chasing the VTT dragon with Gulftown and Gigabyte (i7-970)

[xrror]

So recently I bought an i7-970 on ebay...

Threw it in my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 1.0). Made sure to reset the bios before pulling the i7-930 that was in there before.

While I was in there, made sure I had latest BIOS (F8b)

Fired it up with that "new (to me) chip anticipation" and life was good.

For fun, did a quick and dirty overclock to 4.2 with most stuff on auto, not really expecting much. Runs great! Even more awesome I simply set the memory to 1600, and I'm running 24Gb at 1600 at cas 8 all great and dandy.

This all with Rosetta@Home at full load.

So easy! Wow Gulftown is great! Huzzah!

Pretty happy with this call it a day, will tweak later...

....(crack of thunder in background, cue rain)....

Of course, dear readers... the alarms should have gone off around the part where I said "most stuff on auto"... and of course "tweak later" was sometime 2 days later when it dawned on me "then what was the point of the x980 higher mults? And isn't the Gulftown memory controller supposed to be kinda a PITA?"

I wonder what my VTT voltage is on Auto? Surely Gigabyte would set a different limit for 32nm chips than 45nm right?

HWMonitor doesn't directly show VTT on this board. So I dig around, and find Gigabyte's EasyTuner 6...

1.56v



After shutting down the machine, and a change of pants, I think I found why it was so easy to run the memory... at about anything I tried.

But yes, today has been all about dealing with how much I can overclock while staying under 1.35v VTT, and it sucks

Anyways, hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to ask a coherent question about tricks for keeping VTT down and not having to run slow memory, but as it stands... the moral of the story (Rocky and Bullwinkle Style).

The age old advice to not trust Auto

or

Beware the Gigabyte VTT dragon!

 

[txus.palacios]

... the moral of the story (Rocky and Bullwinkle Style).

The age old advice to not trust Auto..

 

[xrror]

So I just had a complete "I've had it wrong for the past 3 years" moment

So on socket 1366 i7's, when they say "your uncore multiplier must be at least x2 of your memory multiplier" it literally means just that. NOT whatever stupid idea I had gotten in my head forever ago.

It should have dawned on me a LOT sooner because I knew gulftown had relaxed the requirement some to a x1.5 uncore minimum. So all this time I had been running my poor i7-930, and this 970 at crazy town uncore speeds around x18 - x20 uncore.

So my 'ol 930 I thought was a dud clocker had been running the uncore in the 3600-3800mhz range with a ton of VTT. Me thinks maybe it's not so bad a chip after all

Frighteningly enough when I had the suicide 1.56v on the Gulftown it also would run that.

just... So dumb. argh

I hope I didn't damage this chip "too much" where it goes into a spiral of degradation in a week. Took a few years off the life of the uncore for sure - ugh.

So hopefully that concludes my story of being a dotard with uncore (for now).