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P4 Overclock Testing Conundrum

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Lonely Raven

If you traded with me please leave me Heatware Sen
Joined
Feb 2, 2002
Location
Wheaton, IL
Ok, so I'm testing through a few P4s that I have on my DFI
LAN Party motherboard (really good board by the way).
And I've found a P4 2.4c that (so far) is doing 280FSB.

I can run Memtest86 3.0 for 50 passes 0 Errors

I can run Super PI for 16 Million positions and complete it in
record time

I can run multiple loops of 3dmark 2001 Pro Flawlessly

I've gamed on this system for hours on end playing MMORPGs
with resolutions at 1600X1200 as well as your typical FPS
flawlessly as same resolution.

But as soon as I fire up Prime95, it ends with errors in less
then 10 minutes.

If I trust Prime95 exclusivly, then I'm not even sure I can hit
250FSB!!

But if Prime95 is the only thing that drops out....is the system
stable?
 
from the mouth of the creator of prime 95 not exact but close enough. "if its not prime stable, its not stable" but if it runs everything else you need then its stable enough until something hits its fault and it crashes.
 
Hmm.. that's weird...

But just the fact that you're not "stable" with Prime95 means your system isn't 100% stable.

I have the same problem right now.

Prime95 runs for hours at 270+ FSB, but if I play Warcraft III for an hour or so, I get instability.

DP
 
Oh, I agree completely with you guys. I've always used Prime95
on all my AMD systems to prove stability. And if it didn't make
AT LEAST 8 hours, it wasn't stable.

But now, I'm running the games and test programs I want, and
it's still rock solid stable. No crashes, no glitches. Hell, I keep
going back to CPU-Z just to make sure I didn't "stock clock" it
by accident and forgot about it! But sure enough... right now
I'm running 285FSB right now, with Super PI and 3dmark 2001
at the same time without any hangups or glitches...

I'm not sure what to make of it. I think I'm going to stock clock
it later and run Prime95 and see if it's stabilizes or not.
 
I get same here, my 2.4C will do 280FSB but not Prime stable although it will complete 3dmark, SuperPi etc without crashing, I knocked back to 270FSB to be sure SETI WU are not getting corrupted, Prime runs forever at this speed.
I reckon the CPU just needs cooled more, although it could be a number of other things.....I had turbo mode and PAT on which would probably not help. It could just be the fact the board cannot cope with such a high FSB, particularly the NB, an adjustable PSU like the Antec one would allow you to increase VIO to see if that helped, maybe gonna get one of these soon...
 
nikhsub1 said:
Could be the board and NOT the cpu... Have other mobos to test the CPU's in?

I'm testing motherboards for DFI. The one I'm using to hit
285FSB is the DFI Lan Party 875Pro.

Al the other boards I'm testing for them have flaky BIOS and
aren't capable of hitting 225FSB right now. I'm still working
with them to fix it. Especially since I was doing 250 on these
boards before they came out with "optomized" BIOS. LOL
 
Well I'm testing another P4 processor now. This one is a
2.6c Costa Rica, and sure enough, as soon as I get to 260+ FSB
it will run EVERYTHING else but no Prime95.

I'm at 275 with this 2.6c and it ran Memtest86 overnight for 105
passes, zero errors. And now it's about to finish 16 Million
places in Super PI.

I'm really not sure what to make of this. I'll have to format the
hard drive and start over, and use this on a daily bases and
see if I can make it crash under normal wear and tear.
 
hi,
have you try'ed upping the Vagp ?
this settings set the chipset "vcore" (i875) 1.6v or 1,7v possible.

... and try the pci/agp-fix lower or higer as 66mhz. 67 or 68 possible.
 
The latest few BIOS on this DFI motherboard have AUTO or
33/66/100. So bumping up or down the PCI/AGP is not an
option.

I can bump the AGP Voltage a bit, but I'm not sure how that
would help the system gain stability in Prime95

There is also no Northbridge Voltage adjustment.
 
I sometimes trust Prime95 as a Guidline. Correct me if im wrong on this.

If it is not Prime95 Stable but stable in everything else it is not stable enough to live its full life expectancy. The Life expectancy of the proc will been shortened.

Also, try running Prime95 while at stock. Prime 95 may have an issue with a certain piece of hardware and may not be stable on your system no matter what. just turn everything down to stock /by spd and see if it is stable.
 
I've said this more times than I can remember, but here goes again. Prime 95 is NOT the end all of stability tests, in fact I've seen it crash on completely stock oem systems that otherwise never had any problem whatsoever. I first tried it out nearly 3 years ago on my dell inspiron when I first got it. It crashed after about an hour. I got really upset and ran memtest, sandra, and every other benchmark I could think of. It ran flawlessly and still does to this very day - running Seti 24/7 I might add. It wasn't long after that incident that I tried it out again on a dell desktop system. It kept returning errors on that system as well, but aside from Prime that system ran everything else without a hitch, and it's still running fine for the friend that bought it from me. But here's an interesting anomaly for you. I recently decided to give it another try because I was trying to check my new 2.4C P4P800 combo for "stability." The system seemed to be fairly solid at 3400, so I downloaded the latest version of Prime and let it run the "torture test" overnight. It did so without a single error over the course of 10 hours. I figured it was solid so I left it crunching Seti. It didn't go a day before I found it hard locked. The first thing I did was pop in the memtest x86 cdrom and let it go. It didn't make it through one battery of tests. So that pretty well solidified my feelings. One test alone is not enough to declare a system stable, and furthermore if your system does everything you want without any problems, but fails one odd ball test - I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
 
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