- Joined
- Apr 16, 2003
- Location
- Farmington Hills, MI
OC Input on water cooled IC7-MAX3 and P4 3.2EE
Hi all... Although I also built another water cooled system about six months ago with a different motherboard (GA-SINXP1394 & P4 3.06 OC @ 3.55), I'm not the most experienced around with overclocking yet. However, I just completed a newly built system (both utilize Koolance water cooling rigs). I'd love any advice those more experienced with similar configurations can offer, as I am trying to tweak the most out of it while also remaining stable and not setting myself up for S.N.D.S. Here are the specs:
Koolance PC2-650BK watercooling system
ABit IC7-MAX3 Motherboard
P4 3.2 Ghz Extreme Edition 2MB L3 HT CPU
Cosair 2 x TWINX512-PC4400 DDR Memory modules
Radeon 9800 Pro AIW Video Card
4 x Maxtor 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA Drives (RAID 10)
The CPU, MB Chipset, Video card, and all four hard drives are water blocked. The DDR modules also have ThermalTake active coolers. There are three 80mm case fans, BGA DDR Ramsinks on the Radeon, and a twin 80mm side mounted card cooler. The system runs 30 C under a full load per the Koolance display... although, the BIOS shows 42 to 46 C under load/tests. But, I've read on here that this motherboard shows about 10 C hotter than it really is. Correct? In addition, I've looked at the board and it is a newer revision that has the MC64 cap removed already.
So far, the best stable (i.e. I can run all benchmark suites and SETI for quite some time with no crashes) overclock I've been able to get the system to run is at 3.7 Ghz (3712 Mhz) using the following settings:
FSB: 232 (3712 Mhz)
vCore: 1.7v
N/B Strap: PSB800
DRAM Ratio: 1:1
AGP Ratio: Fixed (66/33)
DDR Voltage: 2.8v
AGP Voltage: 1.65v (Radeon OC @ 432 Core / 378 Memory)
DRAM Timing
- CAS : 3
- Act to Precharge: 8
- RSA to CAS : 4
- RAS Precharge : 4
PAT (Game Accel): Auto
- Refresh Cycle: Auto
- Read Delay : Auto
- tRDA : Disabled
- CPC : Disabled
MPS: 1.4
IDE Bus Master: Disabled
USB: Set to OS, not BIOS
BIOS Cacheable: Disabled
Video Cacheable: Disabled
AGP: 8X
Fast Writes: Enabled
I recently read some references to the type of DDR chips used with this board (BH5 vs CH5 I think). I do not know if I have CH5 DDR chips on those Cosair modules or not, so I am wondering if that is my problem. In addition, I am also wondering if I am too high running my vCore at 1.7, although it seems that I have to in order to run stable at the 232 FSB. I am going to try again backing off to 1.675 though. It also seems from what I've read that you just don't want to go over 1.75 vCore with water... and, you want to stay at or below 1.7 with air (from what I've read thus far). I want to make sure I don't kill this thing two or three months from now seeing as this CPU was a hefty $850 bucks.
Any ways, a lot of these settings I figured out from doing some back reading on the forums here. Unfortunately, I seem to now be at a brick wall. I was hoping I would be able to FSB this thing at around 240 to 250 (near 4 Ghz) due to the water cooling and PC4400/550 Mhz RAM I'm running. Can anyone offer any suggestions at this point? Oh yes... and, should I or shouldn't I do a burn-in process at stock settings before running OC'ed? How big of a deal is that any ways?
My current benchmark scores at this OC on the CPU and GPU, with just a standard non-tweaked/streamlined install of XP, are:
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
-- Dhrystone: 11360
-- Whetstone: 4752 FPU / 8307 iSSE2
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
-- Integer: 28866
-- Floating-Point: 40974
File System Benchmark
-- Drive-Index: 100 MB/s
Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
-- Integer: 5652
-- Float : 5645
Cache & Memory Benchmark
-- Index: 12311 MB/s
3DMark2001SE Score: 33607
3DMark03 Score: 6743
PCMark2002 Score
-- CPU Score: 9079
-- Membory Score: 16009
-- HDD Score: 1267
PCMark04 Score: 5850
Here's a photo I took while assembling the system and after (the only thing missing is the side card cooler on the Radeon). Gee... it was nice and neat until you run a gillian power and drive cables all over to hook it all up.
Hi all... Although I also built another water cooled system about six months ago with a different motherboard (GA-SINXP1394 & P4 3.06 OC @ 3.55), I'm not the most experienced around with overclocking yet. However, I just completed a newly built system (both utilize Koolance water cooling rigs). I'd love any advice those more experienced with similar configurations can offer, as I am trying to tweak the most out of it while also remaining stable and not setting myself up for S.N.D.S. Here are the specs:
Koolance PC2-650BK watercooling system
ABit IC7-MAX3 Motherboard
P4 3.2 Ghz Extreme Edition 2MB L3 HT CPU
Cosair 2 x TWINX512-PC4400 DDR Memory modules
Radeon 9800 Pro AIW Video Card
4 x Maxtor 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA Drives (RAID 10)
The CPU, MB Chipset, Video card, and all four hard drives are water blocked. The DDR modules also have ThermalTake active coolers. There are three 80mm case fans, BGA DDR Ramsinks on the Radeon, and a twin 80mm side mounted card cooler. The system runs 30 C under a full load per the Koolance display... although, the BIOS shows 42 to 46 C under load/tests. But, I've read on here that this motherboard shows about 10 C hotter than it really is. Correct? In addition, I've looked at the board and it is a newer revision that has the MC64 cap removed already.
So far, the best stable (i.e. I can run all benchmark suites and SETI for quite some time with no crashes) overclock I've been able to get the system to run is at 3.7 Ghz (3712 Mhz) using the following settings:
FSB: 232 (3712 Mhz)
vCore: 1.7v
N/B Strap: PSB800
DRAM Ratio: 1:1
AGP Ratio: Fixed (66/33)
DDR Voltage: 2.8v
AGP Voltage: 1.65v (Radeon OC @ 432 Core / 378 Memory)
DRAM Timing
- CAS : 3
- Act to Precharge: 8
- RSA to CAS : 4
- RAS Precharge : 4
PAT (Game Accel): Auto
- Refresh Cycle: Auto
- Read Delay : Auto
- tRDA : Disabled
- CPC : Disabled
MPS: 1.4
IDE Bus Master: Disabled
USB: Set to OS, not BIOS
BIOS Cacheable: Disabled
Video Cacheable: Disabled
AGP: 8X
Fast Writes: Enabled
I recently read some references to the type of DDR chips used with this board (BH5 vs CH5 I think). I do not know if I have CH5 DDR chips on those Cosair modules or not, so I am wondering if that is my problem. In addition, I am also wondering if I am too high running my vCore at 1.7, although it seems that I have to in order to run stable at the 232 FSB. I am going to try again backing off to 1.675 though. It also seems from what I've read that you just don't want to go over 1.75 vCore with water... and, you want to stay at or below 1.7 with air (from what I've read thus far). I want to make sure I don't kill this thing two or three months from now seeing as this CPU was a hefty $850 bucks.
Any ways, a lot of these settings I figured out from doing some back reading on the forums here. Unfortunately, I seem to now be at a brick wall. I was hoping I would be able to FSB this thing at around 240 to 250 (near 4 Ghz) due to the water cooling and PC4400/550 Mhz RAM I'm running. Can anyone offer any suggestions at this point? Oh yes... and, should I or shouldn't I do a burn-in process at stock settings before running OC'ed? How big of a deal is that any ways?
My current benchmark scores at this OC on the CPU and GPU, with just a standard non-tweaked/streamlined install of XP, are:
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
-- Dhrystone: 11360
-- Whetstone: 4752 FPU / 8307 iSSE2
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
-- Integer: 28866
-- Floating-Point: 40974
File System Benchmark
-- Drive-Index: 100 MB/s
Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
-- Integer: 5652
-- Float : 5645
Cache & Memory Benchmark
-- Index: 12311 MB/s
3DMark2001SE Score: 33607
3DMark03 Score: 6743
PCMark2002 Score
-- CPU Score: 9079
-- Membory Score: 16009
-- HDD Score: 1267
PCMark04 Score: 5850
Here's a photo I took while assembling the system and after (the only thing missing is the side card cooler on the Radeon). Gee... it was nice and neat until you run a gillian power and drive cables all over to hook it all up.
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