So I've had my P8P67 for a few months now running my 2500K, 4x2GB XMS3, 700W OCZ PSU, HD 5870, 4x WD 500GB RE'2s in RAID 5 on theP67 PCH, 1x DVD-RW and 1x SSD on the SATA3 ports. This has been running fine and decided this weekend as I had some free time to overclock the CPU as I literally haven't had time to get around to it in months. I have the same setup at work (without the raid and 4 hdd's) and it overclocks to 4.5 fine. So using the same settings I could not get the board to overclock, it wouldn't go above 3.3ghz. So I spent a good few hours until I found someone who had used every port on the P67 PCH like I had and he had exactly the same problem as me. I then decided to unplug all 4 hard drives of my raid array and boot into windows. CPUZ instantly reported 4.5ghz, I primed, it was stable after a few hours, great. I then proceeded to plug in the 4 raid disks back into the P67 PCH and booted back into Windows, the Intel monitor reported the array as fine so loaded up CPUZ and primed - 3.3ghz max, it would not go any higher. I then proceeded to google every variation of 'p8p67, raid, p67 pch, power, overclock' etc but got no luck, all I got was generic overclocking problems which I obviouslly do not have. I was wondering if anyone here had an idea about why the board turns off turbo mode when I have all sata ports used? I was thinking of power distribution issues but couldn't find any information on that, I was thinking maybe upping the voltage to the SB but that's just a total stab in the dark. Any help would be seriously appreciated!
Yeah that's what I mean, it's a bit of a stab in the dark pumping up the PCH voltage, I can't think what else it could be?
Well very, very importantly - how are you overclocking? You should be locking the BCLK, and only adjusting multiplier (If stability is your game)
Yep BCLK is at 100, I've got the multi at 42, vcore at 1.3 and other settings are fine, as I said before, when I unplug the 4 drives, my overclock applies and is stable (I tested for a good 6 hours on Prime 95). I've tried ever permutation of turning of C6, C1 etc ... and now I've got to a level where I've reset all settings to default and only applied the overclock by just typing in a multi of 40, setting the BCLK to 100 and booting into Windows, that is stable at 4ghz with everything on default/auto. I then shut down, plug in the 4 disks, check the BIOS settings are the same, boot into windows, run Prime 95 and the overclock / turbo does not kick in at all. I then shut down, unplug the 4 drives, boot back into Windows, run Prime 95 and the overclock works.
Why is it ? You are OC'ing the board and that puts a higher load on system, isn't a PCH over-volt fairly obviously needed ? Beware I had SATA problems on a heavily OC'd board after a year or so. dunx
OK fair point, I'll give that a go when I get home, I just find it strange that not even the slightest overclock works, it wont even go up to 34 and just refuses to do it in Windows with AI Tuner. I would have thought that it would have allowed it and then BSOD'd if the PCH couldn't handle it
I hadn't cottoned on to this before, are you not doing this manually? As a fellow Asus mobo owner, I can appreciate they haven't made it easy to do; but IMO the best way to overclock is to not use the turbo thingy that has a mind of it's own, and just set your desired overclock as your 24/7 'normal' speed, while leaving the various C states enabled so it can downclock when it decides too?
No no I always use the BIOS, always have done since the days of my P3 and CUSL2 . I just tried the AI Tuner to see if it was some weird bug with the bios but the windows app would let you shift the multipliers up and down but when you set it, the clock did not change, although the previous set values for the multiplier were still set. From what I've read from multiple overclocking articles for the P67, you have to have 'Turbo' enabled for your overclock to apply otherwise it wont work. You can see it referenced here multiple times, it has to be on for any OC to work http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1578110 ... so with my Turbo enabled, I have my 4 cores set at 42 mutliplier, BCLK at 100 etc.
So have tried upping the PCH voltage up to 1.15, no luck, still not going over 3.3ghz. I've just unplugged the raid array, rebooted and now running at 4ghz fine ... this is weird
It's a simple power issue, the board does not have the power to support all Sata slots full and then overclock the CPU as well. Not enough phase lanes on your motherboard. You will need a more expensive board than what you have. Each Sata hard disk is aprox 30 watts Each Sata port is taking 15-20 watts from the board itself. 6 Sata devices sending data is a lot of overhead chances are you could remove 1 hd and it would work.
Thanks for the reply rollo, that would make a lot of sense, the p8p67 vanilla is 8+2 phase power where the deluxe is 16 phase so I guess it must be a protection mechanism of sorts ... shame you can't turn it off if that is indeed the reason why the overclock won't work. I've made a technical inquiry with Asus so waiting to hear back from them. In the mean time, I've found quite a good deal on a 1x PCI-E 4-port sata 2 controller for my raid 5 array. The maximum speed I've got out of my array on a Dell Perc 5 pci-e 4x controller was 240mb/s and I know pci-e 1x is max 250 so that should be fine for that I need, got it for £35 delivered so is a bit better than spending £170+ on a 16 phase power mobo!
Are you kidding me ? The only connectivity between the SATA drive and motherboard is the data cable. The data cable has only 4 data pins for 2 directions (to and from the drive), with extremly low power consumption. SATA drives are powered directly from PSU. Another issue are your figures. Even the more power hungry drives use ~10 watts at write operations, most fit between the 6 to 9 watts power consumption at write operations (idle is a bit lower). There is pretty much only one moment when drive consumes between 20-30 watts - and that is the initial spinup. And again, that power comes directly from PSU - if you don't believe me, just follow where you SATA power connector leads.
Are you using the latest BIOS from this link: http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8P67/#download
Yep I'm using 3301 and now have an open ticket with Asus, they seem to have no idea why this won't work. They told me also that it is nothing to do with power issues at all
