MSI 990FXA-GD65 990FX or Asus SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0

It all depends on what your using it for. Different benches/games will use the cpu/gpu differently.

balyn said:

cool.

Yeah I bought the Corsair 8GB (2x4096MB) CL8 1600Mhz VENGEANCE
(CL8) today so I'll get them tomorrow

Which one of these do you think would give the most performance?
1: Overclock the cpu to 4.0Ghz w/o cpu/nb memory
2: stay at 3.8GHz and overclock cpu/nb and memory?

Click to expand...

3.8GHz with CPU-NB@2600/2700MHz will be faster than 4GHz CPU-NB@2000MHz in most uses.
Overclocking memory above 1600MHz with Denebs might be a no go, depending on your luck with the IMC.
Some Denebs can't even sustain 1600MHz. You could still work on the latency though. As 1600CL7 gives around the same results as 1866CL8 (at least with AMD CPUs).

balyn said:

.

Yeah I bought the Corsair 8GB (2x4096MB) CL8 1600Mhz VENGEANCE
(CL8) today so I'll get them tomorrow

Which one of these do you think would give the most performance?
1: Overclock the cpu to 4.0Ghz w/o cpu/nb memory
2: stay at 3.8GHz and overclock cpu/nb and memory?

Click to expand...

Gskil in Ares DDR1600, DDR1866 and now DDR2133; have given me absolutely zero issues at stock speed or overclocked pretty far. Been going with Gskil since OCZ quit selling ram and that is a few years now with NO problem During that time I have had Patriot and Kingston ram all run for a while and finally fail. All ram can fail. I don't care who makes it. I just favor the tweaking and my own personal good luck with GSkil.

Trading 200Mhz cpu speed for more CPU-NB speed and a little more ram speed is likely just about a clean wash. Not enough difference to see even in day to day gaming most likely. Nothing to gain but the mind thing we all fall prey to off and on.

By the way about the Micron and Crucial thing; Micron and Crucial are really one and the same. Crucial is or was the retail arm of Micron the chip maker for making up the memory sticks. These better Asus boards can run one channel of ram at one setting and the other channel at another setting. I know my CHV can. Hard to get in an manually tweak the different channels but it can be done. When I used to bench DFI boards all the time, would actually run the channels differently anyway to make up for the difference in trace lengths. You likely can just go into bios and manually set tRFC to about 150 or so and both channels will run the same. I think most ram for AMD chipsets auto sets to about 150 default anyway. Don't quote me on that but I think it does. I may have it confused with my faster ram speeds. Been running DDR1900 too long on FX processor.
RGone...

The thought was since the temperature gets up to 55-60 with higher vcore than I have right now at 3.8, that I focus my overclocking at cpu/nb and memory

I got my new memory now and I've started to overclock the cpu/nb a bit. I'm currently at 2600MHz with 1.15v if I'm not mistaken. I'd be satisfied with 2600 as well so.. When I get this stable I'm thinking of overclocking the memory to 1866Mhz, how much voltage should be it be safe to run at?

Edit: How long should I be stress testing when overclocking cpu/nb? Still 12h as CPU or could I go less?
And memory as well, how long should I be stressing them and should I be using any different program than P95 for testing the ram?

Been running prime now for over an hour w/o any error or crash on 2600Mhz nb

For what I use my computer for 2 hours prime blend torture test is enough for me. Overclocking a phenom II to 1866 on the ram might be a tall order to ask of the IMC, not to say it can't be done but it may not be attainable.

Mandrake4565 said:

Overclocking a phenom II to 1866 on the ram might be a tall order to ask of the IMC, not to say it can't be done but it may not be attainable.

Click to expand...

Ya what he said

Well It's not a must I've been running prime now for about 2h so I guess I could stop it now and continue later on tonight when I go to sleep.

and ofc I can skip the memory overclock.

There is nothing wrong with trying to OC the memory, my Phenom II will let me go to around 1800mhz for benching purposes. I have never tried to see if it was "stable" there.

What we were saying is that the PII 965 only natively supports 1333 memory. You're at 1600 now which is already above specs. You may or may not get up to 1800ish as Mandrake says but it might not be P95 stable. I have 16 gig of 1600 in mine running just over 1700. It's not impossible but will take some time to make it work. You may need to fiddle with timings and volts on the ram. Also NB freq and volts etc.

Got it But I'd have to overclock with FSB to overclock the memory, right? Otherwise I don't even know how lol. Anyways guys, I'm right now at 2600Mhz northbridge and 4.0GHz cpu and It seems "stable". I've only stressed for about 1.5h so far though.

I had to raise the mem voltage and some more on the northbridge and ofc cpu voltage to get it as it is right now. So hopefully I've managed to get my 4Ghz!
Thanks a lot again guys!

Edit: Bleh, got the Fatal error again(rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4".
Guess I'll try a little higher voltage to mem/northbridge.

Just keep an eye on your temps!!
And yes you would probably have to change the HT base clock, I doubt you'd get it to run 1866 unless you dropped the timings a bit!!
I have mine in the 250ish range, but when you change that base clock you change all the other frequencies as well!!

sup with the exclamation marks?
Well, I ran prime from 21:45 last night to 08:14 this morning and then it BSOD with this:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
0x0000000a

Which means I should increase what voltage?
The temps was rather fine. They were running around at 54-56.

Edit: I bumped up the cpu voltage once. Since it ran for almost 12h I guess It'd be stable with 1 extra bump on the vcore and for what I'm using the PC for (aka game for perhaps 1-4h per day, watch movies, internet, series and music)

You'll be fine for what you're doing. The PII's tend to get a little flaky once they get over the 55°c mark on the core. But it doesn't sound like you'll really be stressing it any way. So have fun gaming

If you passes 12 hours it's stable!