SOLVED Overclocking an AMD Athlon 64 3200+

[trents]

Trents,

My experience with these A64 chips (3500 and Opteron) is that is a LOT of vcore he has and temps go up quickly from about 1.375V on a stock cooler.

Yeah, that's mine too. After all, its a 90 nm fab CPU. OP says he is looking to a complete mod at some point so I'm just trying to teach him the incremental approach and the basics so he'll be ready when he does a complete build. Actually, he's got a good mobo to learn on.

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Ok, I still cant find where to fine-tune my voltage. Under advanced settings there is one setting which increases CPU power by 200mV, which is the one I used before. Also, there is a DDR voltage setting further down that allows you to increase the voltage at increments of .5v, but it starts at 1.6v. All this is under the "Advanced" tab located under the menu "Jumperfree". Would there be another place to change the CPU voltage? Looked all through BIOS.

I apologize for my noobiness.

Crazy

 

[trents]

Alright, just put your CPU voltage at 1.6 again, however you got it there. I'm a little uncomfortable with that much but your temps seemed to tolerate it with a high temp of 51. Just go with 1.6 CPU voltage. Other things are looking good. Lower you HT link multiplier again and start increasing the fsb in 5 mhz. increments until it won't pass a 10 minute Prime test. Then reduce the fsb by 5 mhz to get it stable again. Keep monitoring temps. Report back with those nice pics as you have been doing. You're doing real good with the pics. "A picture is worth a thousand words."

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Alright, just put your CPU voltage at 1.6 again, however you got it there. I'm a little uncomfortable with that much but your temps seemed to tolerate it with a high temp of 51. Just go with 1.6 CPU voltage. Other things are looking good. Lower you HT link multiplier again and start increasing the fsb in 5 mhz. increments until it won't pass a 10 minute Prime test. Then reduce the fsb by 5 mhz to get it stable again. Keep monitoring temps. Report back with those nice pics as you have been doing. You're doing real good with the pics. "A picture is worth 512kB."

Alrighty. As for the pics, they are really easy with this program called Puush. All you do after installing the software is press CTRL+Shift+4, highlight the area you want captured and then it automatically uploads the capture a copies a nice small url to your clipboard.

Crazy

 

[trents]

Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a nice screen capture tool called "Snipping Tool" in Accessories.

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Alright, got it to 2.15 every thing seems fine. But the SB to NB isn't the multiplier for the HT link Im pretty sure. Becuase the HTlink is still rising at a rate of 25 for every 5mhZ.(the SB to NB is currently at 3x now fyi)

Going to go back down to where the HTlink is under 1050. Any ideas for what would lower it? Core temp is getting better though. Down to 47C.

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a nice screen capture tool called "Snipping Tool" in Accessories.

yeah I've heard of that. This old beast is still using XP though

*EDIT* Crap forgot to edit this into my other post, sorrybout that.

 

[trents]

Okay, I think I may have figured out the CPU voltage adjustment thing.
1. Go to "Over-Voltage CPU Vcore". DISABLE it.
2. Go to "FID/VID Change". Switch from [Auto] to [Manual]
3. Then go to "Processor Voltage [1.425]" as seen in Post #9 in the right hand side pic and you should now be able to set the voltage manually up to 1.5625.

If you don't want to use that then you can go back to the .2 overvolt option but at least try it to see if it works in manual mode for future reference.

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Okay, I think I may have figured out the CPU voltage adjustment thing.
1. Go to "Over-Voltage CPU Vcore". DISABLE it.
2. Go to "FID/VID Change". Switch from [Auto] to [Manual]
3. Then go to "Processor Voltage [1.425]" as seen in Post #9 in the right hand side pic and you should now be able to set the voltage manually up to 1.5625.

If you don't want to use that then you can go back to the .2 overvolt option but at least try it to see if it works in manual mode for future reference.

Alright, I'll try that out. Any ideas as to the high HTlink reading?

Crazy

 

[trents]

Alright, got it to 2.15 every thing seems fine. But the SB to NB isn't the multiplier for the HT link Im pretty sure. Becuase the HTlink is still rising at a rate of 25 for every 5mhZ.(the SB to NB is currently at 3x now fyi)

Going to go back down to where the HTlink is under 1050. Any ideas for what would lower it? Core temp is getting better though. Down to 47C.

Make sure you're not using the "SB to NB Link Width" but rather the "SB to NB Frequency" and take it off of auto. Until then you won't be able to select one of the frequencies. Choose 800 mhz. If that doesn't work, try "K8 to NB Frequency" and take it off Auto.

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Make sure you take the "SB to NB" off of auto. Until then you won't be able to select one of the frequencies. Choose 800 mhz.

K, will change all that and report back.

Thanks again for all your help with this.

Crazy

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Alright. Couldn't find FID/VID so I guess I will have to keep the voltage at 1.5. I turned the K8 to NB frequency multiplier down, thats the one that affects the HTlink multiplier. Cant put it that low though(x3) apparently, it brought the HTlink waaaay down. Also affects core speed though. Heres teh latest pics.

 

[trents]

Why did you lower your CPU multiplier from 10x to 9x? That just slows it down. Is that the result of lowering the K8 to NB frequency multiplier? If it is, put it back to where it was. Lowering it is counterproductive. Its really frustrating trying to work with a bios you can't get your own hands on.

 

[trents]

One thing I might suggest is going through every menu and submenu in your bios and change every "auto" you see to "manual" and then go back and study the bios again. It might open up new options when things are off "auto."

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Why did you lower your CPU multiplier from 10x to 9x? That just slows it down. Is that the result of lowering the K8 to NB frequency multiplier? If it is, put it back to where it was. Lowering it is counterproductive. Its really frustrating trying to work with a bios you can't get your own hands on.

Im not sure what that was. It is back up at x10 now. I reset BIOS to defaults to counter that and it did opened up alot of things I couldn't access before, like fine-tuning the CPU voltage. Seems pretty stable now. Clocked at 2.3GHz with a high temp of 47C-49C. Heres the latest wave of pics.

Will upload the core temp one in a few. Just hit the storage limit on a free Puush account(200MB).

 

[trents]

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket939/A8N32-SLI Deluxe/E2280_A8N32-SLI_Dlx.pdf

I would also ask that you get the owner's manual to your motherboard and read through the section on bios settings that has to do with overclocking. It can be found at the link above. That way you will get the whole picture of what's in your bios and some explanation of the settings.

 

[trents]

Don't know what you did but all the setting displayed in CPU-z look like what I was expecting. You have some more headroom from a temp standpoint so see if you can push that Bus Speed (aka, "CPU frequency") higher and maybe add a little more CPU voltage.

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Don't know what you did but all the setting displayed in CPU-z look like what I was expecting. You have some more headroom from a temp standpoint so see if you can push that Bus Speed (aka, "CPU frequency") higher and maybe add a little more CPU voltage.

Yeah, I'm not totally sure either.... I think it was the act of resetting BIOS back to defualts and then going through and changing everything. I'll add a little more voltage and see how high I can get this thing to go before I hit my temp/stability limit.

 

[Crazy_Catz]

Ok, upped the voltage to the next increment in BIOS and everything seems good running at 2.4GHz. Prime is running now, will see how high my temp gets.

Looks like that may be about as high as I can go, with CPU at 50-52 whilst running Prime. Might be able to get it to 2.45, but right now I'm really happy, 2.4 was better then I thought I would be able to get.

Thanks for all your help on this trents

Crazy

 

[trents]

Looking good! The only thing I see I would like to change would be the memory speed (Dram frequency). Its pretty low at 160 mhz. Can you change some setting somewhere to get that closer to 200 mhz without blowing the lid off your HT Link speed?