what can this rig do

first time to overclock. got to 2.4 gig. mem timings are 2.5-3-3-7.stable on prime 95 for 26 hrs and really improved my 3dmark 3&5 scores. under full load temp hits 52c in a room that is 85-90f in the day, hits 48c at night.everything i read says to set your 1t/2t timing to 1t. but when i do i get the black screen. and would i be better off to run 2 1 gig mem stick instead of 4 512s? anybody got a reasonable guess as to how far i can take this on stock cooling? amd athlon 64 3200+ venice core asus a8n-sli-premium 4 corsair cmx512-3200c2pt mem 2 nvidea geforce 6600gt sli vid cards 4 wd 250gig sata 2 hd on a 0+1 raid soundblaster x-fi platinum sound creative p7800 7.1 speakers enermax noisetaker ax 2.0 600 watt psu coolermaster centurion 5 case

 

Your about at the ceiling on stock cooling any higher and theres risk of damage,these chips dont respond well to increased voltage and you cant up it with the stock cooling 2.4ghz is fast enough for 3200 on air,especially on stock air

If you wanna go higher go with a water cooling setup,you may be able to run it at 2.6 but you'd need an after market heatsink and you'd have to dump the coolermaster centurion or do a serious chop job on it to get some air flowing through

 

thanks for the info. if i'm close to the limit on what i can do with stock air then i'm happy. i don't want to push too hard until i gain more exp/knowledge. what case would you suggest that would give better air flow? thank you

 

with aftermarket HSF, you can get up to 2.5 or 2.6 easy. I do it on mine with a Thermaltake SilentBoost.

 

thanks, i'll check into that. i would like to get to 2.5, but with stock cooling 2.4 seems to be about it to stay stable.

 

There are quite a few good cases out there its hard to recommend one espescially since I havnt been shopping for one recently,since your running an overclocked computer you want the whole thing to stay cool not just the cpu basically the more fans the better,you want the airflow to move bottom front to rear top with as many fans as possible moving the air,also as one of my own rules stay away from gimmicks like integrated air conditioning ect.,the only thing thats guarenteed to keep everything cool is lots of air moving through the whole case, some cases split the cooling area's into zones while this usually helps keep the cpu cool other components are negated I'd prefer to stay away from those too

 

thanks for the info, but i think i'll stick with this case. i have a spot to put another fan, and i may change the hsf. i'm not worried about pushing this to the limit so i think i'll let it go at that thank you

 

1T vrs 2T makes (for me anywise) over 10% difference in 3dmark 03 cpu scores, but the chances of getting 1T with 4 sticks of mem are pretty slim.

I'm running 2 1 gig sticks of high end OCZ PC4000 @ 2.5-3-2-8 (1T) DDR440 speeds, but even the 1 gig sticks are a bit much for my 3100 sempron @ HTT268 (Slightly over 2.4).

I had almost as much luck with 2 cheepo 512 sticks.

My best guess is that the onboard controllers don't like 4 sticks at all, and anything over 1 gig is starting to tax them as well.

 

i thought 4 sticks might be a bit much. i think i'll switch to 2 1 gig sticks. the only problem i'm having is my raid. i'm running 4 hdd in a 0+1 raid and during the time it was overclocked it got degraded twice and i had to rebuild it twice. i set it back to stock and it's been ok for about a week. should overclocking cause a problem like this?

 

Yes, many folks over in the MSI forums have complained about raid problems while overclocked. (Some non-raid sata problems as well).

I haven't played with raid yet, but my understanding was that it had something to do with not having the PCI bus (on which the HD controller resides) locked out of the OC.

On the MSI boards you had to manually set the PCI clock in bios up 1 from normal to engage the lock on the bus, otherwise it ramped up with the HTT OC.

 

thanks for the info. i figured it was something like that. man this ocing is tuff. so many things to balance and you have to take such small steps to do it right. it's kind of fun, but a big challenge. thank god i have nothing but time on my hands.

 

Heh.....

Well, let me give you another "balancing" act you're going to be playing with if you decide to change memory to get (1T).....

I found with my sempron that using (1T) limited my HTT OC.

It took a lot of benchmarking to decide what the best combination of mem settings vers higher CPU clock speed was.

But like you I enjoyed the challenge.

 

yeah but now i have another problem. i got a bsod saying there was a prob ntfs.sys and then the weird location numbers. tried to boot in safe mode and got the same thing. tried 3 or 4 times and kept getting the bsod even when i tried to boot in safe mode. so i decided to reset the cmos. now she won't boot at all. get a black screen, can't even get into bios. don't even get any beeps or buzzes. my dvd players light up like it's trying to boot but that is a far as it goes. even my floppy doesn't light up. my activity light comes on for about a minute then goes dark. i'm going to have to do some studying to figure this out.

 

Ouch........

Try removing all but one of your mem chips first and see if it will at least post to get you into bios.

 

tried that, no help.

 

Back to basics then..... unplug everything (including system (not!!! cpu) fans) plugged into the mobo

 

well after unpluging most everything and using only 1 mem stick and resetting cmos about 5 times i can boot to bios. but when i boot to windows i get a bsod saying ntfs.sys and an adress. i've tried to overwrite the os and repair it but as soon as i do i get the bsod ntfs.sys error.these nvidea raid controllers don't like to oc.guess i'll keep playing.