New member, 2.6C stable or not stable

[sp00L]

Hi everyone. I've been lurking for weeks and finally decided to register since I've seen these forums to be more hospitable than others. Anyways, I consider myself a "noob OC'er" but find it extremely addicting, almost as much as Wolfenstein ET

Anyways, I got my Christmas in October and built a new system as seen in my sig. Anyways, I've done prime95 stable for 10hrs on 1.65 vcore with temps idle/load of 35/47 and system 29/32. I'm pleased with these. Now comes the dilema. I adjusted the GA to A-A-A-D-D and even Turbo-A-A-D-D runs fine. Tonight I decided to take some of the advice I've read here and set 5:4 and underclocked the ram to see how high the cpu would go. 255, boots to windows, not prime 95 stable at 1.675. 260, boot to windows, 1.7 (don't check for stabiliity). 265 same. 270, boot to windows 1.75 vcore, no stable check. 275......277 now I'm at 3.601 with 1.75 vcore and I'm thinking "holy crap!" I don't bother with prime95, and my mem is like only 222. I pop cpu-z, try to screen shot, but turn into an idiot and can't figure it out. I immediately reboot, go back to 1.65 @ 250 FSB, 1:1.

I noticed the vcore @ 1.75 fluctuate from 1.74 to 1.808, it's been a somewhat known issue with the IC7-Max3. I'm thinking the mobo isn't stable. I'm thinking I can do 3.4-3.5 stable but I'm all out of tricks. I'm thinking I should be happy with 3.25 and go play some games.

Anyone got any advice, criticism, or rants? I'm getting greedy again

 

[shiyan]

welcome to the forums!

stable for Prime 95 means no errors, so if it errors out on you, your still too fast.

your 2.6C seems to be a very good overclocker, but first of all, try staying under 1.7v, as people have reported shortened lives of Northwoods with more than 1.7v.

then just clock down to a speed at which Prime 95 does not error out on you.

also, if you are at 270 fsb, even with the 5:4 divider, it could still be your RAM that's causing instability, so set it to 3:2 to be sure you're only testing the CPU.

nice cooling setup.

 

[sp00L]

Thanks a bunch for the advice I've got the SP94 going and will max the rheostat on the smart fan 2 and see what happens. I'll try the divider to 3:2, thx.

- sp00L

 

[Edward2]

If your CPU requires 1.65 volts to run at 250 FSB, you may not be able to overclock much higher before you hit the 1.70 volt limit. You can certainly try using the 3:2 memory ratio, but you will take a big performance hit by doing that. It would be better to run a lower FSB 1:1 than a higher FSB 3:2.

You could also try improving your memory timings. I'm not sure what you are running now, but you could try using the GAT "Street Racer" and "F1".

 

[sp00L]

I can't go above auto. Turbo and up at 250 won't boot. I can do Turbo but that's at 235fsb and street racer won't run. Everything else is set to Auto and disable for the last 2. I just did some benching and found that running 5:4 with mem at 200, 2-3-3-6, was about 10% less bandwidth in sandra and 2 seconds slower in super-pi. You're right, for the P4 bandwidth is king. Oddly enough, I can boot and bench, but unstable between 270 & 275 but that's with 1.75 (yikes!). Also I noted that my current mem settings of 2.5-4-4-7 were not any faster or gave more bandwidth than 3-4-4-8. All of these were clean with 300% coverage in MemTest.

I'm going to play with some better heatsink fans and possibly nb cooling and see if I can reduce my vcore and go higher. I seriously doubt it but 3.25 isn't so bad. Of course Intel just dropped the price of this chip by $30. Such is life.

 

[shiyan]

I remember seeing somewhere that street racer was actually a faster setting than F1 for some reason.

defies logic, but I do remember being surprised by that.

 

[Johnny Mo]

Yes, that is correct, street racer is the fastest setting.

Oddly, even Abit has it wrong in their PR crap, stating F1 is the fastest.

Check Xbitlabs' recent review of the IC7-MAX3 for hard numbers confirming that Street Racer is the fastest setting.

JM