[ChillPhatCat]

Well, my PII 940 arrived a couple hours ago and I had to install it of course immediately. I went a little on upgrades and basically built myself a new computer over the last month... but hell I hadn't upgraded anything in my system for about 2 and a half years and the old 4000+ @ 2.7GHz just wasn't up to snuff anymore.

So, todays upgrades included a new 20x SATA DVD burner, to replace the archaic 8x IDE burner, 750 Gb WD "Green Power" hard drive, and my precious... my Phenom II. Ahem.

Of course the first two upgrades are not interesting, so let me get down to the meat of it. I popped the CPU in with the stock cooler and took some readings, it should be noted that the processor idles at 800 MHz with the stock settings. All temp readings were after 6 minutes of prime, until the temp stabilized and I took the maximum temp it saw at that point.

Stock HSF, Stock Voltage:

3000 MHz CPU
1800 HT
15x Multi
Idle: 22C
Load: 48C



3400 MHz CPU
1800 MHz HT
17x Multi
Idle: 28C
Load: 49C
3DMark06: 16,100

Lapped Thermalright SI-128SE, 80CFM 120mm Fan, Arctic Silver 5, Stock Voltage:

3400 MHz CPU
1800 MHz HT
17x Multi
Idle: 25C
Load: 39C

3400 MHz is now 10 min prime stable... seems to be running Windows 7 just fine, I will follow up with more stability testing to see whether it continues to be stable or needs a voltage bump. I got into Windows at 3500 MHz, but core #4 failed prime after about 30 seconds.

I'll add more to my results when I've played around with the voltages a bit, I think 3600 is a fairly realistic goal, maybe even 3700, it all depends how the voltage effects the temp... I try to keep load under 55C, which seems to be the sweet spot for most AMD chips.

[Dolk]

Alright now that you hit a wall, go ahead and follow the NB guide below. Try to match it by at least 100MHz, you do not have to up the FSB. After that try lossening your RAM timings if possible.

Hope that helps!

[ChillPhatCat]

Originally Posted by Dolk

Grats, saving this post for advice. Need to get something done

Heh... yeah I work at home... I've been bad for the last couple hours But, most of my real work gets done after hours anyway... I'm just a lump by the phone most of the rest of the day, waiting for customers to break their stuff.

[Caviman2201]

400MHz bump @ stock voltage is very nice...

[hooflung]

My 940 just got delivered to my front door. 2 day's shipping from newegg for free. I'll be able to truely share your emotions in 1.5 hours when I leave work!

[ChillPhatCat]

Well, around 1 hr 10 mins the computer reset... prime didn't fail, the comp just reset. It may just be Win 7 being finnickey... it seems to do this sometimes even with stock speeds. I'm satisfied with that result however and am going to try to max this thing out now... then I'll see exactly how long I can get it to prime.

[ChanceCoats123]

If your getting 400mhz at stock speeds, then my ideas about the x3 should be spot on ! Thanks for that.

[ChillPhatCat]

I've found with Win 7 that I can boot into it at the same speeds I would in Win XP, but sometimes it will reset randomly in Win 7 whereas it will continue to prime away to it's heart's content in win XP. I have to say I'm proud of win 7 though, after countless memory dumps I'm now sitting at 3600 MHz @ 1.475v... it's maxing out at around 46C by the 6 minute standard I used above... it should hit another 4 degrees on short FFT's, so that puts me right around 50C for absolute max temp. I'm gonna work on getting this speed to prime for more than an hour later tonight, but it's functionally stable here so far.

[hooflung]

I just got it installed. My ECS 790GX was flashed in Vista 64 using the windows tool. I installed the 2 sticks of DDR2 1066. Booted into Vista 64 without any change. These are all at default AUTO settings except pushing the DDR from 400mhz to 533.

Is there a way I can use a resize feature for this pic? Its BIG!

[ChillPhatCat]

Wow haha that's a big screen shot there... I usually do a quick and dirty photo editing to mine to get them smaller... paste it into paint, then save, then I open the picture in view mode and resize it to the point where I can still make out letters, then take another screen shot of that and paste it into paint again... move it to the top left corner and resize the picture to the dimensions of the smaller screenshot... save as JPG and you've got a nice 70-100kb image.

I'd post a SS myself, but my provider is not allowing FTP connections right now.

Anyway, sitting here ate 3600MHz @ 1.4875v, it's fairly stable... enough for gaming at least. I booted into windows at 3700, but it dumped the memory within a couple minutes of starting up prime 95. I don't want to push the voltage any further on air... Looking at 49C load temps with large FFT's, and 32C idle. Current 3DMark06 is 16,500.

[hooflung]

Originally Posted by ChillPhatCat

Wow haha that's a big screen shot there... I usually do a quick and dirty photo editing to mine to get them smaller... paste it into paint, then save, then I open the picture in view mode and resize it to the point where I can still make out letters, then take another screen shot of that and paste it into paint again... move it to the top left corner and resize the picture to the dimensions of the smaller screenshot... save as JPG and you've got a nice 70-100kb image.

I'd post a SS myself, but my provider is not allowing FTP connections right now.

Anyway, sitting here ate 3600MHz @ 1.4875v, it's fairly stable... enough for gaming at least. I booted into windows at 3700, but it dumped the memory within a couple minutes of starting up prime 95. I don't want to push the voltage any further on air... Looking at 49C load temps with large FFT's, and 32C idle. Current 3DMark06 is 16,500.

Don't get me wrong, I work in photoshop, gimp and fireworks all the time. I just don't want to take muh beautiful desktop to the crop shop.

I definitely love the motherboard even more now that I have it maxed as much as the AM2+ platform will probably go. I am going to tweak the memory.

I never OC'ed AMD tech before so I gotta sift through forum posts.

[ChillPhatCat]

Dolk, I missed your suggestion above... I've been fooling around trying to get this Mobo to let me get the HT over stock all night, it doesn't seem to want to allow a multi over 9x... and the settings where it just asks for a certain speed (1600, 1800, 2000) doesn't seem to recognize anything over 1800... to top it off, I'm shooting in the blind in bios since I've got to rely on a hex code table to change multipliers and CPU voltage... and it's not a direct translation from the normal tables. Anyway, to cut a long post short, I dropped the ram to 667 and bumped my FSB to 240, dropped the multi back to stock @ 15x and now I've got the NB running at 2160 MHz and 1.2v. Picked up another hundred or so 3D marks for a grand total of 16,671. This RAM doesn't want to go over 820 MHz, but that seems to be the nature of filling up all 4 slots... the two original 1Gb sticks used to do 900 MHz no problem.

Originally Posted by hooflung

Don't get me wrong, I work in photoshop, gimp and fireworks all the time. I just don't want to take muh beautiful desktop to the crop shop.

Heh, it's not THAT big, keep it whatever size you want... no skin off my bandwidth.

[Dolk]

yeah I didn't know you had 4 ram sticks and win7 64bit. Your wall should be around 3.7ghz though.

Do not try to up the HT, just the NB. I would grab your Manual and read it. It has a lot more info then you think. If your not sure where settings are, head over to the EVGA forums and ask some people there. That is how I got to know my mobo. Have you tried going up with your CPUv also? I know some people like it at stock but sometimes you just have to bump it .05v to get that extra 300 mhz.

[ChillPhatCat]

Dolk, you think I should go to 1.5v? I figured I was getting pretty high up there. I know where the HT/NB multipliers are, and what I should set them to, however it doesn't seem to be working for this chip. With the last CPU I was able to change it on the fly, now the same settings do nothing... perhaps there's a trick with the PII's or perhaps it's just that the PII support is not complete... I dunno. I'll probably head over to the EVGA forums at some point.

[ChillPhatCat]

Ok, I think I've pretty much reached a conclusion on this NB problem. At first I thought the HT was locked to the NB, but then I saw that I can lower my HT to anything below 1800, and it won't effect the NB speed. But, I cannot get the NB multiplier to budge up or down. From what I've read, this multiplier is locked on PII's from the factory and only certain motherboards can defeat it... mine is not one of those.

[ChillPhatCat]

Update:

I thought I was running my northbridge at 1.175v, I didn't think the adjustment was working, so I figured it was at stock voltage... for some reason I was reading chipset voltage and thinking "northbridge" when I read the voltages... not the case at all So I was actually running the NB at 1.55v...

So I'm pretty sure this is why I was getting random crashes/resets at full throttle and complete stability everywhere else... that part of the chip was just getting too hot. I backed the voltage down to 1.25v, which should give complete stability for 2160 MHz on the NB. Also, it's running prime like a champ now... I dropped the CPU down by .0125v and ran through 30 mins without any errors just now where before it would die at 5-10. Oh and my temps have dropped by a good 4 degrees.

I bet I can get the CPU voltage down quite a bit more, this probably explains why it was doing pretty well at stock voltage and 3400 MHz, but took another .125v to get to 3600. Man I wish I didn't have to deal with hex codes here... it just makes things that much harder.

[ChanceCoats123]

lol I love stupid mistakes where you realize you were doing it the whole time. Glad you go it worked out man.

[ChillPhatCat]

Yeah, looks like I got to 3700, I bumped the volts to 1.525, but it's staying a good 3-4 degrees cooler this time around... I've passed the 10 minute mark in prime now with no cores failing and still running. With an up to date HSF I'm sure I could hit 3.8 no problem.

[ChanceCoats123]

Excellent, that also makes me feel good being as I'm too cheap for a new hsf. I can just use the stocker.

[ChillPhatCat]

I cannot confirm that this is stable, as it's hitting 57* at full load, but it can do about 3 iterations of Prime before the comp resets without a mem error or prime failing.

3800 MHz:


Need more cooling.