Help OC X58 X5660 Westmere - 185ish bclk wall

[satandole666]

I recently purchased a X5660 to replace the 920 in my daily driver. Still using the Gigabyte EX58 Extreme with the most recent BIOS. I was able to reach 225ish BLCK with the 920 but never ran that for daily settings.

My goal with the X5660 is to run 200 blck @ 4600mhz. I revisited the excellent x58 overclocking guides http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/overclocking-the-x58-a-practical-guide.108526/ and http://www.techreaction.net/2010/09/07/3-step-overclocking-guide-bloomfield-and-gulftown/ and followed them pretty well.

Both mention safe limits for QPI-VTT voltage around 1.35v to 1.4v with one mentioning damage when going past 1.35v on 32nm chips.

Problem is, I'm hitting a pretty hard blck wall just over 180. 180 boots and passes stability tests with the 1.35v core, 23x multi (4140mhz), and 1.335v QPI-VTT. 185 isn't stable at 1.4v QPI-VTT and 190+ won't boot at all no matter what voltage.

What am I missing here? Is 1.35v QPI-VTT still recognized as the point where damage occurs? I'm water cooled and temps are in check, can I push it to 1.45v for suicide runs to see if I can even boot at 200blck? Is 1.45v out of the question for 24/7?

I did upgrade to 12gb of ram (6x2gb). I thought that was the problem so I pulled the 3 new sticks and the voltages required and blcks achieved don't change.

 

[satandole666]

I just noticed I used blck instead of bclk. I'm sure that drove someone crazy...sorry about that.

 

[freeagent]

I use 1.39vtt for 200 bclk

I have gone over 1.4vtt once or twice, but did not find what I was looking for..

It is true that not all cpus are equal, some are more fragile than others.

Mine for instance doesn't like to run mems over 1000mhz, but can run a pretty high uncore.. And my old 970 didn't clock well in the raw cpu mhz or uncore department, but I ran some sticks at 1200-1300mhz with relative ease..

 

[satandole666]

Been running that way for a while?

These things are cheap at under $100 so I'm not terribly worried. It would be nice to have it last for a little while though.

 

[freeagent]

Yeah man, they are tough. I haven't had any problems

Don't forget, you don't have to clock it like a nehelam, you can make some finer uncore settings. Not a huge deal, might see a bit of a drop in latency on the stix, but nothing too terrible.

 

[satandole666]

Thanks for the advice.

I'll see what it takes to hit 200 bclk and then decide if it is worth running 24/7. Currently I'm in the 1.5-2x ratio sweet spot for uncore but I'll experiment with that some more.

 

[satandole666]

Quick update.

It turns out there was a newer beta BIOS available. After the update the bclk wall vanished all together. I've been able to boot at 220 bclk and run prime95 with all 12 gbs of ram with 1.355vtt.

One major annoyance is the 22x multi won't "stick". It always ups it to 23x on boot. 4.6ghz was taking a lot of vcore but I still have some more tweaking to do before that is my daily.

Currently running 4.2ghz @1.3vcore prime stable all day. All the power saving stuff is turned on. If I can get the ram stable at 210 bclk I'll aim for a 4.4ghz 24/7 setup.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

The board probably needed the BIOS update to fully support 32nm Westmere based X5660. The 920 is 45nm Nehalem based and was earlier in the product cycle.

An overclocked X5660 is a pretty formidable chip, enjoy it