Athlon MP2000's - push them to the limit

[frostmeister]

OK, I'm running twin athlonMP2GHz's at their stock speeds/voltages. I haven't done any unlocking of any bridges, but don't know their stepping. I'm running these in an Asus A7M266-D. I wondered what sort of speeds I can get out of these babies with a few tweek. Do I need to unlock anything on them to allow them to go faster? I heard that the multipliers are already unlocked on an MP. I'm handy with a soldering iron, having more than a basic knowledge of electronics. I'm currently watercooling my rig, but am moving to pelts soon. What I'm saying is hit me with some ideas to get my 3Dmark scores above 7000. (I do know that 3Dmark is not smp by the way )

 

[skahtul]

Well I don't know much about the MP but I have a small piece of advice. I have been doing a lot with 2001. I think the best way to get your score up is to turn down your multiplier and go for a higher FSB, as high as possible. The more you can feed the Video Card, CPU the better. If you only increase your CPU Multi. then you don't get as much as an advantage. You may get more clock cycles, but what you want is for every clock cycle to count for more. Did you already overclock your video card? Play with your RAM? You should tell us what you have done to get your score up there. You may already know all of this.

 

[frostmeister]

Thanks for the helpfull tips skahtul. Thinking about what you'd said, it makes sense. Not that what you've suggested might not be true, I mean commonsense. I mean, we all know that a FSB overclock improves system performance, more multiplier=higher CPU performance, O/C'ing the FSB O/C's the AGP and PCI. It's not until you put it together and think about how it affects the system in a holistic way that the penny drops. I remember this summed up in a nutshell by the speed comparisons between a 486 DX2-66 system and the 486 DX50; The 50 could outpace the 66 on most things, except a direct CPU/FPU comparison. I'm going to look towards a FSB improvement and some manual tweaking i think Any more tips would be gratefully recieved

 

[frostmeister]

Oh yeah, my vid card is untouched. The whole system is running at stock speeds.

 

[cmcquistion]

1. Increase your FSB as much as possible, running your memory at CAS 2.

2. Increase your multiplier as high as you can. Still keeping your voltage @ default. (Watch your temps and make sure they stay reasonable, ie, below 50C) (only increase your voltage if your temps stay below 50C @ full load)

2. Overclock your video card and tweak you settings. I won't go into a lot of detail because there are many good guides out there that explain how to do this in better detail than I could provide.

 

[donny_paycheck]

I thought the A7M266-D didn't have multiplier adjustments in BIOS.

 

[cmcquistion]

You're right. It doesn't. Sorry.

 

[donny_paycheck]

You're right. It doesn't. Sorry.

No problem. I'm wrong often too, but I'll openly admit to it!

The multiplier lock might not be such a bad thing. The FSB is still going to be overclockable to some extent, which provides a much greater increase in overall system performance than raw clock speed does.

 

[skahtul]

I thought the A7M266-D didn't have multiplier adjustments in BIOS.

I don’t know about the Dual AMD’s, but I think on the XP’s you can play around with the bridges (similar to unlocking it) to get different multiplier effects even if the mobo doesn't support multiplier changes. Is this correct?

 

[skahtul]

Oh yeah, my vid card is untouched. The whole system is running at stock speeds.

In my limited and humble experience, if I were going to overclock the system to get a higher score I would "start" with the video card. When I have tested tons of different systems with different MB, CPU’s, RAM, and Video Cards I find the video card really has the most to do with it. IF you put a real kick *** video card such as a Geforce4 TI 4600 (for ex.) in an ok system, and had an ok video card like a Geforce3 in a kick *** system, the one with the GeForce4 TI4600 will pull up a better score (all things being somewhat equal). I know this is not always true, but if I were going to get a few more MHz of FSB or 100 MHz in video ram performance, I would go for the video. Point is, over-clock you computer as much as possible, but I like to start with the video card, make it stable, then go for the rest of the system. Go to this link and download this program before you do anything else and see what happens. http://www.guru3d.com/rivatuner/

PS frostmeister, With my system in my sig. I am shooting for 8000 on 3Dmark(already past about 7500). Any more questions just ask. I will post some more tips (from what I know)

 

[cmcquistion]

FSB overclocking affects your video card, though. When you raise the FSB, you raise the AGP speed. This overclocks your video card. You want to do FSB before overclocking your video card, because your video card overclocking is affected by your FSB overclocking.

For example, let's say you overclock to Geforce 4 to 300/650 while your FSB is at default. This is as high as it will go and be stable.

Then, you raise your FSB to 145. All of a sudden, your video card gives you fits and is unstable. Your video card has been overclocked another 9% (on top of it's max stable speed) because of the AGP speed being increased.

This is why it is important to do your FSB overclocking BEFORE video card overclocking.

 

[frostmeister]

Cheers for the tips chaps - I agree with doing the video card after the fsb adjustments though, like cmcquistion says, and for those reasons. I think if you're really going to go for it like that, you should take everything off the pci buss and al your cdroms, etc, to then put them back on one by one to see which one if any would affect the highest speed you can get up to safely. The CD rom and other PCI cards are quite limiting factors from what I've managed to find out. Thanks again guys

 

[cmcquistion]

Yes, and no. Most of the time, you won't have any problems with your PCI devices until you reach 155-160 FSB. I could be wrong, but I don't think the ASUS board goes over 150. I would be extremely surprised if any of your PCI devices gave you any trouble at 150 FSB or less. (USB devices are sometimes flaky at 150, depending on the device, but the USB, itself, won't hold back your overclock.)

 

[donny_paycheck]

I've heard from the guys at burningissues that the IWill MPX2 will do 180FSB. Now, getting your CPUs to lower their multipliers so they'll reach that is another matter because that board has no multiplier adjustments (wish golden sockets were still around ). But one of the guys that wrote the burningissues review for it hand-changed the multiplier on two 2200+ CPUs (not easy to do) and managed to reach 180FSB. Sadly, this board has no multiplier adjustments so this sort of overclock would be very difficult to achieve.

For all intents and purposes though, you won't find any 760MPX boards that will do over around 150-155FSB.

 

[happysmp]

Hey frostmeister,

I've got the same rig as you. A dual MP 2000 on an ASUS A7M266-D. Just for kicks I OC the system all the way to a FSB@140 before it crashed on me.

At stock speeds using a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 I got a score of 8925
After a few BIOS tweaks (CAS@2, Fast AGP writes, 512MB AGP Aperture *half my system ram, and turbo mode *I'm assuming that this increases the FSB to 134) I got a score of 9275.

Tweaking some more I found that the system remained stable at a FSB of 138...which resulted in a 3D score of 9525.

Keep in mind that these score are all with stock cooling (retail AMD HS+Fans, 2 chassis fans, PS fan).
I brought the system back to normal after I discovered my system's limits. I figured that with a dual MP 2000...you shouldn't really need to overclock at all. Perhaps when this becomes my backup I'll play around some more.

Ref.
Tests were conducted using 3DMark2001

If your going to overclock your system...I'd recommend these steps in this order:

1) BIOS adjustments (CL@2 for all three settings, AGP fast writes, Turbo mode, and half your system memory set for the AGP aperture)
2) increase the FSB in the bios in +1mhz increments...make sure the system boots and check the temperature. keep pushing it till the system crashes. go back to the last good boot FSB and start to run torture tests.
3) of course, if you plan on keeping it OC, then make sure you've got adequate cooling.

good luck and tell me how it goes.

 

[64026402]

The MPX boards don't like fsb past 144. My MP 2460 boards will do 150 comfortably but I keep my three MPX boards in the 140-144 range. I haven't got a MPX2 board yet, but it sounds promising. It seems the 2000s hve been doing about 2 ghz.