Here’s my rig: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 (Link) Mainboard: MSI P45D3 Neo-F (Link) Cooler: Corsair H50 (Link) PSU: Corsair VX450 (Link) RAM: 2 x Kingmax DDR3-1600 (Link) Everything’s fine up until 3300 MHz. It doesn’t even require more voltage. But if I try to go over even 50 MHz it won’t POST. Things I’ve tried so far: - Increase CPU voltage up to 1.3595 - Increase northbridge voltage a couple of notches - Increase southbridge voltage a couple of notches - Increase memory timings to match what SPD lists for 1333 MHz, even though it’s running at a lower speed I’ve been doing some reading on the subject, and I suspect I’ve hit a FSB gap. If this is the case, going much higher will require more voltage and I don’t know how much to give it, without risking frying it. What voltage do you recommend for 24/7 operation? Any other knobs I can turn to get it to work past this value? I know there’s a ton of material on Internet on how to overclock, and in the stickies on this forum even, but I’m kind of put off by the fact that it does so well without any modification up to a point, and going over that even with significantly more juice, won’t work at all. I was expecting to increase voltage a bit for 3350, a bit more for 3400, and so on. Or am I unlucky and have a CPU that won’t overclock as much as what I’ve read this model usually does?
Maybe thats as far as it can go, you haven't actually told us what speeds you're hitting, which might be a help as we can see where you are with regards to settings etc.
Stock: 266 x 11.5 = 3066 I'm running very stable at: 287 x 11.5 = 3300. No voltage increases, everything on "Auto". A 296 FSB won't POST even with increased voltage. This site suggests it can reach 4.7 GHz on air! However, I'm more inclined to take this review as more realistic. As you can see, they managed to get it to 3600 without touching the voltage. I couldn't even do 3500 with a slightly higher voltage than what they used for 3800.
so 1150 qdr (fsb).. you check your dram:fsb ratio- try a 1:1 and push up like that also your chipset voltages are trial and error.. I never set anything to auto- just asking for trouble =] sometimes too much voltage is just as bad as not enough on the chipset I'd keep the cpu voltage under intels spec.. a bit lower if you remove vdroop could be fsb hole but on a intel chipset more than likely your memory
Ok, I'll try that. What voltages do you suggest for a P45 + ICH10 ? I'm thinking setting 1.37xx in bios might end up around the maximum Intel recommends for this chip: 1.3625 (considering vdroop) That's what's puzzling me! I bought DDR3-1600, and I'm not even using it at 1200! How bad can Kingmax be?!
bit has some voltage numbers here that might help http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2008/05/12/will-you-overclock-intel-s-p45/1
Voltage and RAM, it's harder to push RAM above spec, so you might want to just do a pure FSB clock and not include ram in that OC.
I struggled to clock my old Q9450 past 3.2. I tried absolutely everything and nearly gave up until I borrowed a pair of corsair dominator ddr2-1066 sticks and hey presto, 1:1 strap and 3.6ghz stable. I previously had OCZ reaperx ddr2-800 in there. See if you can get hold of (borrow because it's not worth buying for a test) some overspecced ddr2 for your system and try that. You might have some luck. If not, I'd go with the prognosis of the previous post that MSI boards are hit and miss for clocking - which is why I personally prefer Asus since I discovered that for myself with my old cheap and cheerful AMD builds. Best of luck though bud. There's loads of peeps on bit-tech and with their help, you should see 4GHz very soon.
Just had a look at the link for your mobo. I had trouble getting to 3Ghz just last week end with An E6600 on the same board, better ram might help, but don't expect to much. As for that 4.7, I think some ones on the wacky backy or had a very special mobo to play with.
I'm not a native speaker, so I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. Thanks for the link. I'll use it next time I feel like fiddling with it. (which may be pretty soon) I see what you mean. It's sad, but I think you may be right. I thought of that when I bought the memory modules. By the way, I'm using DDR3 (not DDR2) 1600, and what baffled me at first was the fact that I couldn't even get to 1200 FSB. That's why I cried: How bad can Kingmax be? But, your advice to not leave everything on Auto made me think, so I took a closer look at the other settings. It turns out that disabling Extreme Memory Profile and Enhance Setting (what the heck are these anyway?) allowed me to go way higher. I've set the FSB to 333 (1333), manually set the memory timings to the ones reported by SPD for this frequency and it booted straight into 3830. It would hang under load, so I started increasing the voltage. Every time it would take longer until it restarted. It would probably have reached a stable state, but I didn't want to risk frying the CPU, as I was already past 1.4v. So I've lowered the multiplier to 11 and now it's running at 3663 with a slightly higher voltage than what Intel recommends (1.36-1.37 under load. higher when idle so I've enabled SpeedStep to compensate). I'm happy so far, but my next goal is to take it to 3830 (333 x 11.5) Thanks for your suggestions. I appreciate it. If you have any more, keep 'em comin'!
Extreme Memory Profile (or XMP) refers to settings specific for that RAM stick stored within it. When XMP is active in the BIOS, you should see the timings etc greyed out and unadjustable. This is probably why the system failed before. If you've got DDR3-1600, with XMP on, the BIOS would be trying to run it up at that speed, whereas now you've gone manual and underclocked, you've got a stable system. If you can take a few screenshots of your current BIOS settings, including voltages etc and post them in here, we'll see if there's anywhere we can help you tweak the most from it and iron out the wrinkles.
