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AMD Phenom 9500 Woes

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STi413

New Member
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Well, it's been a long road and I'm about one thread away from buying a new CPU.

Here's the story:
A year or so ago I bought a cheap Phenom 9500 Gateway machine with 3GB RAM and a mediocre video card. The plan was to just use it for warcraft; nothing crazy.

Recently I finished toying with my car for the season and now I'm playing with computers again (Sys admin by trade but it's still a hobby). I'm definitely not a 'noob' to hardware but I am to overclocking.

Fast forward to the purchases:
-I grabbed an Nvidia GTS250 and a 585 watt PSU for a steal
-I then picked up an Arock a780GMH/128M mobo and a Cooler Master V8 to use with the Gateway's phenom 9500
-Finally I got 2 x 2GB PNY PC2-6400 RAM

On to the woes:
I can't overclock this thing more than 50MHz without getting a BSOD! The default multiplier and speed is 11 x 200. If I go any higher than around 11 x 205 it won't stay running for very long.

My reading is telling me that these CPUs are simply junk. However, I see some people running them at 2.6GHz with no issues. I don't want a huge overclock - I'd be happy with a stable 2.5GHz.

The BSOD error is:
"A clock interrupt was not recevied ona secondary processor within the allocated time interval"


System specs:
Arock a780GMH/128M mobo (with latest bios revision)
AMD Phenom 9500 Quad
Cooler Master V8
585 watt PSU
Thermaltake case
4GB PNY PC2-6400 RAM
500GB SATA II HDD
Galaxy nvidia GTS-250

(I also attached a DXDIAG to the thread)

Any thoughts?
 

Attachments

  • DxDiag.txt
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Give it a notch or two more vcore and see if it flies.
What brand PSU?
 
Thanks for the response!

Orion PSU.

I tried going up to 3 notches on the core voltage. No luck.
 
Ok, first set the ram speed lower (667 instead of 800), and set the HT-link lower as well, just one notch (sometimes it's a multiplier, other times it's a spec speed, either way set it lower), then try again.
It may be that your ram doesn't appreciate being overclocked, i had a set that would do 800 all day every day, but refused to do 814 even for moments.
 
Hmm, I tried to lower the RAM, all the way down to 533. I bought this new RAM thinking it was my old RAM causing the issues. Same crapola.

Not sure if I've messed with the HT-link yet...

I'm starting to think I might as well buy a better processor. For the few MHZ I'm gonna squeeze from this one I might as well buy a 3.0ghz chip that doesn't bomb with the slightest tweak.

Any suggestions for a resonably priced AM3 chip?
 
For a quad, the Athlon II X4 is hard to beat, it OCs nicely and costs $99.
 
"Better" is dependent on what you do. The Athlon X4's don't have any L3. For some apps that makes a difference but the fourth core is often enough to balance the lack of cache - and it's cheaper.



Going back to your 9500 - that error sounds like an ACC problem. I sometimes see it when I'm trying to tweak the ACC values on Phenom I's ...
 
The clock interrupt BSOD, as QuietIce pointed out, is a timing issue that you'll only see with the Phenom 9500 and 9600. It's worst while using 64-bit OSes, but happens far less frequently with 32-bit OSes.

Enabling the ACC and tweaking it (either with Auto or moving the ACC drive strength up) may alleviate the problem. Lots of people, though, never get rid of the problem until they replace the CPU entirely...

Better than the Phenom II x3 720? Someone suggested that.

The Phenom II will work better for gaming (at moderate resolutions, anyway) due to its big ole' L3 cache. The Athlon II X4, though, is less expensive, will run 95% as well at high resolutions, and might work better for multi-threaded encoding tasks. Overclocking is probably a push, you'll likely see similar clocks between the two.
 
I did notice the issue was more prominent when I went to x64 Win 7.

Ahh ok, perfect. I have the Phenom II x3 720 BE in the mail right now! :) 120 shipped from new egg sounded great.

The 9500 seems like junk and I'm done messing with it. I mainly use the machine for everyday things and some gaming (DDO!) so this processor should work nicely.

I'll post my OC results and impressions when it arrives!
 
The CPU was my problem!

I installed my new chip last night and I'm still smiling!

Unlocked 4th core and clocked them all to 3.41GHz stable in 3dmark6! I DOUBLED my FPS!

The individual cores do not show temp when unlocked but I see the temp for the entire CPU. It's Idling at 29C and hitting around 36C under load! I love this setup!
 
Those motherboard temps can be off quit a bit. You can get a good idea of your actual core temp by going back to stock, then comparing your loaded core temp with the motherboard's CPU sensor you're now using. That'll give you an index (correction) you can use when the cores are unlocked ... ;)
 
^ I see.

Well stock I was seeing around 24-25 per core and the CPU temp read 30-31. So I should be fine then, right?
 
Absolutely! I didn't mean to imply you had bad temps at all. Even the worst board sensor isn't off more than ~10°C compared to CoreTemp (it looks like yours is off ~6°C). But at some point you may want to push it more and need more accurate temps ... ;)
 
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