AMD X6 1090T More Overclocking Adventures! BSOD's

I have been quite succesfully running my AMD X6 1090T BE at 3.936GHZ, bearing in mind this on an AM2+ board being an M4N72-E.
Multi: X18
HT: 218.7Mhz
HT link: 2187Mhz
NB: 2616Mhz
Ram:8GB @ 872Mhz at 4-4-4-12-20 (2.1V) (4x2GB)
CPU Vcore: 1.456V
CPU-NB: 1.3V

Turbo disabled, Cool and Quiet and C1E enabled!

This gives me very reasonable results and as this is a video encoding machine, am quite pleased.

I have always seen that these chips can be pushed further at seemingly lower voltages and I yearn for 4.2Ghz which some people have managed to achieve.

The main reason I am writing this though is because I always found it so hard to get good information, it involved much trawling around and searching through various people's guides, and I had several BSOD along the way.

From what I have myself witnessed, I would like to offer a theory as to what some of these mean in lay man's terms when overclocking the AMD.

Common ones include:

Secondary Processor Clock Interupt
A problem has been detected and windows has shut down
An incorrectable hardware issue

All of these basically mean that you are going to far, either the processor has reached its limit and a core is shutting down, or its overheating. No matter what I tried, when I recieve these I couldn't push any futher, more voltage did not help.

By the way, the most worrying, an Incorrectable Hardware Issue, is correctable just not by Windows, the blind panic of thinking your CPU has failed totally is very disconcerting! Usual means voltage is wrong somewhere and Windows can't control it.

IRQL not less or equal
System Service exception

I believe this can be solved by adding CPU-NB voltage, it seems to be related to the communication between the HT link and the IMC(NB) on the chip, another reason this crops up is if your multipliers are too far apart it seems, it used to be that CPU-NB and the HT Link were linked together but now they can be unlinked, however if you set a CPU-NB multiplier that is more than 2 above the HT, this error seems to be thrown up, say 11X cpu-nb and 8X HT link.

This then can be corrected by keeping these together somewhat, obvioulsy people want to push the CPU-NB higher these days, but I found that sticking within 2 multipliers of the HT link kept the system stable, say 10X and 8X.

In the overclock I mention at the start, the CPU-NB multiplier was 12X and the HT link was 10X and this was stable, however if I pushed the CPU-NB up one more I would get an error.

Also you may recieve the system service error if you try to push the HT link too much past 2600Mhz which is the peak speed of HT3.0.

So far example when I tried matching my NB of 2616 with my HT link I would get a BSOD with system service exception.

Essentially the "system" or the motherboard in this case cannot handle what you are asking it to do.

On this board I have tired everything to get beyond 4Ghz and I have finally come to the conclusion that MY CPU cannot handle anything more.

My peak CPU case temp, is 57C under full load.

Thanks to my cooler it doesn't alter much even if I load 1.504V onto the Vcore, however even with this much extra voltage, I would always BSOD or would see a core fail while monitoring in Core Temp, anything above 4Ghz and the core fails on this particular CPU.

Assuming its not a power delivery error on the part of the VRM's on the board of course.

Anyway, my best overall clock after much more fiddling:

Multi: X16
HT: 250
HT Link: 2500Mhz
NB: 2750Mhz
Ram: 8GB @ 1000Mhz 5-5-5-15-20 (2.1V) (4x2GB)
Cpu Vcore: 1.488V
Cpu NB: 1.3V

Total Overclock is 4.0Ghz exactly and I will have to settle for that.

One other thing it seems that Windows Experience Index is very sensitive to bad Overclocks, it will BSOD if anything is wrong!

I now have :

CPU: 7.6
Ram: 7.7
Graphics: 7.9
Graphics: 7.9
Disk: 5.9

My disc is weak because it isnt an SSD as yet.

Hope this helps somebody, it may only be relevant to my board, and with the FX processors around, AMD people are moving on, although I hear that even the 8 core ones are struggling to beat X6 BE on a lot of benchmarks.

Oh well after passing lots of benchmarks, the last listed overclock failed intel burn test which i used after having a random BSOD after 2 hours of playing FSX.

So back to the drawing board:

Multi: x18
HT: 220
Ht Link: 2200
NB: 2659mhz
Ram: 8GB @ 880mhz at 4-4-4-12-18 DDR2 (2.1V) (4x2GB)
Cpu Vcore: 1.488v
Cpu NB: 1.220V
HT v: 1.3V
NB v: 1.4V

Turbo disabled, Cool and Quiet and C1E enabled!

Speed = 3.963ghz on all 6 cores

Intel Burn Test on MAXIMUM stable

In Core temp, I have adjusted the offset by 10 to give more accurate data, even with this addition, idles at 27C max temps in Intel Burn test MAXIMUM were 60C, but apparently the temps get more accurate when nearer the higher temp ranges so the offset imakes for a bad result really.

I have my 1090T stable at 4GHz. Takes a lot of voltage tho 1.448v. NB is @ 3GHz. Load temp is 56c running Prime.

The problem I've got is I can't push my RAM higher than 1600. When I try I get random blue screens. I'm hoping ASRock puts out a better BIOS soon.

Tweek your not the only one who pointed that out but AMD chips require some voltage to reach a certain level im running the 8120 @4.4 Ghz @ 1.42 stable but if i bump it to 4.5 it freezes or Bsod on prime so I figure to get what i want i have to hit almost where you are

Thanks for the info Nomad!

tw33k said:

I have my 1090T stable at 4GHz. Takes a lot of voltage tho 1.448v. NB is @ 3GHz. Load temp is 56c running Prime.

The problem I've got is I can't push my RAM higher than 1600. When I try I get random blue screens. I'm hoping ASRock puts out a better BIOS soon.

Mark I have 1866 RAM running at 1904 stable in memtest. Have you raised your Bus Speed? It shoud be about 234 and your RAM will be ~1866. You may have to lower your multi though to keep the CPU within reason. This is on the ASRock 990FX board, not the one in my specs.

I think i will get a sabertooth 990fx and see if that helps any, they are more geared up for it, problem there is I have a gtx 470 soc!

Has it happened yet where you can SLI on AMD boards?

I can add lots of volts to this like 1.55 in BIOS which gives 1.520 on Vcore but nothing, it will not budge one inch over 4 Ghz.

Just to say I have cool and quiet and C1E enabled but I have tried overclocking higher with these turned off and no joy, My multiplier of 18 along with the next one up 18.5 and of course any lower seem to allow the cool and quiet to work, 19 and above and Windows disables it??

This does make me ponder if that is the key to it all, just raising the multiplier past 18, but then I would not be able to overclock this RAM and I need the extra speed as it does not like 1066Mhz even though its rated at at that! (cause I am running 8GB) The 880mhz at 4-4-4-12 has been said to be more like 1200Mhz speeds coupled with a 2600Mhz NB.

I have actually reduced all my voltages down, its still Intel Burn test stable, dropped the CPU-NB voltage down to 1.875, dropped my RAM voltage down to 2.0V and lowered the CPU down from 1.5250(bios) to 1.500V(bios) which gives 1.488 on the Vcore and its still totally stable.

With the cpu-nb raised to over 2800, ie the next step, the screen just kept freezing and locking up, tried voltages all the way to 1.35 but no help.

I have raised my HT link up one level too, 2420Mhz now and still Intel stable.

I am limited by my RAM also as this board is DDR2.

Oh and if you look in the screen shot for some reason, Wprime 32 thinks that my CPU is an engineering sample with figures all wrong, not sure what that uses to get its info but its messed up, it took it that I was running 176 HT at 800Mhz, strange processor that one! haha

The HT will put stress on the CPU and will not effect performance any. It should be as close to 2000MHz as you can get it, i.e. FSB 200 as Stromy said.

Yeah a board to use DDR3 RAM will be a good upgrade IMO.

@ Nomad8459

Total Overclock is 4.0Ghz exactly and I will have to settle for that.

One other thing it seems that Windows Experience Index is very sensitive to bad Overclocks, it will BSOD if anything is wrong!



Found that out the hard way had it clocked at 4.5 Ghz the WEI wouldn't finished backed down to 4.4Ghz rock solid WEI finished yeah

7.8 's all around untill my SSD gave me a 7.0

So my wall is 4.5 it runs but WEI fails i even gamed with that power last night no hitches untill that dreaded WEI came into play

It actually seems more stable at the HT link of 2420, as I say its passing Intel Burn Test still, I have read that these cpu's like the HT to run higher when overclocking, I know it doesn't give any performance boost but the desktop seems to load snappier and before at the lower figure it was taking a while to load up the desktop items.

Any advice on my NB not being able to go ove 2640, I assume its because the RAM is holding it back, the Ram is 1066MHz Ram, it just won't run at that, its rock solid and passes Memtest 86 at these speeds, having said that it also passed Memtest at 1000mhz at CL5, but my system wouldn't stabilise with that.

I run the HT at the 220 to get my Ram up, I am on the 800mhz divider, system seems very unstable on the 1066Mhz divider although that is where I would prefer to be.

I was running some OCZ reaper at 1072Mhz even with 8GB but my tuniq tower 120 wouldn't allow the slot nearest the cpu to be used, I regret getting rid of that Ram now, I had to set the TRFC down to 195 and increase he DQS and DRAM strength to 1.5X but it ran stable and was great. Should have just got a different cooler, oh hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I got this Gskill because it was on the QVL where the reaper wasn't but have had real problems with it, Gskill forums are really rubbish, the admin just don't help anyone and then just tell people to RMA, OCZ forums were much better at giving advice to get things running.

Some Benchmarks for you:

3D Mark Vantage
Unigine Heaven
Novatech

Britton30 said:

Mark I have 1866 RAM running at 1904 stable in memtest. Have you raised your Bus Speed? It shoud be about 234 and your RAM will be ~1866. You may have to lower your multi though to keep the CPU within reason. This is on the ASRock 990FX board, not the one in my specs.

Thanks for the tip but honestly, I've tried everything. I think it's a poorly binned chip. For example, I thought 236x17 (4012GHz) would boost my RAM but it wouldn't even POST.

I'm gonna throw an FX-8150 in it soon to see how things go.