OCing Biostar TA890FXE

[penetrecion]

Just bought this board from Tiger for $120 to replace my Gigabyte 790XTA-UD5 which was bugging out on me after a year of heavy usage. So far I haven't had much time to play with it but haven't been able to get a solid OC with it yet. Ran 4.0 GHz but it's unstable even after upping the NB voltage to 1.3 and 2.8 GHz and putting the CPU voltage up to 1.55 volts.

Anyone own this board have any hints as to settings to try in the BIOS? This board has a few different options that are not available to my old Gigabyte board. All my hardware is in my signature and unfortunately the CPU is a C2 stepping.

I just want to hit 4.0 with this puppy, I can do 3.6 with no voltage increase, have for over a year and a half now, but it seems anything beyond that takes massive voltage increases.

Any clues would be greatly appreciated.

 

[CgS Drone]

RAM timing and voltage? How are you running the OC, purely multiplier? I have a C3 stepping 955 and run mine at 3.8 for daily driving with:

200fsb x19 @ 1.44volts
cpu-nb at 2600 using 0.010 added to over volt.
RAM at 1333-7-7-7-24 and 1.6 volts
HT link at 1800

 

[bigben6]

Screen shot please, what are your temps like? why do you say it is unstable? BSOD?

 

[CgS Drone]

Penetrecion. This is from AMD and it may help you resolve your issue or at least be part of your issue and this may be what was happening with your other board as well.

Reading through this basically its saying drop your RAM down to 1066 and tighten up the timing accordingly. So as you overclock remember to keep the DRAM freq. at 1066 (533).

 

[penetrecion]

Thanks for the response guys, yeah it will sometimes just freeze and I have to do a reset. Occasionally it will BSOD and reboot. I am running stock right now, I will try that idea with the RAM though, I never thought about that. My idle temps were about 42-43°C at 1.55 volts. I wasn't able to get a 100% load on it at all so I have no idea where my temps would have gone.

 

[CgS Drone]

Seems like an awful lot of voltage on the cpu, I don't use that much to get to 4208mhz on air.

 

[bigben6]

I ran my 955BE (c3 stepping) at 3.8Ghz (multi only) on P95 Blend last night for 6 hours on stock voltages, no problems, gonna let 3.9 run today, I just wanna find max clock on multi right now but it would seem that the board is perfectly capable anyways, and that it may well be other settings interfering....

 

[CgS Drone]

OP, which slot do you have your video card installed? is your video card the twin frozr?

 

[penetrecion]

Currently running 3.6 GHz @ 1.38 volts, 45°C under Prime load right now. Using multi only since as soon as I increase the FSB it will crash in Prime. I was able to get the board's north bridge stable @ 2.8 GHz with minimal voltage, should I scale that back you think? I also have the RAM running 1066 with 7-7-7-20-27 timings (speed settings)

CgS Drone, my video card is the Twin Frozr and it's sitting in the 1st PCIe slot. And yes that was a lot of voltage on the CPU and it didn't like it. I can't get it stable even @ 3.8. I incremented the voltage up to 1.48 or so and it just ran hot and rebooted my PC. I think this CPU is a dud overclocker.

 

[CgS Drone]

Unplug power and drop the video card to the second pcie slot. If you look at the motherboard your video card is blocking air flow to the northbridge heatsink and is installed over top of the southbridge heatsink as well letting it heat that up. If you run cpu-z hardware monitor and look at motherboard temp. (I believe this is taken off of the southbridge chipset) you will notice a high temp. with my case side panel off so there was no active cooling on the chipset I was getting a 5F higher temp on motherboard temp. at idle, so your video card is blocking off air flow that your system could use to help cool the motherboard. This is with my video card in the second slot.

 

[bigben6]

I think this CPU is a dud overclocker.

This^


I didn't wanna say it first, but still dude 3.6-3.7 is not terrible, its disappointing sure, but it's not horrible, have you set everything to stock and done JUST the proc? Thats my current game, I am doing multi ONLY, right now im at work but my hope is that on multi only it'll still be running P95 blend @ 3.9Ghz when i get home at 4:30ish

 

[CgS Drone]

I wouldn't call your cpu a dud. There are several threads on here about the C2 and the difficulty in OC'ing the cpu. I think it will just take some time to get what you are looking for. The C2 is harder to OC from what I have read than the C3 and requires a bit more tweaking but it can be done. from what I have seen.

 

[penetrecion]

Nope, not an issue, my mainboard temp is currently 40°C still under Prime. Thanks for the suggestions though!

 

[CgS Drone]

hardware monitor screen shot of 40C mainboard temp please.

Not doubting you, we are discussing this board in another thread in here and I am trying to figure out some temps on the motherboard.

 

[penetrecion]

Ask and you shall receive...

 

[penetrecion]

Ouch, gotta resize next time!

 

[CgS Drone]

Thanks.

 

[CgS Drone]

Penetrecion, I got jealous of your board temps so I remounted my heatsinks. These are at idle (before at idle I was around 53C) I will give it a day or two to set in then I will start pushing my OC again to see if this has helped any. I'm at 200fsbX19 and 1.44 volts here, I don't need the 1.44 volts but I leave it there so I can do a quick jump on the multi to get to 3900mhz. At 4ghz I have to jump to 1.456 volts.

 

[QuietIce]

Currently running 3.6 GHz @ 1.38 volts, 45°C under Prime load right now. Using multi only since as soon as I increase the FSB it will crash in Prime. I was able to get the board's north bridge stable @ 2.8 GHz with minimal voltage, should I scale that back you think? I also have the RAM running 1066 with 7-7-7-20-27 timings (speed settings)

CgS Drone, my video card is the Twin Frozr and it's sitting in the 1st PCIe slot. And yes that was a lot of voltage on the CPU and it didn't like it. I can't get it stable even @ 3.8. I incremented the voltage up to 1.48 or so and it just ran hot and rebooted my PC. I think this CPU is a dud overclocker.

If you're running 45°C @ 1.38 vCore then what are you running using a 1.45 vCore?

Personally I think you're doing good if you can hold 3.8 GHz w/8 Gb of RAM on a C2.

 

[penetrecion]

CgS Drone, those are some nice temps! Now I'm jealous! You just unmounted the stock heatsinks and reapplied? What did you use for the thermal compound and did you change anything on the voltage regulators or just stretch the springs a bit?

QuietIce, here's my current temps in Prime for 10 minutes so far. I don't need 1.45 volts to run this speed but used it as an example of my temps.