trying to get stable 955 BE

[trekky]

stumped on the overclocking 955 BE

im trying to overclock this 955 BE
im upping Volts and multi
with NB multi
i cant get prime95 to stop failling heat on cores are pretty good cause i got my window open to keep it cool from the winter air
prime95 using blend makes any core 1-4 fail in about 1 min
however using Inplace FFT does not fail any cores is it a Ram thing?
also im getting low 3dmark scores im thinking its due to my overclock and or Ram
heres what i got
955 BE @ 3.8ghz with 1.4v
NB at 2600mhz
ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA Socket AM2+
Ram BL12864AA1065 Crucial Ballistix 2GB 2X 1GB DDR2 PC2-8500 1066Mhz
GPU is a radeon 7000 DDR
Windows XP
HT link is Maxed out for this Mobo

Oh ya for the Ram i cant change the voltage on it it only has auto/normal/high and ultra high? which to set it as?
and should i mess with the AGP clock? its set to 66mhz right now

 

[trents]

One thing I suspect is there is too much discrepancy between the HT Link frequency and the NB frequency. The first is quite low and the second is pretty high. I would bring them closer together. I also suspect that motherboard is not up to the power draw of an overclocked PII X4.

 

[Efonzerellie]

what is your CPU/NB voltage at

 

[BeepBeep2]

For troubleshooting purposes, keep HT Link at 1000 MHz and CPU-NB to 2000 MHz (10x) right now.
If you want to know if it is a RAM/CPU-NB related issue as-is, then report the exact error that Prime95 is spitting out and I will tell you.

That motherboard should support up to 1000 MHz HT Link. Are you on the latest BIOS? The issue is not a difference between HT Link and NB speeds. Of course, they are related, but HT Link should not be a bottleneck at ~800 MHz and above. At lower speeds, you may notice a decrease in overall system responsiveness, for example, if you were to run 200 MHz HT Link the system would become extremely sluggish and relatively unusable.

You're asking a tall order to be overclocking with that board anyway, the only reason that board exists was to give AGP/DDR users in 2006 a cheaper upgrade path to Athlon 64 X2 and DDR2, then further in 2007 AM2+ Phenom quad core CPUs, and Phenom II were added later by BIOS update. ASRock is good about including compatibility for new CPUs, thinking about the end user's wallet, but this is the furthest from the best choice for brute force overclocking.

 

[redduc900]

Is the RAM stable while running Memtest86+?

 

[trekky]

good idea testing now

 

[TeknoBug]

Is your DDR2 1066 or are you overclocking it? Don't overclock it if it's DDR2 800. I'm @ 3.8 on this 955 and it's stable using DDR2 800 and all other settings stock.

It's probably your motherboard, you said AGP??? Also why does HTlink say 800 in the CPU-Z, it should be 2000.

 

[trekky]

no its 1066mhz D9 micron DDR2
and yes AGP slot on the mobo
why?

 

[trekky]

it seems that when the Ram is set to 533(1066) it gives errors in memtest
on 400(800) works fine in memtest
and for the HT is is Maxed out at 800 and yse its not set on auto set to max manually
also setting the ram back to 800 lets prime work it seems
i will let it run and will see
and why does CPUz say i have 6400 Ram i got 8500 any other way of checking what the Ram is rated at?
oh and for the 2x post i was having problems with the website so i tryed posting it and it did not but it seems like it did srry

 

[trents]

DDR2 800 is the same as PC6400. DDR2 1066 is the same as PC8500. Different ways of expressing ram speed. Look at the CPU-z SPD tab. It gives four columns at the bottom which display the standard frequencies your ram is capable of. The EPP2 is the "Extended Performance Profile 2) is really the overclocked "on the edge" profile of the ram and does not represent the maximum frequency the ram will run at on most motherboards with most CPUs. It may run at 1066 on some systems when everything is perfect and when you have manually set the voltage and timing to what is displayed in EPP #2. In other words, EPP2 is the "might under perfect circumstances but don't count on it profile". EPP1, PC6400, is the "it will usually do this on most systems" profile. Veteran PC builders will tell you that an AM2+ system that is truly stable with the ram at 1066 is not that common. And even if you can run it at 1066 you have to relax the timings and so you lose part of the performance gain the extra frequency would have given you.

 

[BeepBeep2]

Phenom II is a bit bandwidth starved - if you can get it stable at 1066 by adding a bit more voltage (up to 2.2v is fine) I would do so.

You didn't need to run memtest, had you reported the error in Prime95 it would be easy to tell what component was causing the problem.

 

[TeknoBug]

Ah yeah forgot about that ^ try bumping the voltage for the ram.

 

[dtrunk]

why push for such a high OC if your memory is ddr2? i'd assume the lack of ddr3 makes the OC pointless, your memory is still SLOW.

 

[trekky]

ya but im going for high scores on 3dmark for AGP
most bench AGPs are DDR Ram so DDr2 is fast comparely

 

[BeepBeep2]

why push for such a high OC if your memory is ddr2? i'd assume the lack of ddr3 makes the OC pointless, your memory is still SLOW.

That's like saying "If your CPU is slower than another CPU, why would you overclock it?"
...
DDR2-1066 5-5-5-15 is about as fast as DDR3-1333 7-7-7, near 1600 9-9-9 for Phenom II.

DDR2-1200 5-5-5-15 would be pretty fast.

 

[TeknoBug]

why push for such a high OC if your memory is ddr2? i'd assume the lack of ddr3 makes the OC pointless, your memory is still SLOW.

Well a Phenom II can reach 4.2GHz with DDR2.

 

[trents]

No flies on the DDR2. Memory bandwidth doesn't make as much difference as a lot of people think it does, especially when your CPU is not starved for it.

 

[trekky]

ya i seems i cant get a stable 1066 but hey! i have gotten gold medals already! going for my 3rd right now

 

[BeepBeep2]

No flies on the DDR2. Memory bandwidth doesn't make as much difference as a lot of people think it does, especially when your CPU is not starved for it.

Why do we overclock CPU-NB trents? To get more memory / I/O bandwidth and better performance. The gain is mostly because of the memory bandwidth increase. Memory bandwidth meaning: L3 cache bandwidth (it is low-latency memory) which runs at half of CPU-NB speed
DDR bandwidth.

When running DDR2, it is crucial to overclock the RAM to the absolute maximum frequency possible to ensure optimal performance.

Otherwise, it is practically useless to overclock CPU-NB.

You would be surprised, all recent CPU architectures are "bandwidth starved"...

Why do you think people like to run 2400-2800 MHz on Ivy Bridge? For a noticeable performance increase. Why DDR3-1800 6-6-6-18 on Phenom II? Because there is a measurable performance increase. Why 2400 7-11-77 on Bulldozer? Because there is a measurable performance increase.

Whether this gain (1-10% depending on benchmark/game/etc.) is worth it to people, who knows.

However, there are real-world games and real world applications such as WinRAR that are affected largely by memory bandwidth and/or latency. Some prefer lower latency, some prefer higher bandwidth, some just need a mix of both.