help overclocking asus M4ATD-pro

[magnus28]

Hello all,

I have been an intermediate over-clocker for a few years now.
About a year - year and a half ago, I asked for help overclocking my 1090t.

I read Dolk's guide, and got a ton of help from members on this forum.

I wanted to overclock my Ram and Cpu simultaneously.

a good tip was to start overclocking just the cpu, and leave ram at stock, then find out where my cpu becomes unstable, than back it off a bit, then do the same thing for FSB or hyper-link. Then OC both. I did this and found I could OC my 1090t to 4.01 Ghz, and my ram to 2000 Mhz 9-9-9-24.

I was quite please with this, and although my setup was not prime stable, It ran my favorite games for hours without a crash. I pretty much went crash free for almost a year. Then one day I got a BSOD and upon reboot I got an overclock failed! message in the post.

Ever since that day I could not get my OC even close to what it had been game stable for a year.

Now my ram is G.skill PIS series 4GB and is advertised to run at 2000 Mhz 9-9-9-24 (for intel).

I got lots of help from the techs at G.skill and they said AMD boards don't like running ram at those speeds and like 1600 and less. He said it was possible to get my board stable at those timings and speed with a little work. After some suggestions I bumped my DRAM voltage to 1.70 (1.52 stock?) The tech said my ram can handle quite a bit of voltage and 1.71 would be fine.

The 1090t doesn't seem to like to go over 4.00 Ghz. best I got to run stable was 4.01 Ghz with 1.475 voltage.

I've seen a lot of debate over what to set the optimal NB voltage to. Some say with that speed, 2800Mhz would be ideal, and any faster could hinder my performance. as for HT speed, 2000Mhz or close to it seemed the general consensus.

I just don't get why my computer ran for at least a year with certain settings, and all of a sudden it doesn't want to overclock anymore. I don't think my cpu or ram has become defective.

I'm tired of changing setting after setting trying to get the most speed out of my system. Main reason is a game I play (Arma 2) is VERY cpu intensive, and I notice it uses a lot of cpu during a game. The game itself is an absolute resource hog and I have even seen a guy using 12GB ram and 2 radeon 6970's and it only giving him 40-50 fps.

I've changed my bios setting so much I know the voltages almost by heart.

here is what I changed the volts to.

Cpu 1.475
CPU/NB 1.3
SB auto
NB 1.25
VDDA auto
DRAM 1.70

my ram that used to run my games 2000Mhz @ 9-9-9-24
won't even do 1800Mhz 9-9-9-24 anymore

best I can do is run at 1667 9-9-9-24
or 1333 8-8-8-24.

just to reiterate, my cpu doesn't like over 4Ghz and my ram is very fickle, even when I down my ram to 1333 and bump the dram volts, and then increase the cpu and volts, the number one crash seems to be one of my banks failed to return cycle in given time.

I will not settle for dropping my ram to crap speed and crap timings, I might as well scrap my computer.

my simple goal is to have my 1090t run @ 4ghz and my ram at decent speed whether it's 1600 or 1800 with decent timings.

anybody got the same board and cpu?

btw no hardware changes, and I have the latest drivers, and bios update

and my graphics card is an evga 570 GTX HD

thx


-frustrated

 

[RGone]

Been there and done that with ram failing. Got a set right now in a test board that ran fine for almost 2 years and then actually began to give a random C1 error. Fooled with it and memtest86+ for a couple of days and then it dawned on me the ram was just getting bad. So in my case I 'could' and 'did' up the ram voltage by 0.05 and the ram quit throwing errors.

I have advised the actual owner of the ram to get him some ordered.

 

[magnus28]

thx for the reply..

So you think the ram is getting bad?

I uped the voltage to 1.71 and was still crashing just inside windows at 2000 9-9-9-24.

do you think i should up it to 1.72 and memtest86 it?


one final thing...

seems when my ram AND cpu are clocked high they combinly cause my computer to crash - as i opposed to just having one clocked at a stable OC.
I guess what i'm saying is if I get a good workable OC with my cpu, and leave the ram alone, it will run forever, and vice versa with my ram. But put them both together and they wanna crash. I have tried even giving extra voltage on top of the cpu/nb 1.3 I have it at now to try and stablized the NB...

and edit: my board is M4A89TD-PRO

 

[RGone]

Okay let me see if I can make sense in what I write.

1. IN general AMD IMC's do not like high memory speeds. In fact it has only been just in say the last year of less that the cpu and IMC cared much for any ram faster than DDR1333. I know and yes I have seen the advertising from mobo companies touting DDRXXXX OC and all that, but I am talking about the situation as it often really is.

2. Then comes the 6 core thuban and a somewhat better IMC and it became easier to run DDR1600 sometimes and beyond.

3. Now none of these later IMC's like much voltage on the ram. I see recommends for the 1.5V stuff and now even less. Back when AMD 'first' moved the IMC into the cpu, you almost HAD TO run extra cpu voltage so that the IMC would have enough voltage to run the higher voltage ram OR the IMC would fail. Some of that has been overcome or worked around by the coming of ram needing less voltage.

4. So where are you in all of this? I would suspect in perhaps two places at one time. IN instances like this you sort of have to go with your *gut* feeling since I cannot actually touch the keyboard and visually and by feel see what is happening. My *gut* really is sort of shouting that the IMC and the ram are going to the happy hunting grounds. Perhaps moreSO the ram. And regardless of which is really the hangdog puppy right now...you will likely begin to have real problems with that 1.7V on the ram hitting that thuban IMC.

5. I think it is time to swap something out and if it were me...it would be the ram first. Beg some DDR1333/DDR1600 1.5Volt ram from a bud. If they are wonky about that, then maybe they would let you test your ram in their mobo. Your ram has very very little chance of dorking up someone else's mobo. If your ram will not perform correctly at its' rated voltage in another board, then you certainly have found one part of the bad in your equation.

About as far as my brain goes at this early morning hour where I am.

 

[shadowdr]

I have the same mobo but different ram and only a 4x cpu. The mobo will not like more than 1600 speed ram, I would just set it at 800 and some tight timings and be done with it. I have 12 gigs of mixed ram but they run together at 8-8-8-24-34-1T at 800 MHZ and at 1.5 volts. This is probably some later ram than you have but you might try similar timings or whatever the 800 MHZ timings are with 1T. You may see higher bench speeds but in real life you won't notice any difference as the TRC is very high with higher settings.

 

[magnus28]

muchos gracias

I'll try replacing the ram and see if that's the culprit.