Overclocking

[hicks]

Well I been on another forum too and this is what I was told about my motherboard:

Ballistix works best at 1.72v. This means you cannot ever have your vtt below +200mv (flaming blade undervolts vtt).

Vioh varies depending on heat and board. 1.24v should be fine for anything up to 200bclk. Reduce it when you get to your overclock if you can as you probably wont need that much voltage.

CPU will need 1.3v+ most likely.

Overall I would try +250mv cpu, +240mv vtt, 1.72vddr, 1.24vioh, qpi @ auto, cpu @ 20x, uncore at 16x, memory at 8x, turbo off, multithreading off, memory timings "By spd". Save and exit bios, start at 20x175 to make sure you boot to a stable overclock. Then try for 200bclk for your 4ghz overclock.


Now when he says to do memory timing by spd? it is at 8-8-8-19 right now. but it shows that it is supposed to be 8-8-8-24. I am guessing I can set that manually? if so where?

[mDust]

Now when he says to do memory timing by spd? it is at 8-8-8-19 right now. but it shows that it is supposed to be 8-8-8-24. I am guessing I can set that manually? if so where?

The SPD setting is just an auto detect setting. It may be called 'auto', 'auto detect', 'spd', or anything similar. I don't have your mobo so I can't say exactly where, but unless there is a separate 'memory' screen in your bios, it should be on the same screen as all your other timings. Just look for any DRAM settings and it will probably be the very first setting.

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure why multithreading should be turned off...but go ahead and do it in case it does affect stability somehow. It never bothered my pentium 4 back in the day but who knows. Once you get your OC finalized though, try turning it back on as it will increase performance a bit more.

[The boy 4rm oz]

Best bet is to have a look at the BIOS section of your mobo manuel, if it was designed in any way to perform overclocking the mobo will list exactly where you can access these features and exactly what they can do.

First off you need to set yourself a (realistic) target for your clock speed. an i7 930 should easily be able to hit 4.5GHz on water but aiming at 4GHz gives you some room to play with once you get everything stable.

From my experience you just keep increasing the core clock until PC wont boot or BSOD's while booting. Once you get a crash just increase the voltage slightly and try to boot again. If it boots successfully run some benchmarks, whether it be Prime95 or 3DMark, you just need something to stress the CPU a bit. If it's fine after 30 mins re-boot and try some more core clock and rinse and repeat. I try to stress test for a few hours after every 500MHz successful increase.

Once you hit your target clock give it a good stress testing over night. If you find it crashes bump the voltage up a little bit until it becomes stable. However if you find that it is stable straight away start to drop your voltage slightly and stress test until you find faults, then bump the voltage up slightly to maintain stability. It is best to get the voltage right, to much extra power going to the CPU could burn it our prematurely.

I hope that helps you out a bit.

[hicks]

Ok so I tried out everything tonight and it worked. I got to 4.0 no problem, but I cant tell the temps of my cpu or vreg. Any1 know of any programs?

Also Here is what I did to get the 4.0

CPU - +250mv
vtt - + 240mv
qpi - auto
CPU multiplier - 20x
Unicore - x16
Memory - x8
CPU Turbo - off
Vcore - 175

Now should I just start lower in the mv till I dont get a post then bump it up to previous mv? Also on the vtt I put it to default because it was highlighted red and that scared me lol. Can I also turn on CPU turbo to always on and have CPU multiplier as x21. With CPU multiplier it will make it x22 but does CPU turbo make a big difference? if not Ill leave CPU turbo off and just leave the CPU multiplier at x21.

Thanks for all the help.

[The boy 4rm oz]

Personally I use CoreTemp to monitor my CPU temps, it gives a temp for all cores individually as well as the Delta-T.

As for dropping the voltages personally I would, just to preserve the chip a little bit longer but if your voltage is close to what others are using I wouldn't bother.

With the turbo boost feature on the i5 and i7 as far as I know it does make for a more stable overclock with them disabled but I can't see why not you couldn't have it active.

[mDust]

Congrats getting to 4.0...Now shoot for 5!
CoreTemp or RealTemp will work fine for monitoring your CPU temp.
Run prime95 for about 10 hours or so on torture mode (if you haven't already) the first time to make sure the current OC is 100% stable. If there are no errors, then your OC is stable and you might get away with lowering the voltage a bit. You'll have to run prime95 for a few hours each time you lower it to make sure it's still stable. If you don't ensure the stability, your CPU could be making errors. Many of these errors may not be mission critical or even noticed, but the computer could randomly crash at any moment.

[Trace]

Also, odd multipliers (19, 21) overclock better then even multipliers(20)