Opteron 165 Overclocking

QUOTE (KillrBuckeye @ June 14, 2007 01:03 am)

Hi guys, I haven't posted in quite some time. I just wanted to update you on the status of my rig, and confirm that many of the quirky issues I was experiencing before with unstable memory dividers were caused by the mobo's apparent incompatibility with the Crucial Ballistix memory.

My rig had become very unstable over the past few months, with BSODs becoming more and more frequent. I had been running my rig at 290x10 with the DDR200 divider (yes, the memory was underclocked at 145 MHz!). To see what the heck was going on, I returned everything to stock settings (which actually increased the memory clock), and quickly found that the system was extremely unstable--I couldn't even boot to Windows. A few Mem-*test*-('")86 runs later and I found that I had yet another bad Ballistix module!!! This is faulty stick #4 for me! And this time, I had the stinkin' things UNDERCLOCKED the whole time.

I am convinced there is something really funny with the Ballistix RAM and the A8N-SLI series of mobos... My memory seemed to die every 4-6 months, while all other components were fine. This also happened on 2 different mobos (a Deluxe and a Premium). Heat was not an issue as the modules weren't even hot to the touch during torture -*test*-('")ing. Add to that the fact that my memory dividers never worked right: with my Venice CPU, the DDR333 divider didn't work, but all the other dividers were fine; with my Opteron, the DDR266 divider didn't work, but all others were okay.

Anyhow, I purchased 2x512MB of Corsair VS PC3200 at the bargain price of $60 shipped! (I just couldn't bring myself to spend the money for 2 GB when I'm hoping to upgrade to Conroe within the next year or so). I just popped in these modules and all the dividers seem to work just fine now. I'm currently Orthos -*test*-('")ing 285x10 with the DDR266 divider, which puts the memory at 190 MHz. The only bad thing is that I have to run these modules at relaxed latencies compared to the Ballistix. Oh well, I'm sure the 45-55 Hz increase in memory speed will more than make up for that difference.

Sorry for the babbling, but I thought some of you might find this interesting, if not reassuring. I wish I would have purchased high-end Corsair memory instead of Crucial in the very beginning... Oh well. Live and learn.

I'm now running 4GB of value select (UCCC based sticks) on my DFI Expert.

Despite the 2T cmd rate it's running at 242Mhz. Rock stable