Help me o/c my E6700 ES please!

[astorcat]

Hello All,
I just recently switched back to Intel from an AMD X2 4400 which I had o/c to 2.55GHz, and I am looking for some help in overclocking my neww system. I do have some experience in overclocking but nothing compared to some of the folks here.

I currently have the following:
Intel Conroe E6700 Engineering Sample: Revision B1, Stepping 5
Asus P5WDH mobo, BIOS 1101
2x 1Gb Corsair RAM DDR2-800 (PC6400). http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820145590
ATI Radeon 1900XT PCIe video card
Zalman 9500AT copper heatsink
OCZ620W PSU
Big LianLi V2100 server case
2x80Gb WD SATAs as RAID0, one Seagate 400Gb SATA as data.
One Plextor DVD-RW and one NEC DVD-RW
Audigy2 PCI sound card
2x 24" Dell LCDs monitors as dual head (2x 30" Dells in the mail! - one 24" still for sale!)

I think I am screwing this up somewhere:
I currently have the FSB @ 335 with a vCore of 1.3875 - seems high?!
RAM is at 1:1 at 2.0v
PCIe and PCI are locked at 100 and 33

99.9% of the time I am fine doing whatever in Windows. I can bench at this (Sandra, 3DMark) but I simply cannot encode video. I do a lot of AVIsynth/VirtualDub/XVID stuff and it invariably reboots/hangs.

Can anybody help me get this thing faster and more stable. The guy I bought this from (reliable ebayer) said he had this stable at 4.13GHz! It is a B1/Stepping 5 ES Conroe which I ahve heard are quite capable overclockers, right?

BTW, most of the time during the day I use this PC for VMware sessions, as I am a radiologist and read CT/MRI scans from home inside multiple VMware sessions (I have multiple jobs, and this keeps things very clean).

I am a fairly advanced computer geek but am my overclocking skills have usually been limited to upping FSB/vCore and fiddling a bit with RAM ratios.
(BTW, before I put this together, I did remove the heatsinks and AS5 them all. Temps seem good, but I am happy to report any number you want from any program you name).
Feel free to ask me anything, or get me to run any program you need to report any number you like in your investigation.

A big thanks to anybody who can help.

Cheers,

Asif

 

[Daleon]

There are a number of options that you want to disable. Someone with a
P5W DH should be able to tell you, or check some of the threads at XS.

Make sure you have the timings set manually to 5-5-5-12. Push another volt or two to vdim and mch. Have an option to overvolt PCI-E? Can also try auto instead of 100, sometimes that works better.

Is it Orthos/Dual Prime stable?
If so, it could be an OS/driver issue. Does it work fine at stock?

Try dropping your multiplier and working the fsb up also.

 

[astorcat]

Thanks for the reply Daleon.
I will try these things later today when I sign out from my jobs (I work from home)
I dont think it is an OS issue. I use my own customized lite verison of XP Pro made using nLite which has been a bedrock of fast, clean computing for a long time.
Although this is an ES, I dont get the option to alter the multiplier, perhaps due to a limitaiton in this mobo/BIOS? I am stuck at 10x for now, although maybe Asus will change that one day....

Any ideas on the vCore?
vDIMM and vMCH should be bumped by what? +0.1v?
What about temp monitoring? What program do you all use and what temps are acceptable?

 

[Sunburn74]

e6600 issues

I can barely push my e6600 past 3 ghz. Its sitting at 9 x 334 mhz with vcore at 1.4. I have the the mch set at .3v the most my board will let me and the vdimm plus .1v. I'm not sure what else to do. I'm reading about guys hitting 400 and 450 mhz with my same board, I can barely push 340...

These are my specs
board ga-965p-ds3
e6600 at 3ghz
2 gb of pc6400 ram by ocz
radeon x850 pe
big typhoon heat sink and aerocool extreme engine 3t case (14 cm fan and 25 cm fan on side)

 

[sicloan]

Yes this mobo doesnt allow you to trop the multi unfortunately. The P5b Deluxe has this option.

Have you disabled HyperPath 3 in the chipset settings? If you havent it would give you an FSB wall around 300 fsb, so i'm assuming you have.

Have your turned off speedstep? And what kind of cooling are you using?

 

[Gautam]

Max VMCH out at 1.65, disable hyperpath 3. Try bumping vcore up a notch or two if you troubles persist. Your memory is spec'ed to run at 400MHz so there should be no trouble there with vdimm.

ESes and retails are both downward unlocked, however the BIOS at present doesn't allow for it. Supposedly an update coming soon will.

 

[astorcat]

Thanks for the replies, folks.
I will be trying these ideas tonight and over the weekend.
What would you suggest as a good test of stability?

 

[Dragon Heart]

Thanks for the replies, folks.
I will be trying these ideas tonight and over the weekend.
What would you suggest as a good test of stability?

run prime 2004 in dual mode , I think 8-10 hours should be acceptable ( Got errors above 3hours so be stable about 1-2 hours doesn't mean anything . Blend stress mode , cos people can be stable for cpu but not ram if stress at once

Then you could complete this with gaming tests or futuremark ( 3d 05 and 06 )

Mine is stable ( 24 hours running prime 2004 )

Don't think reaching 4ghz is so easy whatever your ebayer told you !

You don't know what rig he ran nor which cooling he owns , so don't be so confident about what ebayers say to sell something there

Regards

 

[astorcat]

He said he ran this particular proc at 413FSB on this same Asus P5WDH mobo (BIOS 901 I think) with just a slight bump of vCore (he said +0.025v). He said it ran at 400FSB at default vCore. Cooling was Tuniq 120 tower. RAM was ADATA DDR2 Extreme Editon 1000+ 512 X 2.

OK, even if I dont get to 4 (admittedly rather unlikely), I would at least like to get to 3.5+.

EDIT: I am now at stock, cos I downloaded a WMV file and plopped it into WMclassic. The whole amchine just froze. It is that kind of weird unpredictable stuff at 3.35 that is bothering me, especially when it means I lost a rather long complex MRI dictation in the process! (I run my Radiology stuff inside a VMware session)
I will be trying various fiddling options tonight and later this weekend. I will post back with my results.

 

[Daleon]

I think he was blowing some smoke up your you know what.

 

[astorcat]

Ha! Ha! You are probably right!
But I am still determined to get this 6700 up to 3.5 stable if at all possible, and higher is better!
Overclocking is a disease!

 

[astorcat]

Been trying various things. I set Hyperpath, C1E, and Sppedstep to OFF (they already were). I set the vDIMM to 2.0 and the vMCH to 1.65. RAM was manually set to 5-5-5-12 and PCIe to Auto.

Although I will eventually do dual prime, I needed something faster to test so I used my real world test of video encoding. Initially I would encode a certain episode that I use for speed testing, using AutoGordianKnot. This would take about 15mins. If it could pass this I would bump up and try again. Once I got to a stage I really thought was workable, I attempted to encode an HD movie using AVIsynth, VirtualDub and the WMV codec (a fairly typical thing for me to do).

Here are my results with the TV episode: (memory was always adjusted as needed to be close to but under DDR800)

330 @ 1.30v: PASS
340 @ 1.3375: FAIL
340 @ 1.35: PASS (then failed at attempt two cos I fiddled with RAM to make DDR825)
345 @ 1.35: FAIL
345 @ 1.3625: FAIL
345 @ 1.375: PASS
350 @ 1.375: FAIL
350 @ 1.3875: FAIL
350 @ 1.40: FAIL
350 @ 1.425: seemed to be going OK and much further than before, but load temps were 69C so I aborted.

So....

I thought I would try a doing the HD movie as a longer test (estimated time about 3 hours):

330 @ 1.35 @ DDR660: FAIL
330 @ 1.3875 @ DDR660: FAIL
(by FAIL I mean that I came back later and found that it had frozen, rebooted or BSOD during pass1)


So now I am about to try:
320 @ 1.3875 @ DDR800 and we'll see.

Idle temps in Coretemp are about 44-45 and full load is about 54-55. Is this OK? (ambient says 85)

I need this to be so stable it is boring. I had my AMD X2 4400 at 2.55 cos it was very slightly unstable at 2.6 and it never ever ever gave a problem, during lots and lots of VMware and encoding. This is what I am looking for here, and I must confess to being a wee bit disappointed that I have to go so low to look for this. I have heard (and read here) about the 6700 ES's being respectable overclockers but perhaps I was being unrealistic? (greedy?!)

Oh well, now I am just looking for rock solid stability, even if that means hovering around 3.0Ghz.

What is my problem? Is it the mobo? (I flashed to the latest 1301 BIOS yesterday - no real difference except it no longer makes the 'click' when it resets) Is it my RAM? If so then what RAM should I get? (but surely I locked the RAM to what it wants to run at?)

Any good ideas will be welcome, and I will post back on my final stable level....

 

[pscout]

I suspect you are also in somewhat untested OC waters here since I assume you have vanderpool (or whatever its called in the p5wdh bios cpu settings) enabled to be running VMware?

Have you tried an oc without it enabled? Not sure what this does to your vmware setup but if you can oc with just xp running it might shed some light on the issues.


Oh and to OCF

 

[astorcat]

An interesting thought!

FSB320 @ 1.3875v encoded my movie fine (about 4 hours total)
RAM 5-5-5-12, vDIMM 2.0, vMCH 1.65

So that seems to be where I am. I will now run dual prime for a good long while to prove that it can handle long stress beyond what the encode gave it.

BTW, I previously I had tried 340 @ 1.35v and it was successful for the eipsode encode for 14 mins but failed the movie encode within an hour. So, based on your suggestion, I turned off Virtualisation and tried 340 @ 1.3875. It froze within 5 mins, so I dont think VT is part of the equation here. (AFAIK, the latest VMware 5.5.2 does not even support VT/Pacifica yet, but I dont think leaving it on is hurting).

So onto dual Prime at the current [email protected]

Although I was initally a wee bit disappointed, I will be fine. O/C is always a freebie, and this is also my work machine and I need to have a level of stability that can reflect that. If that means a wee bit lower then that's fine. I was never too interested in benchies, but rather real world performance, and the difference in encode speed between 350 and 320 is not very much at all.

 

[batboy]

Looks like you will need to make sure the cooling is good and then crank up more voltage.

 

[Daleon]

Make sure you've run memtest and that the memory is good and not giving a bunch of errors.

Since its an ES, your multiplier is unlocked right? Try lowering it and raising the fsb, may help tell if its the chip or the mb.

Your temps are ok, about same as mine.

 

[astorcat]

Memtest gave no problems.
Although it is an ES, I dont get the option to change the multi -it is greyed out at 10x. Presumably this is a BIOS limitation.