Overclocking Advice? DFI Lan Party nF4 Ultra w/ AMD 939 +3000

[kid_icarus]

HI everyone,

I need advice on settings for my new system. I've just thrown together a new rig as follows.

DFI Lan Party nF4 Ultra
AMD 939 +3000 (Winchester)
XFX Geforce 6600GT
Crappy Samsung PC3200 Ram 1GB
(may upgrade to OCZ EL PC3200 400MHZ DDR 1024MB DUAL CHANNEL GOLD VX MEMORY KIT 2X512MB CL-2-2-2-8 184PIN )
Thermaltake 480W Purepower Butterfly

Can anyone please offer me suggestions and "specific advice"
on how i can overclock and/or increase the performance of my system? This includes all bios settings and what not and potential windows configurations?
I doubt i can extract too much out of my ram but assuming I get the OCZ ram please provide me with your experiences on what the best configurations for this board and cpu and ram are?

It would be greatly appreciated.
I am purely newbie at this and can't find too many specific talks about ppl with the same MOBO and CPU.
If you have any links that would help that would be appreciated as well.
Thanks in advance.

[felix]

Actually many people have same config including me! (except the video card and power supply, everything else is same including the new ram)

Sorry no time to post but you can find links and a guide on overclocking at dfi-street.com

[Traum]

If you want to know more about overclocking in general, a quick google search will point you to more sites than you can handle.

http://www.ocforums.com

OC Forums have some pretty good articles and FAQs about overclocking in general, and there is a quite a good knowledge base there for many different setups.

You might also wanna check http://www.overclockers.com out as well. Some decent articles there as well.

-Rick

[felix]

bump ..

My OCZ ram arrived (now I got the same CPU, motherboard, RAM as you!)

Installed my pretty new ram and ran Memtest86 v3.2 on it and I'm getting a lot of errors (around 13 after several hours). This is at stock voltage 2.6. Does yours do this too?


Found this o/c guide the other day .. I thought it seems more easy to follow than some of the others I've seen ..

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=1497607&enterthread=y

Unfortunately it's not tailored to our DFI board. I wish someone would make one with easy to follow pictures for us newbies. :D I haven't done any overclocking at all since the days of the Celeron 300A where pretty much all of them would do 450Mhz with decent ram. :)

[kid_icarus]

I've increased my voltage to 3.2. My system hasn't been unstable once in terms of windows. And hasn't crashed once yet.
However running memtest I get a ton of errors I believe on test 5 or something.
By the time i'm on test 7 I think there are a ton of errors probably over 1000.

Nonetheless I've made my ram timing 2-2-2-8 as per the ocz ram saying that it can do that with 3.2V

I've increased my FSB to 230 as well. so i'm running at about 2070 Mhz

And so far so good. No instabilities as of yet. Thanks for the link




bump ..

My OCZ ram arrived (now I got the same CPU, motherboard, RAM as you!)

Installed my pretty new ram and ran Memtest86 v3.2 on it and I'm getting a lot of errors (around 13 after several hours). This is at stock voltage 2.6. Does yours do this too?


Found this o/c guide the other day .. I thought it seems more easy to follow than some of the others I've seen ..

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=1497607&enterthread=y

Unfortunately it's not tailored to our DFI board. I wish someone would make one with easy to follow pictures for us newbies. :D I haven't done any overclocking at all since the days of the Celeron 300A where pretty much all of them would do 450Mhz with decent ram. :)

[gambit_360]

You should definitely try to get higher overclocks. I've got the same cpu but Asus A8N-SLI, and I've got mine at 2430 Mhz. And that's a "safe" setting for me, definitely could go higher if it wasn't for my crappy ram.

Aim for higher overclocks but go slowly. You might need to use ratios for the ram though.

[scottyb]

I would be RMA'ing that RAM if you get errors in memtest at speeds its supposed to be able to hit, that's bad news. Or at least try it in a different machine.

[felix]

Yeah, mine locks up in Prime95 and errors in Memtest.

I'll check out the DFI and OCZ forums to see what I can do. From what I've read, they suggest testing one module at a time. Have you tried that? I haven't yet, because it's such a pain to have to add/remove it with the XP-120 installed. :(

[JLee]

i hate ocz =\

[ElvaSoShexai]

erm... i normally don't even let it go into windows unless memtest shows no errors...

did you test the ram before starting to OC it?

and 3.2 vdimm seems kinda high... most ppl seem fine leaving it around 2.8...
also try to relax your ram timings...

maybe read some of the stickies here:

http://www.ocforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3

[duckdown]

ocz rocks

[felix]

hmm .. according to one of the stickies in the OCZ forums ...

"This does not mean that the 3000+ is a bad processor by any means; however, it will simply require a greater HTT clock to hit the same speeds. Let's look at the following example: Say you want to clock your chip to 2.6 Ghz. The 3200+ can do this with 10x260, but the 3000+ will require 9x289 to hit the same overclock. So you can clearly see why, at the very least, a 10x multi will be desired by most. It is true that some TCCD sticks will have no problem hitting 289, but that does not hold true for every user as one's results may vary. Furthermore, anyone looking at memory such as the OCZ VX will need to think 10x at least, as most VX ram doesn't hit past 270."

from second post of http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=355145


Could this be why we are having problems even on default voltage?

[Wassup Doc]

VX requires 3.2v. People run all day long at 3.6v. The only requirement is that it requires a fan on top of the sticks to cool them.

[scottyb]

If you setup a divider you can make the CPU OC work with less expensive RAM.Can the divider be set at 5:4 or 6:5 on the DFI board?

Could this be why we are having problems even on default voltage?[/QUOTE]

[kid_icarus]

i want to increase the voltage for the ram to above 3.2
but it says i need to turn off auto cpu vid voltage
but when i change these settings i can't load the system and always have to reset the bios.
does anyone know what i need to set these thigns to?
maybe i need to set the cpu vid startup voltage as well....

[gambit_360]

FYI, the default voltage for the cpu is 1.4V. When you turn off auto cpu voltage, what's there by default might not be 1.4V.

I also hope you guys are considering the HyperTransport frequency. As this does NOT overclock well and can seriously mess up your system if you go too high.

[kid_icarus]

HT should stay at 1000 right?

5 X 200Mhz?
so if i change my fsb to 230.... the HTT should be lowered...
but since they are multiples of 1 i can't really go down to 4 unless i go up to 250...


is this the right logic?





FYI, the default voltage for the cpu is 1.4V. When you turn off auto cpu voltage, what's there by default might not be 1.4V.

I also hope you guys are considering the HyperTransport frequency. As this does NOT overclock well and can seriously mess up your system if you go too high.

[gambit_360]

With your motherboard, you could probably hit 1100 HT. However, there are motherboards are can't even go a few mhz above 1000 HT. 1200 HT would be really pushing it. The max I would ever go is 1100 HT.

You should lower the HT multiplier to 4x if you want to get a good overclock.
Doesn't matter if the HT is well below 1000. The performance gain you get from it is negligible; what matters most is CPU speed.

[felix]

FYI, the default voltage for the cpu is 1.4V. When you turn off auto cpu voltage, what's there by default might not be 1.4V.

I also hope you guys are considering the HyperTransport frequency. As this does NOT overclock well and can seriously mess up your system if you go too high.
Checked with CPU-Z just now. My cpu voltage is 1.36V by default. I guess the exact number fluctuates a bit, along with core speed, HTT, etc.

I'm pretty sure it's not a CPU problem, as Prime95 runs fine on the CPU stress test.