So recently I bought an i7-970 on ebay...
Threw it in my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 1.0). Made sure to reset the bios before pulling the i7-930 that was in there before.
While I was in there, made sure I had latest BIOS (F8b)
Fired it up with that "new (to me) chip anticipation" and life was good.
For fun, did a quick and dirty overclock to 4.2 with most stuff on auto, not really expecting much. Runs great! Even more awesome I simply set the memory to 1600, and I'm running 24Gb at 1600 at cas 8 all great and dandy.
This all with Rosetta@Home at full load.
So easy! Wow Gulftown is great! Huzzah!
Pretty happy with this call it a day, will tweak later...
....(crack of thunder in background, cue rain)....
Of course, dear readers... the alarms should have gone off around the part where I said "most stuff on auto"... and of course "tweak later" was sometime 2 days later when it dawned on me "then what was the point of the x980 higher mults? And isn't the Gulftown memory controller supposed to be kinda a PITA?"
I wonder what my VTT voltage is on Auto? Surely Gigabyte would set a different limit for 32nm chips than 45nm right?
HWMonitor doesn't directly show VTT on this board. So I dig around, and find Gigabyte's EasyTuner 6...
1.56v
After shutting down the machine, and a change of pants, I think I found why it was so easy to run the memory... at about anything I tried.
But yes, today has been all about dealing with how much I can overclock while staying under 1.35v VTT, and it sucks
Anyways, hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to ask a coherent question about tricks for keeping VTT down and not having to run slow memory, but as it stands... the moral of the story (Rocky and Bullwinkle Style).
The age old advice to not trust Auto
or
Beware the Gigabyte VTT dragon!
Threw it in my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 1.0). Made sure to reset the bios before pulling the i7-930 that was in there before.
While I was in there, made sure I had latest BIOS (F8b)
Fired it up with that "new (to me) chip anticipation" and life was good.
For fun, did a quick and dirty overclock to 4.2 with most stuff on auto, not really expecting much. Runs great! Even more awesome I simply set the memory to 1600, and I'm running 24Gb at 1600 at cas 8 all great and dandy.
This all with Rosetta@Home at full load.
So easy! Wow Gulftown is great! Huzzah!
Pretty happy with this call it a day, will tweak later...
....(crack of thunder in background, cue rain)....
Of course, dear readers... the alarms should have gone off around the part where I said "most stuff on auto"... and of course "tweak later" was sometime 2 days later when it dawned on me "then what was the point of the x980 higher mults? And isn't the Gulftown memory controller supposed to be kinda a PITA?"
I wonder what my VTT voltage is on Auto? Surely Gigabyte would set a different limit for 32nm chips than 45nm right?
HWMonitor doesn't directly show VTT on this board. So I dig around, and find Gigabyte's EasyTuner 6...
1.56v
After shutting down the machine, and a change of pants, I think I found why it was so easy to run the memory... at about anything I tried.
But yes, today has been all about dealing with how much I can overclock while staying under 1.35v VTT, and it sucks
Anyways, hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to ask a coherent question about tricks for keeping VTT down and not having to run slow memory, but as it stands... the moral of the story (Rocky and Bullwinkle Style).
The age old advice to not trust Auto
or
Beware the Gigabyte VTT dragon!