"advanced" questions about overclocking P4 NW with TH7II :)

I got pre-tested P4 NW 1.6 that runs at 2.7 on TH7II Raid now.. I know that it can stably do 2.85 or more after I tweak all the possible things to the max, so to achieve that I have few questions:

1. I flashed Mr. Natural bios and it's working great.. no cold boot probs anymore. Big thanks to Mister N. for that ..anyway, about the fsb setting, which one is better in achieving best overclockability and stability: fixed or 1/5, 1/6 divider? I have read somewhere that if fixed setting is used in TH7II pci and agp will not be in right sync and that slows the system somewhat is certain situations.. is this true?

2. I'm going to make vmem mod for my Samsung rdram using 10k ohm adjustable resistor. Now I need to know how to measure the voltage that will go to rimms with a meter BEFORE I boot up the machine.. I would be "moderately" unhappy if my rimms burned up in the smoke because of overvoltage..

3. currently I have my one and only Maxtor 60GB harddisk connected to raid port, but since I don't use any raid setting I suppose there is no speed advantage in using HTP370 controller over the standard udma100 controller on TH7II? If I turn the raid controller off in bios and connect the hard disk to standard ide port, will it increase stability at high fsb:s (over 170)? (currently I have 2 cd-rom drives in the standard ide ports)

4. does it (even theoretically) increase stability at high fsb if I disable all the ports that I don't need such as usb and firewire?

5. is there any difference in stability (from irq sharing point of view or otherwise) in which pci slots I put my extension cards? I have 3 cards: SB Audigy, Telewell ADSL card, Ati TV tuner + Radeon 8500 as display adapter (for that there are not much choices for slot tho ) OS is Win XP Pro.

..well that's all I can think of asking of so far ..but any additional comments or tips are also welcome.

Macu said:

1. I flashed Mr. Natural bios and it's working great.. no cold boot probs anymore. Big thanks to Mister N. for that ..anyway, about the fsb setting, which one is better in achieving best overclockability and stability: fixed or 1/5, 1/6 divider? I have read somewhere that if fixed setting is used in TH7II pci and agp will not be in right sync and that slows the system somewhat is certain situations.. is this true?

Click to expand...

I have to use the 1/5 setting with my rig - because with the fixed setting my radeon8500 locks up when starting any 3d application.

2. I'm going to make vmem mod for my Samsung rdram using 10k ohm adjustable resistor. Now I need to know how to measure the voltage that will go to rimms with a meter BEFORE I boot up the machine.. I would be "moderately" unhappy if my rimms burned up in the smoke because of overvoltage..

Click to expand...

Measuring the Vrimm before booting will not be possible. But you CAN and SHOULD measure the resistance of the poti.
Full resistance (10k) = no voltage increase
~0.75k = 3.6V Vrimm (my samsung were still runnin' at this setting - puuuhhh.
I recommend setting the poti to full resistance initially - decreasing the resistance continuously until you get the desired vrimm.

]

3. currently I have my one and only Maxtor 60GB harddisk connected to raid port, but since I don't use any raid setting I suppose there is no speed advantage in using HTP370 controller over the standard udma100 controller on TH7II? If I turn the raid controller off in bios and connect the hard disk to standard ide port, will it increase stability at high fsb:s (over 170)? (currently I have 2 cd-rom drives in the standard ide ports)

Click to expand...

I'm running my hdds on the hpt controller as well - it has a significant advantage when creating partition images with norton ghost running DOS.
there, the HPT controller is about 4-5 times faster than the i850 integrated ide controller.
Almost same performance running windows, though.

Stability is more related to PCI-speeds running out of specs than the CPU-FSB speed.
Keep the PCI to ~33MHz and you shouldn't encounter any stability problems caused by PCI components.

4. does it (even theoretically) increase stability at high fsb if I disable all the ports that I don't need such as usb and firewire?

5. is there any difference in stability (from irq sharing point of view or otherwise) in which pci slots I put my extension cards? I have 3 cards: SB Audigy, Telewell ADSL card, Ati TV tuner + Radeon 8500 as display adapter (for that there are not much choices for slot tho ) OS is Win XP Pro.

Click to expand...

sorry .. dunno about that

You guys bring up an interesting subject. I wanted to run my HDD on the raid controller and the machine refused to boot. I had initially used controllers one and two for my ROMS. Now I have been forced to run my HDD on one and the two drives on controller two. I must note I did have another TH7 2 and when I had that board I had no issues. Could it be a board issue? Maybe a fix in a bios revision? To be honest the overclocking totally took me away fro the controller issue. Let me know it could very well be somthing that I may have overlooked. I did read somewhere that the NT Kernel has a known conflict with running a single drive on a RAID controller. Also I was able to run 98 and ME on the same setup. Strange, but neither 2000 or XP had any intention on running in this setup.

I did the RAID 0 thing when I set up my system and found that the HPT controller was more likely to encounter hard drive errors as a result of overclocking. I eventually totally trashed both of those brand new 30gb drives and had to RMA them. (the partition was so corrupt, they could not be formmatted).

I then went with a single drive as my boot drive on the RAID controller and also found that Windows XP was becoming corrupt at times for no apparent reason. I would just reboot and bam, XP was trashed.

I then decided to move my boot drive over to the normal ATA 100 Intel controller and I have not experienced any problems at all. This includes the occasional BSOD when booting up, which happened 1 out of 10 times on the HPT and often resulted in the trashed XP I reffered to above.

I am not really into super duper hard drive speeds, but I have found that the single drive benchmark on the HPT vs. Intel controller was pretty much dead on equal.

I left my storage drives on the HPT as single ATA 100 devices and they are running fine with no errors. I think a lot of my problems had to do with XP and writing to the drive before shutting down, something was becoming corrupt. All I know is that this frustrating problem kept me from enjoying my new machine fully for the first 6 weeks after I built it. It runs perfectly now and I am not changing things. Another advantage (according to Intel) is that with the drive on the Intel controller, the Intel Application Accelerato can be used to improve performace. This program obviously has no effect if your boot and application drive in on the hpt controller.

LJ