Killer
If you are on an A8N-SLI Deluxe you'll need to run that RAM at 2T with a FSB above 250 or so. No ifs and or buts about it. It is the downfall of that board. I am very surprised that you have 280 FSB with the RAM at 1T. You are one of the few I have ever seen get above 250 at 1T. 4Q managed 260, I think, then chucked the board.

Hello,
I'm new to OC & This forum. I wish I found it last weekend when I received my Opteron 165, it would have saved me a few hours of research and experimentation. I thought I would post my screen shots and you folks could make recommendations if you would be so kind...

I saw a post that someone had the HT at 1500 & got very excited until I read further. It seems like 1000 and under is preferable - no bottleneck there anyway.



I ran Prime95 for a day or so and never saw the temp rise above 127F.

My Sys...

A8N32-SLI Deluxe | Opteron 165 @ 2805MHz 1.365v | Stock Heat Pipe Cooler | Fans: 2x120 + 3x80 | 2x1GB G.Skill DDR400 @ 2.5 3 3 5T | 2xSLi Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT | Thermaltake 430W PS | 2xSeagate Barracuda 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 | LITE-ON 16X DVD±R DVD | Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS

troybme-
Welcome to the board and our little Opte thread. Looks like you have a good chip there. Do you know what the stepping is? One thing you may want to do is just run the two sticks of GSkill RAM and forget about the Mushkin. Running 4 sticks of any RAM, especially when the pairs are from different manufacturers and of different sizes, makes overclocking much harder and will limit your top speed. Unless you have a very specific need 2GB of RAM should be plenty for XP and any game you want to run.

Other than that it looks like you have a great start. 2.8GHz at 1.34v is excellent. HT above 1K Mhz is useless but yeah, I did have mine up to 1500, by mistake. Forgot to reset the multi to 3x after a CMOS reset.

A couple of questions?
1. Do you have CPU Overvolt enabled?
2. Have you been having any weird system issues like crashes or system stalls? I'm just thinking that the Antec 430w may be close to its limits adn some folks here have been having problems with Antecs lately.

Overclocking is full of surprises, some good, some really bad ones...

Yesterday I was playing Project Reality with some friends and my system had a really "nice" lock-up, repeating sound and a reboot without even a blue screen.

In a minute, my 22h orthos stable system at 2907Mhz was completely unstable. Nothing changed, not even room temperature.

Now, for some arcane reason, I cannot use 166 divider with 2907Mhz, maybe 150 divider is fine. Before yesterday, 3Ghz was a no go, now it's a reality using 150 divider.

So, please welcome Chris into the 3Ghz club !

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=9123478

http://asustech.15.forumer.com/index.php?s...t=0&#entry15803

BTW, do you need a fast stability -*test*-('") for your processor ? Run 3DMark 2001 with a nice video card. It's almost a processor benchmark now, not a video card -*test*-('"). Orthos could run at 4h+ or more with the unstable settings while 3dmark 2001 failed, closed and I could fine tune the computer in minutes instead of looong hours running prime based -*test*-('")s.

I cannot use 3ghz here due to ambient air temps, but it's nice to see it running.

Merc, I'm running the memory at 1T command with my current settings. If I implied that I was running 2T with overclocked memory, I didn't mean to do so. I was able to run 1T at 280 FSB when I used the 200/400 (1/2) divider, resulting in a memory speed of 140 MHz, but that's no surprise, is it?

Anyhow, 2.8 GHz seems to be the point where I have to add significant voltage if I want to push it much further. 2.9 GHz failed Orthos after an hour with Vcore at 1.39.

I do have a couple of questions for you guys:
1) My Premium board seems to hang on POST occasionally, even at settings that pass 10+ hours of Orthos blend -*test*-('"). When this happens, it gives me the "POST failed or interrupted. Please enter setup and load default values" message. However, if I simply enter setup and re-enable my overclocked settings, it usually POSTs just fine on reboot. This behavior is making my stability -*test*-('")ing more confusing, because I'm not sure whether I should trust settings that fail to POST on occasion.

2) My board shipped with the 1009 BIOS. According to the CPU support section of Asus' website, the DC Opterons weren't fully supported until 1010. Has anyone had experiences that suggest I would have better luck with an updated BIOS?

Killer-
I was looking at your signature and I thought you were on the A8N SLI Deluxe. The Premium is a whole different animal and doesn't have that 250FSB/2T issue. Deinitely flash to the la-*test*-('") BIOS.

Cris-
Welcome to the 3.0 Club mate.

Not so early...

My Opteron is dying I think.

It refuses to run stable now, fails at orthos on 2.8 after 3+ hours which was my 24/7 setting.

A good and fast -*test*-('") is the 3dmark 2006 game. It probably uses both cores so it fails almost instantly with a unstable platform.

Settings that were 24+h stable at orthos now fail at every single 3d game.

I still don't know how 3Ghz was stable for more than 6hours.

It isn't heat or voltage. It also refuses some dividers for ram. I think that the memory controller is dying.

I had similar issues with my rig after I installed watercooling. The first time I found that there was insufficeint air flow to the area around the CPU and the voltregs (MOSFETS) in that area were overheating. Couldn't get my 4400X2 past 2.4GHz. Installed a 120mm fan in that area and an 80mm up near the vid cards. Problem solved.

Next problem was a sudden instability at nearly any clock that gave above 200MHz on the RAM (DDR500). Turned out that I had a deadspot in my case, despite all the cold air blowing in there, and the RAM was seriously overheating. I never even thought about it as there was so much air flow. Touching the RAM HS was what clued me in. I installed a small OEM HSF fan on some velcro to redirect air flow over the RAM and the problem went away. Course I had baked one stick already that Corsair replaced.

So check for hotspots in either of those areas. Don't assume it is fine, like I did, just because there is a lot of air blowing through. Deadspots happen.

Currently RAM voltage is 2.52v, no heat issues with it, with the XP120 blowing all over the place, directly above ram and mosfets.

Il have some sensors here from the aerogate device, let's take some time to put it on the voltage regulators. The DFI board has sensors on chipset, mosfets and cpu. I'll do a little check on the aerogate vs motherboard sensors data.

I'm currently rebuilding the overclock, -*test*-('")ing with orthos at 2700 (default vcore), let's do it all again. I hope that it's ok.

2.52 Vdimm seems really low. Most DDR runs at 2.6v to 2.7v. Are you sure you aren't undervolting that stuff?

No. UCCC uses real low voltage. Some ICs like mine run better at low voltages. It doesn't improve performance with high voltage like most ICs. 2.5 or 2.75 is enough for most UCCC based sticks.

Hmmm. I can't find the 1010 BIOS on Asus' website. Their CPU support page tells me that the Opty 170 has been supported since BIOS 1010, yet if I click on the link they provide, it takes me to the 1302 beta BIOS! If I search through the downloads for this board, I still can't find 1010, only 1009 and 1302. Does anybody know what's going on?

This intermittent POST problem is driving me crazy! I have to reset the system up to 4 times to get the POST to complete successfully, but once it does it is stable. Any ideas on this one?

Give that Opte 170 a little more voltage and see if that stabilizes it. I know it is Orthos stable but sometimes things get out of balance. 1.4v is really low for a 170 so a little twitch up won't hurt anything.

Thanx Merc!

I'm not sure what the stepping is; I just got it from NewEgg a week or so ago, I’m thinking CCBBE, but my memory isn’t that good. I'm not sure how to enable Overvolt, I have the voltage set to ‘Auto.’ Is that just picking a voltage to keep it from fluctuating?

I took the Mushkin out, I noticed that it has lower timings, but the G.Skill was highly rated for it's over clocking flexibility.

Funny that you mention that about the Antec, you reminded me that the Antec I had ended up at the recycle center. The one in this machine is a Thermaltake 430w.

I don't have -*test*-('")ing equipment, so a lot of my trouble shooting involves the process of elimination and intermittently failing components can really help develop your pertinence (or your pitching arm).|D

At his point I’m going to install ‘3DMark 2001,’ as Crisao23 suggested and start slowly stepping up the CPU Frequency. I bumped it up to 313 MHz – It’s running at 2823 right now, but I haven’t stressed it yet.

Netiquette question…
Is it cool to post your pics out in the board – do you prefer a link to another page to keep the board cleaner?

Thanx again,
New Guy