Have I reached a wall with my 3.0c?

Greetings everyone,

I just built my first, real overclocker today. Specs are as follows:

Northwood 3.0C
AOpen AX4SG Max II
2x 512mb OCZ Enhanced Latency PC3200

For the time being, I'm running the Intel HSF. Outside of being a little noisy without a smart fan utility running, it seems to do a decent job on temps. I know AOpen isn't exactly overclocking paradise, but this board actually has some nice features... even allows changes to BIOS settings while in Windows (reboot required of course) and FSB/voltage changes on the fly.

I'm just trying to figure out if I've pushed my 3.0C as far as I can or not.

The highest I've been able to dual Prime95 is 235 (3525mhz) @ 1.55v with the AGP voltage at stock and the DRAM voltage @ 2.7 (automatically controlled by the board).

I've had things run fairly stable to the naked eye up as far as 240, but Prime95 gave me rounding errors then.

Oh, and the downside to the board... my core voltage only goes to 1.6.

So, my temperatures seem fine... I'm @ 52C right now after running dual Prime95s for a couple of hours... what might be the problem?

Is the RAM the likely culprit, seeing as how it's only meant to run @ 200mhz and it's at 235 already, or am I missing out on something?

I also read on here that raising the AGP voltage could help. Can I get an explanation on that?

Thanks guys.

Oh I might add, although I'm not sure that it's relevant, that I'm using the onboard video for the time being... which means it's pulling 16mb from my RAM.

I know, seriously goofy, but I'm holding out until next pay day for the Geforce 6800 GT.

That could be the limit, but I doubt it.

Your still pretty much at stock voltage, you can raise it higher, but I'm not sure how well that stock heatsink will do. Is that 52C WHILE P95 is running?

It could be your RAM, so here is what you do to find out. Dont run it 1:1 with your processor. Run it 5:4 so that your RAM isn't running so fast, then you'll see what it is.

Increasing the AGP voltage will do what? You dont even have an AGP card installed! And even if you did it would do nothing for your FSB. Now if you were overclocking your video card, then yes, increasing the voltage would help. You should have the PCI lock turned on so that you dont run your HD's and PCI slots out of spec.... That can lead to corruption of your harddrives.

Hope this helped.

Welcome To The Forums.

i read in those forums that the NB voltage is linked to the AGP voltage, which COULD help stability at high fsb

but i'd like if someone could confirm this

I read the same thing, but it just didn't make much sense to me.

I'm going to run things at 5:4 and see how it goes.

Thanks

Oh, and to answer your question, yes it was 52C after running 2 copies of Prime95 for an hour or so.

My idle temperature, on the other hand, is only 32C. Hm, 52C really doesn't seem to be outrageous, but that 20C difference does seem like a jump from idle to load.

I changed the ratio to 5:4, and now it's running 3600 (15x240) @ 1.6v and so far, it's rock solid in both Prime95s.

Temperatures haven't passed 53C yet, but I'm going to leave it for a while and see how it goes. I'm not too worried about temperatures at this point because I've still got plenty of simple air cooling options at this point.