What's your memory assessment speed?

[doveman007]

After a bit of tweaking, I'm happy with my Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600Mhz results.



At stock DDR3-1333Mhz, NB 2000Mhz, the results were:
Copy 10466 MB/s
Read 8107 MB/s
Write 6831 MB/s
Score 7.47GB/s
Latency 66.9 ns

winsat mem: 14911.50 MB/s

At DDR3-1600Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), which the RAM is specified for, I got:
Copy 10560 MB/s
Read 8667 MB/s
Write 6734 MB/s
Score 7.70 GB/s
Latency 65.0 ns

At DDR3-1600Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2400Mhz, CPU-NB 1.32v I got:
Copy 11602 MB/s
Read 9457 MB/s
Write 7883 MB/s
Score 8.67 GB/s
Latency 61.5 ns

winsat mem 18172.96 MB/s

With the RAM at 1600Mhz, the highest NB I could boot at was 2600Mhz (with CPU-NB 1.32v, NB 1.3v) which gave the following but wasn't stable (I was getting crashes in Explorer):

Copy 11867 MB/s
Read 9822 MB/s
Write 8457 MB/s
Score 9.14 GB/s
Latency 60.4 ns

winsat mem 19929.93 MB/s

So I decided to drop the RAM back to 1333Mhz and see if I could increase the NB, which is how I got my current results with the NB @ 2800Mhz, which are somewhat slower in MaxxMemm for everything except Write speed, which gets a nice boost, but gives a better result with winsat mem.

 

[panais]

Here's a nice one.
View attachment 192024

Cute!

 

[Britton30]

doveman007 try setting your NB to 1.4V or 1.425 to see if that will stabilize it.

 

[doveman007]

doveman007 try setting your NB to 1.4V or 1.425 to see if that will stabilize it.

Thanks. I'll give that a go.

 

[doveman007]

doveman007 try setting your NB to 1.4V or 1.425 to see if that will stabilize it.

I actually forgot which one you said and increased the CPU-NB to 1.4v, but it seems to have done the trick

DDR3-800 (1600) Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2800, CPU-NB 1.4v, NB 1.3v:

Copy 12049 MB/s
Read 10094 MB/s
Write 9021 MB/s
Score 9.56 GB/s
Latency 58.9 ns

winsat mem 21452.53 MB/s

 

[Britton30]

doveman007 try setting your NB to 1.4V or 1.425 to see if that will stabilize it.

This one It runs the memory contoller. what you did is fine too.

 

[doveman007]

Hmm, seems I spoke to soon. Next time I tried to boot it had the same problem accessing the HDD. It boots grub4dos OK but then can't seem to find the drive when I select the "boot from partiton 0" entry.

Do you think increasing the NB to 1.4v, so that both that and the CPU-NB are at 1.4v, will be safe and likely to fix this?

 

[Britton30]

Hmm, seems I spoke to soon. Next time I tried to boot it had the same problem accessing the HDD. It boots grub4dos OK but then can't seem to find the drive when I select the "boot from partiton 0" entry.

Do you think increasing the NB to 1.4v, so that both that and the CPU-NB are at 1.4v, will be safe and likely to fix this?

Yup, that was my original suggestion, NB>1.4V. The CPU NB may be better lower than that, say, 1.25

 

[doveman007]

Seems rather low for what's meant to be an enthusiast's board, but the BIOS only lets me take the NB to 1.388v so I've set it to that and the CPU-NB to 1.3v for now. Booted OK but it did so once before with only the CPU-NB at 1.4v, so I'll have to see if it consistently boots OK and then look at maybe decreasing the CPU-NB a bit.

 

[Dave76]

Always good to find the lowest stable voltage.

Run Prime95 Blend test, max RAM, to check for CPU-NB stability.
Be sure to watch the CPU core temps, use Core Temp.

 

[doveman007]

Thanks, I'll do that.

In the meantime, here's my latest results. Some things up, some down but overall I'm happy.

 

[doveman007]

Prime95 defaults to 8K FFT, which doesn't work on my system, so I set it to Custom 1024K and 8000MB. Unfortunately, it errored straight away and BSOD my PC!

I tried upping the CPU-NB back to 1.4v, but it failed to boot (seems quite random), so I've dropped the NB down to 2600Mhz for now and Prime95 is running OK at the moment, although everything gets a bit toasty so I'm going to have to look at my cooling (running a TRUE rev.C with Nexus 120mm @ 1050RPM).

 

[Dave76]

Can you define 'a bit toasty' in °C?

Better to run the torture test as it will test some RAM also.

CPU - Stress Test with Prime95
Prime95 Torture test
First open Core Temp to monitor CPU temperatures, don't go over 78°C.
Open Prime95 and stop the test if it is running, in Advanced tab select 'Round off checking', in the Options tab select 'Torture Test...', in the window that opens select 'Blend', after 'Number of torture test threads to run' enter 3 or 4 (depending on which rig you are using), then click OK to start the test.

 

[doveman007]

Yeah, not very technical but that's what came to mind when I went to plug a USB stick in and felt the heat coming off it!

In HwInfo, the CPU temp (under AMD 10h+ CPU Thermal Sensor) was about 71c and I think the others (CPU, Aux, Motherboard) were in the 60s, but I was more concerned with stopping the test than noting them down at that point.

I'm running Prime95x64 to test the NB @ 2600Mhz now, and the Blend option is working. Maybe it didn't work before because I was running the 32-bit version.

I've updated my BIOS from 11.6 to 11.8 hoping it might offer higher NB voltages than 1.388v, but it doesn't.

 

[Dave76]

AMD CPUs normally run pretty cool, have you checked the CPU cooler?
Maybe time to replace the thermal paste.

I've seen AMD CPUs run Prime95 torture test at 60°C and below.

Use Core Temp to monitor your CPU core temps.

 

[doveman007]

It should be fine. Only built the system a couple of months ago and used Arctic MX-2.

With nothing overclocked, with Prime95 CPU Thermal Sensor is at 62c, CPU 51c, Motherboard 37c, T1/D1+ 52c. At idle, I get CPU Thermal Sensor 33c, CPU 23c, Motherboard 35c, T1/D1+ 24c

I'll double-check with CoreTemp next time but running it now at idle the temps shown are the same as HwInfo

 

[doveman007]

Actually I do have the CPU overclocked to 3.9Ghz. Did that with ATI CCC, so forgot about it as it's not shown in the BIOS

I just flashed the latest beta BIOS (11.8b2) and it does offer one extra step for NB at 1.394v, but even at that and CPU-NB at 1.3v I got BSOD pretty soon trying NB at 2800Mhz, even with the RAM on Auto (1333Mhz).

Just testing with the RAM on Auto and the NB @ 2600Mhz, with NB and CPU-NB both at 1.3v. Seems OK so far and might keep the temps down a bit. Then I'll test again with the RAM at 1600Mhz to see if that increases temps.

 

[Britton30]

Another thing to do is power off the PC and let it get cold to help cure the thermal paste. Run some more torture tests to get it hot and repeat. I found this accidentally, my PhenomII X4 had been idling at 42C-46C which is hot for it. I ran some tests, Prime95 and Intel Burn Test and it got to a max of 63C. I turned it off one night and the next day I noticed the idle temp had dropped to 31C-33C.
I had fresh Artic Silver 5 since I had put on a different heatsink/fan.
Thanks to Essenbe for pointing this out.

 

[doveman007]

Thanks, but MX-2 doesn't require curing.

It's hard to compare temperatures without knowing the CPU, heatsink, fan, etc but as my X4 is idling at 33c with the Nexus 120mm only pushing 36.87 CFM, I probably haven't got the same problem you had.

I'll probably try the Scythe Slip Stream 120mm PWM Fan, as it goes up to 1300 RPM / 74.25 CFM when needed but will still run quietly the rest of the time. As I can't run the NB higher than 2600Mhz, I'll see if I can shave a few °C off by lowering the voltages a bit as well.

 

[BoostAddicted]

DDR 2, 8 GB, should be running dual channel. I'm confused by the CPU-Z timing. I've never quite understood what everything means. It says my memory is running at 533? I'm confused. The memory should be running at 1066...unless that's what each stick is, and dual channel is 1066...someone help?