz. Right now my temps are holding steady at 41C. What’s strange is that I was playing WoW and it didn’t crash. I load up CPU HWMonitor and no crash. Firefox crashes at random and so I start to run Prime95 and boom, blue screen. Drop out of windows and mess with the timings a bit more and still no closer to a solution. I gave up around midnight and just dropped memtest in there and let it run while I slept. Woke up this morning to memtest humming along on its 7th pass of my 8GB of RAM, no errors. At this point I’m at a loss, so I figured, shoot, I have to go to work anyway, I’m just going to drop Spinrite in there for kicks and see what it turns up. According to my estimates it shouldn’t be done for another 9 hours.
 
Yea, I saw that. I also read that anything over 1.5V is not the best idea ever. Also, Kyle had mentioned that he doesn't recommend that kind of extreme voltage. However, I'm still curious exactly what settings I should apply. Currently I'm only adjusting by the multiplier. I know there's more to it than that, but I'm not sure which settings I should mess with. I'm in the learning stages right now, so please go easy on me. Should I assume that the VCORE voltage setting would be the CPU voltage that CPU-Z shows and that I should bump that up to 1.5V? Also, what about the CPU Frequency? Does this need to be changed at all?
 
I guess my question is what do you expect to gain...Most of the benchies for the AMD chips overclocking show they do not scale well over 3.0 ghz..so you have diminishing returns. It is always cool to see it done, but if your looking for production, there is not a whole lot to gain.
 
phenoms were typically bad cpu/ht frequency overclockers hence the multiplier free black editions. whether these phenom 2 chips are receptive to frequency overclocking, i don't know. you can try pushing the cpu frequency a bit above 200mhz. you also need to be aware of the ht multiplier. dropping a notch or two might also help you attain a higher overall clock speed. you might also need to add voltage to the ht bus to achieve stability. yes, the vcore setting is the cpu voltage read out in cpuz.
 
@Hasoos: Well, that's just no good. The problem was I wanted to see some serious speed increases in Windows and in other applications in terms of boot up and load times. I hadn't read anything about the diminishing returns. And now that you've told me I'm going to be depressed for weeks! Thanks a lot! LOL. Totally kidding. Thanks for the heads up though.

@rennyf77: Yea, I've seen many overclocks for the new Phenom II 940BE hit about 3.8GHz stable with air cooling. I just don't know much about the specifics of how everything from the CPU-Z screenshots match up with the settings in the Crosshair II BIOS.

Thanks again for all the inputs guys! I'm trying 3.6GHz now with a 1.4V VCORE. I'll keep everyone posted of my findings. Problem is, the majority of good overclocks come from the new AMD chipset... not the NVIDIA one.
 
My Ph2 is running 3.8 with 1.52v to it. rock solid and i think i can even drop the voltage a bit with good stability.
 
I'm running a 780a SLI board as well. temps never get above 44C at full load in my place when its warm. I'm running watercooling so temps are never really an issue.
 
AMD's 45nm process is different than intels. AMD's 45'ers can handle higher voltages than intel's 45'ers safely.
 
Well, I'm back at 3.6GHz for now running at just an 18X multiplier and the VCORE set to 1.50V. However, CPU-Z still shows the Core VID at 1.350V. Not sure if that's good or bad, but I'm assuming it's not good, seeing as how most people show that at 1.50V when OCing this chip. Maybe I'm changing the wrong setting in the BIOS? Who knows. Either way I'm getting sick of rebooting this dumb motherboard because every time I do I have to watch it hang up on the LCD Poster at EN SETUP and then I've got to manually power it down and yank the power cable just to get it to start up again. The settings all save, but it's annoying to say the very least when I'm changing one minute (SP?) detail after another trying to get this thing to run properly.

In other news, I've successfully downclocked my RAM to PC800 after noticing my NB/SB heatsinks were too hot to keep my finger on for anything longer than a second or two. Loaded up HW Monitor from CPUID and was told that it may certainly be at 80C-90C. That was exciting. I read that the load from 4 chips running at 1066 was sometimes too much for these chipsets to handle, so maybe this will help. It won't boot unless I keep the memory timings at AUTO so I'm stuck with 5-5-5-18 as opposed to 5-5-5-15. Not sure why, but it just won't post unless I let it do that. Any other thoughts would be greatly appreciated because this is getting very annoying.
 
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