AMD X6 1090T More Overclocking Adventures! BSOD's

[Solarstarshines]

I had read that if you ring Windows and explain that the Motherboard has died that they usually will reactivate your key, I can't afford to buy windows again after the expense of a new motherboard as well, Motherboards die, it happens, they must have some experience with this??

Had G Skill RAM with the DDR2 and couldn't get it stable where as the OCZ reaper was totally stable at 1072mhz, couldn't get the G Skill stable at even 1000Mhz!

It was an OEM but I have the Windows 7 Install disc, I paid extra to have it pre-installed but they also sent me the disc, its OEM though not retail.

I think it would be possible to go that route and explain you have a OEM disc copy and you wish to keep your current win7 because you can't afford to buy a new one and since the board the OEM was tied to died technicly you own that copy of windows so they would have to suplament something in order for you to continue being a valued consumer they also have records of when windows was last used and maybe a crital error notifaction before dying so they would have some knowledge

Think it would be a good idea

 

[Solarstarshines]

BullDozer and WEI

This is BullDozers WEI on my machine my ram increased from 7.5 to 7.8 so did the chip

 

[Nomad8459]

As I say, I have paid extra to have Windows 7 pre-installed and they did send me the OEM disc, surely this is my Windows 7 and not the machines??

Anyone know how much it would cost to reactivate??

They are asking $199 dollars for full retail version.

That's £125!! I could have easily bought my ASUS sabertoothe for that if I could afford it!

My GTX 470 gives me double 7.9 on graphics.

Those specs are nice though mate, good luck with the bulldozer, Its interesting to see what its actually achieving!

 

[Solarstarshines]

Exactly just call Microsoft and tell them your OEM board died and you have a new one you wish to install your OEM copy too they will get your info and probally grant you use of it as a retail copy

 

[Solarstarshines]

My GTX 470 gives me double 7.9 on graphics.

Those specs are nice though mate, good luck with the bulldozer, Its interesting to see what its actually achieving!

For some reason those Nvidia cards are mad impressive on the WEI i used to run Nvidia years ago but went ATI because it was cheaper

Also i think it has to do with the core shaders and stream processors ussually Nvidia pumps alot of core shaders and vram in there cards so that also will make a WEI hit the max

 

[Nomad8459]

I wanted ADOBE Premiere pro accelerator support so only had a choice of two cards, GTX470 (the "cheaper" option) or the GTX 580 I think it was or maybe 560, can't quite remember, I eventually want a second GTX 470 SOC to SLI them.

They are just mad power hungry and even my 1000w power supply probably won't be enough for SLI!

 

[Solarstarshines]

yea Nvidia takes alot of power but in turn worth the use they get the job done but still people Oc cards anyway no matter how good they are

 

[Nomad8459]

Have heard good things about the Crucial RAM, I mean they are Micron's after all which are renowned for their overclocking, have heard of people getting 1900mhz out of them, as long as I can get them at 1600, I will be happy enough, if not am gonna try for 1333 with cas 6 or cas 7.

They are 8-8-8-24 at 1600, which is pretty good for 2 x 4GB, I am hoping also that I will be able to run them at 1t as there will only be two dimms and not four.

 

[Solarstarshines]

Have heard good things about the Crucial RAM, I mean they are Micron's after all which are renowned for their overclocking, have heard of people getting 1900mhz out of them, as long as I can get them at 1600, I will be happy enough, if not am gonna try for 1333 with cas 6 or cas 7.

They are 8-8-8-24 at 1600, which is pretty good for 2 x 4GB, I am hoping also that I will be able to run them at 1t as there will only be two dimms and not four.

I actually follow the QVL it seems to do alot better when it is matched to the right board

 

[Nomad8459]

The QVL for this board is about three years out of date however and around 90% of the RAM listed on the QVL is no longer available, that means I have to take my chances.

I found that with my last board that has just died too, actually finding RAM that was on the QVL was impossible, I googled each product number in turn and constantly it was deactivated, not available, even tried finding it second hand.

Well, well, plugged in 1 of the 4GB Crucial sticks and hey presto, straight into BIOS, changed back to AHCI and altered the basics like turning number lock off, all seems fine.

Cleared CMOS, installed the second Crucial 4GB stick and straight into BIOS again.

So far so good.

Rebooted after altering the settings again, straight into Windows. Excellent!

Checked system information, it said three days to activate Windows, tried the online activation but no success, it said try the automated phone line.

Rang the automated phone line and after entering a seriously long string of digits and verifying that I was only using the key on one computer, I was given another seriously long string of digits to enter, Windows is verified and activated.

Job done on the install, now for the new mission of the over-clock.

My old board used to report socket temp for the CPU at 43C on idle, that was with four pin CPU power, this board is reporting 27C on Idle, the cores are showing as 19C but with the +10 then that would equal 29C.

I have lapped both my CPU and my cooler in the meantime using 1000 and 2500 grit sandpaper, both are gleaming copper, good scrub with alcohol wipes, then application of MX4 Thermal paste.

Things are looking good so far!

Here is what I know so far:

The 1301 (latest) BIOS for this board does not allow you to manually set the CPU/NB voltage, I mean you can set it but it doesn't actually change the value, I have contacted ASUS about this, I think others are discovering the same thing.

My processor even though relatively cool at 57C as opposed to max of 62C when using the old board and Intel Burn Test, still refuses to get much past 4Ghz, on or two of the cores will always fail.

I haven't tried enabling the CPU over - voltage jumper yet which allows values up to 1.8!!, it is currently peaking at 1.55V allowable in BIOS although this is falling as low as 1.408V when under load, ASUS site says not to worry about this Vdroop and TBH, its not affecting stability at my current speeds.

The new board allows me a much higher NB frequency, I am currently stable at 3020Mhz.

in order to get this I have to run the HT link at 2520 in order to keep within two steps on the multipliers, I think I have spoke about this before and how this chip doesn't seem to like it if the multipliers are too far out of sink.

Its perfectly stable under Burn Test like this though on Very High Settings, I will retest with maximum settings shortly just to be sure.

This is what it looks like:

HT@ 252Mhz
CPU@ 4.017Ghz or 4017Mhz
NB@ 3020Mhz
Memory@ 1674Mhz 2 x 4GB at 8-8-8-24 DDR3 CR1
HT link@ 2520Mhz

I have gained about 5 or 6 Gflops over and above previous best and obviously the latency and overall data transfer rates are significantly better.

Maxx Memm now gives me 10.60GB/s score, as opposed to 8.65Gb/s

Couple of benchmarks;

Here is my new WEI::

My processor has gained 0.1 from 7.6 up to 7.7
My RAM has gained 0.2 from 7.6 up to 7.8

Ps. I know I should buy an SSD, am waiting for prices to become realistic!

 

[Britton30]

SSDs have dropped a lot. Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, SSD, Internal SSD, 64GB, SATA III
In November I paid $127 for a Crucial M4 64GB to run my OS from. Get one now and enjoy the bleeding edge performance. It will work well with your set up.

 

[tw33k]

Good Maxxmem score Nomad8459. Very nice. It's similar to the score I got with my 1090T

 

[Nomad8459]

It was going too well, just tried playing a game F1 2011 and my GTX 470 crashed.

It was at stock settings too, could this be the HT link, thing is I tried lowering the HT link down to 2016Mhz and Intel Burn Test failed even only running "high" settings, It passed fine at higher settings when the HT link was up at 2520Mhz! Could I need more HT voltage to sort this issue out.

I am worried that my GTX 470 is dying!

Just clean installed the latest NVIDIA drivers which state that they perform better with F1 2011 in the release notes, after that the game crashed without even getting into the game, with the older drivers it was playing for about ten minutes or so.

Its weird!

Thanks Tweek, I am really happy with the RAM, the blue dancing LED's are so cute!!

Its solid RAM I believe.

Wish I knew why F1 was crashing though!

 

[Britton30]

I think the HT Link should be close to 2000 MHz and the NB Freq can be a lot higher. You might try bumping your NB and CPU NB volts .1V at a time. If you have HT volts try 1.4V.
Also try tRFC at 110ns.

 

[Nomad8459]

I am doing so much reading about all this stuff, but with every board its different, there is a theory that X6 like there HT high has provided by DOLK, but he also states that in some cases this doesn't work at all, everyone seems to be able to push the cpu/nb up to 3000 and keep their HT low, but on my old board, cpu/nb wasn't stable at all above 2640Mhz.

My TRFC is currently at 160, you think it should be lower??

My HT voltage, goes red above 1.3V in the BIOS, have tried it at 1.2V, stock is 1.1V, it seems more unstable tbh.

Have put my RAM down to 1600Mhz, am trying 240 HT link, 4.08Ghz, 2640Mhz cpu/nb with Ht at 2160Mhz

I think the issue is my CPU/NB voltage and the fact that I can't get the setting to stick in BIOS, even though AIDA is reporting it being at 1.35V in its BIOS screen when it is set to AUTO, on the overclock screen, the VID remains at 1.15.

Something is definitely buggy with that Voltage.

On my old board 2640MHz CPU/NB was stable at only 1.1875V and higher voltages caused instability, I think either the voltage is not changing and is staying at 1.15V or its going too high at 1.35V

Just tried stock HT and NB at 4ghz cores and it failed Intel almost immediately.

I know I am not gonna get much more than 4GHz from this chip from previous experience with it, but I would like to push my CPU/NB up and I would like to play my games!

Why is all so complicated, big sigh!

Also, people seem to suggest that games are not a good enough stress test, well my PC has passed Prime, its passed Intel and its passed Hyper PI, in the past all to crash in a game.

This time its passing Intel fine but crashing my GTX 470!

 

[seekermeister]

Nomad8459,

Since you use the same processor as I do, I would like to ask your opinion on something...I bought a new motherboard (ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4) at the same time I bought the processor last June. I had never attempted to overclock any computer previously, but since I also do a lot of encoding, I gave it a shot. I never got to the point of having to deal with BSODs, overheating, etc. because all attempts to control RAM and processor speeds failed. I gave up trying, because the speed that I was able to encode at was still far superior to what I had used before. But I have always figured that the problem was due to the motherboard, rather than the processor. I'm not ready to replace it, but I'm wondering if you would concur, or if it is possible that the processor is the culprit? I never experienced any unusual temperature behavior of any kind, I just had no control.

 

[Nomad8459]

I am not really an expert, keen amateur.

Some would say that ASrock boards are the cheaper version of ASUS boards and therefore perform less well, I have heard good things about their reliability, they won't be the strongest overclockers but should do well.

The 890FX chip-set is the flagship chip-set for the X6 Phenoms and so should handle overclocking very well indeed.

How were you trying to overclock your processor?

Its best to use the BIOS, if its a BE processor then you can simply increase the multiplier or CPU ratio. If you like the cool and quiet feature that keeps your power and temps down when the CPU isn't doing much, then any Multiplier below 18.5 is going to allow yoiu to keep the cool and quiet enable, C1E in BIOS, I would disable, as well as secure virtual machine mode if you are not running Virtual PC.

18.5 x the stock frequency (200mhz FSB or HT) would give you a CPU running at 3.7Ghz, this would probably need you to manually adjust the CPU voltage just slightly in the BIOS, probably around 1.4 to 1.4375V would allow you to use this overclock nicely.

If you change the FSB or HT(same thing, sometimes called different things) say upto 210, then x 18.5 would give you nearly 3.9Ghz, for this your voltage may need to be up around 1.45 to 1.5 set in the BIOS, this would overclock your RAM, NB, and HT link slightly, but not enough to worry too much about voltages I wouldn't have thought.

It depends how far you want to go, personally, I want every inch of performance 24/7 so I try to find the limits of all of these things, the RAM, the CPU, the NB and the HT link, but most people are happy with a small overclock on there processor.

Simply changing your CPU ratio without changing any volts to 18X will give you 3.6Ghz on all cores.

When overclocking up to higher levels (above 3.8Ghz) make sure you also disable the Turbo Boost feature!

Hope this helps a bit, cheers

 

[seekermeister]

Thanks for the input, but I can't give clear answers to your questions, because it has been ~ 9 months since I messed with this, and my memory isn't all that good. I realize that it isn't possible to give a precise answer under the circumstances, but was hoping that you knew something more about the motherboard that I have. I don't know when, but I intend to replace it with something from Asus, when I can afford to do so. At that time, I will try anew and see what happens.

 

[Nomad8459]

Your motherboard should be fine, it is made by ASUS, just not as high quality wise, you should still be able to overclock your processor very easily on that board by going into the BIOS.

 

[seekermeister]

Actually, it is not made by Asus, but by a sister company. From what I have read, they do not necessarily share tech with each other, so essentially they are separate entities.