MSI Eclipse and general questions

Hi folks, let me toss a couple of questions out for thought, comments and perhaps answers: a) I just noticed for the first time that some of you have htt (hyperthreading?) off. What is the advantage of switching that off? b) in the "PC Health section of my bios, (MSI Eclipse) the IOH temps are significantly higher (@ 86 to 90 C) than system (39 C) and and cpu (45 C). Is the IOH the power regulation chips on the MOBO? ( MSI Eclipse) and would the higher temps be a consequence of having all six ram slots filled? DRAM voltage is 1.6v. c) finally I have the PLL voltage in auto, what does PLL stand for? and is it's voltage normally increased for OC'ing? My signature below indicates the speed that I have attained thus far but I think I still have some headroom.

Can't help ya..

But I will give ya a bump to the top so you won't be forgotten.

Gunny51 said:

in the "PC Health section of my bios, (MSI Eclipse) the IOH temps are significantly higher (@ 86 to 90 C) than system (39 C) and and cpu (45 C). Is the IOH the power regulation chips on the MOBO? ( MSI Eclipse) and would the higher temps be a consequence of having all six ram slots filled? DRAM voltage is 1.6v.

Click to expand...

IOH is the X58 chipset. It contains the hub between the CPU and the IO (but not RAM anymore, since it now connects directly to the processor). The Eclipse Plus doesn't have a very large heatsink for the X58 and has no fan over it, so that is why it runs so hot. What I did to fix that was to remove the heatsink, clean off the thermal paste, put on some new thermal paste, peel off the metal "stickers", and then put it back on. IOH temps are completely unrelated to the RAM.

Gunny51 said:

finally I have the PLL voltage in auto, what does PLL stand for? and is it's voltage normally increased for OC'ing?

Click to expand...

PLL is a phase-locked loop, which is a control circuit used in electrical circuits for various purposes. In a processor, it is usually used to sync the clock signal across the chip, to pass asynchronous (clock-less) data into a clocked region of the chip, or to "bridge" a signal across clock domains (two clocks of different frequencies). I would guess that the PLL voltages are for the PLLs that deal with data signals arriving from different clock domains that need to be synchronized to the new domain. For example, data arriving to the processor from the IOH must move from one clock frequency to the the frequency of the processor. This would be the CPU PLL. The QPI PLL takes care of the signal coming from the RAM's frequency (mine is 1600 MHz) and locking it into the frequency in the QPI (3200 MHz). There are many PLLs in the CPU and the IOH, but the two main ones (from the RAM and IOH to the CPU) have their own voltage regulation. Some people report that increasing the voltage improves the overclock, but I wouldn't increase it very much (maybe .04 or .05 of a volt at most). Auto should be fine.