960T cores and stability (info)

Ok first of I will apologise for any typos or random words inserted as using my iPhone to post this and the predictive text is a bit wild sometimes anyhow. I found something out today that I think might interest some of you.

This all has to do with my testing I've been doing over the past few days with my 960T, I was wanting to run a bench for the team cup currently running on hwbot so installed a fresh install of win7, after installation I unlocked my cores and windows failed to boot, only making it as far as the flying balls logo before restarting (strange I thought ) as I had benched 5 & 6 cores on it before, so I disabled one core and it booted no problem, "one bad core" I hear you say , but as stated earlier I had already benched it as a 6 core but I used xp to bench it as a x6, at this point I was a bit confused, so decided to install a fresh copy of vista and after installation it booted straight in as a x6 no problem after much troubleshooting and help from team mates it turned out that one of the cores has a problem with running a 64bit OS as xp and vist were both 32bit installs and the win7 I was using was 64bit, after instaling win7 32bit it works a treat as a hex so if anyone has a 960t running a 64bit install and can't unlock all cores I would grab a spare drive and install a 32bit OS on it, and see if it works for you.

Mark

A 32-bit OS can only access a max of 4 gb of ram and by the time you take into account the ram set apart by the executive functions of the OS it is actually more like 3 gb. My thinking here is that when you changed to the 64-bit OS you found a weak IMC or a problem with the ram itself that was obscured when using the 32-bit OSes.

I only use 2gb of ram (1 stick), and it's definately not a weak Imc as it will bench at almost 2000mhz mem clock and over 3000 NB and the ram or imc is not bad as I've benched it since unlocking all 6 and it all works fine (up to now ) touch wood .

Out of curiosity Trents , what bit OS are you running with you're 960T ?

Win 7 64-bit.

So, you're running in single channel mode then?

Yep, just for these tests I have used single channel throughout. You could try the 32bit OS theory out as your chip is the same as mine and will only unlock to x5 in 64bit OS, do you have the spare drive/partition to test it ?

keny said:

Yep, just for these tests I have used single channel throughout. You could try the 32bit OS theory out as your chip is the same as mine and will only unlock to x5 in 64bit OS, do you have the spare drive/partition to test it ?

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Not sure what you mean. Mine is stable at 3.9 ghz as an X6 on the 64-bit OS.

trents said:

Not sure what you mean. Mine is stable at 3.9 ghz as an X6 on the 64-bit OS.

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My bad , I thought you had a x5 only!

I have run it as a 5x at times. It is stable at 4.0 as a 5x. Right now I'm running it as a 4x at 4.1 which eems to give the snappiest performance in all but really well multi-threaded apps like handbrake.