and speaking of failed, bright ideas

[JLK03F150]

You're actually lucky you're getting that high.
That board has a non working PCI/AGP lock. It was a common thing on most VIA chipset boards. There were only a couple that had working locks.

Is the PCI bugged when you try to lock it & the lock fails? What about just leaving it on Auto & letting it proportionately overclock with the FSB. I've reached 225FSB on Dell Intel chipsets with the AGP/PCI being increased using SetFSB. Think that'll work or is that VIA just totally bugged?

 

[PolRoger]

I finally managed to get the ECS K8T890-A (VIA chipset) board up and running in Windows and I discovered that it has a rather limited BIOS overclocking features set.
No voltage control in BIOS other then DRAM from 2.5v up to 2.8v(max) No CPU multi adjustment and bus speed is limited in BIOS from 200 up to 232(max). Dram multi/dividers.... 100/133/166/200.

220 was a no boot with black screen requiring a CMOS reset. 217 would boot into windows but was not stable... 215/216 seems to be max overclock for this board.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Is the PCI bugged when you try to lock it & the lock fails? What about just leaving it on Auto & letting it proportionately overclock with the FSB. I've reached 225FSB on Dell Intel chipsets with the AGP/PCI being increased using SetFSB. Think that'll work or is that VIA just totally bugged?

You can...I do it, but it depends on what frequency your peripherals can stand. Nv cards and Seagate drives can stand higher frequency's than anything else that I've tried. 225 give or take a couple is about all you'll get before data corruption.....and that's actually really good. 213-218 is about normal.

 

[xrror]

That board has a non working PCI/AGP lock. It was a common thing on most VIA chipset boards. There were only a couple that had working locks.

Oh man this brings back the nightmares. I was going to suggest C_D try using PATA instead of SATA but looks like he's already using a Maxtor 6L04J2.

I remember those era maxtors had good performance, but didn't like overclock. A last ditch, if bios allows it, to change his PATA mode from ATA-133 to 100 or even 66. Personally I had good luck with old Samsung Spinpoint drives of that era - for some reason they'd eat much more PCI/southbridge abuse (so while the Maxtor would not like over 37, Samsung over 41).

I do remember though on many of the cheap OEM boards I had, the SATA would drop waaayy before PATA on overclock. Don't know why.

Last trama I remember, with clockgen going over 235 after booting lower seemed to work great, but HDD was always trashed on reboot. But maybe that was just a quirk of the rando boards I had.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Last trama I remember, with clockgen going over 235 after booting lower seemed to work great, but HDD was always trashed on reboot. But maybe that was just a quirk of the rando boards I had.

It was no quirk. Most all were that way.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Ah PolRoger. Get the A8N32 SLI going. leave the VIA chipset alone!

Seriously, 1.35v and 3ghz is good. Go back to that, but should try for some serious v-core increase.

De-lid these 939 chips and run them naked under the water block. Custom mounting if need be. You'll thank me later.

 

[PolRoger]

Ah PolRoger. Get the A8N32 SLI going. leave the VIA chipset alone!

Seriously, 1.35v and 3ghz is good. Go back to that, but should try for some serious v-core increase.

The ECS K8T890-A motherboard has been put back on the shelf.

I originally got it out because Caddi was trying to run with a K8T800 Pro and I couldn't remember how that old VIA board overclocked.

The Opty 180 was benching on an ABIT AN8-SLI and it has some kind of strange sensor/set on the board and CPUZ reports VID just like CoreTemp. With the ASUS and ECS boards CPUZ shows normal ~ vcore voltage.

For benching at 3.1GHz(+) I was actually running in the ~1.525v/1.550v/1.575v range.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

She'll take 1.6 1.65v like a champ. Most Amd chips start overclock at ghis voltage even the fx processors. Phenom II at 1.6v and up.... Its a good starting point once you start chilling.

 

[PolRoger]

I saw this old AMD box in the corner of my closet today... Decided to fire it up again... Its going back into storage.

Athlon XP 2500+ ASUS A78VX DDR333 single channel ram:

 

[ShrimpBrime]

I saw this old AMD box in the corner of my closet today... Decided to fire it up again... Its going back into storage.

Athlon XP 2500+ ASUS A78VX DDR333 single channel ram:

Now this set up you can send to me instead of storage. I could use another sA setup.