The Official OC (OverClocking) Thread!

Sorry, double post!

Happy Computering,
theone

 

And you still trust those readings, bless!
SilenX were right to advise caution, I am told a former employee started his own company under the same name, producing inferior quality products that are well below the par of the genuine article.
I'm intrigued as to your CPU temperatures. My CPU runs in the low forties regardless of fan speed, and if I up it to 1600rpm, doesn't break 50C in gaming. However, it does have 125W of graphics card heat underneath it!

 

Sam,

Actually, I do! After talking to them a few minutes ago! Their testing methods include mounting them in a case with a doctored PS so they can test an individual fan. Then they put the whole thing in a sound chamber and test in a real life way. He told me that the low dBA is not the issue as many companies bend the truth by certain fudging of the tests, when it comes to claims. He also pointed out that their advertising states "and the worlds best noise-to-airflow ratio". Another fan manufacturer tried to claim that this wasn't true and sued them for false advertising. They lost! In fact to prevent future nonsense suits, the Judge made a ruling that someone would have to prove different before they could even have a lawsuit heard!

Here's my Everest read out from about 20 minutes ago. Ambient temp was 28C.

From L to R:
Fan Speed
HD, GPU, Core 1, Core 2, CPU, and MB Temps
CPU Speed (I use thermal management which doesn't affect performance)



BTW! Sent you a present. Check your e-mail!

I'm Happy!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I hope this isn't too out of place, but what is a better motherboard for OC. The Asus P5W-DH or the Asus Commando?

Thanks

 

eparker89,

Hands down the Comando. Supposedly it the best overclocking MB you can get! Newegg has them for $209!

Happy Computering,
theone

 

The reason I asked was because I thought that the Commando was a really good board (out of my price range) but newegg has it for 209US, the same price as the motherboard I was originally going to get, so I began to wonder if I misread something about it.

Thank you, theonejrs.

 

eparker89,
You're welcome! Least I could have done is given you the link! God, isn't senility great! LOL I can't believe I told you about the price and didn't give a link! Here you go!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131149

NuckNFuts,

I like that! You have no idea how many silly things were dreamed up to try and replace or refine my "Happy Computering" on another forum. At least this one's worthy! It makes sense too! I won't steal it from ya though!! ROFLMAO!!!

Best Regards,
theone

 

Really depends on your aim for the use, but OC is very close on most CPU's and no different on others. We may not see another great !975 from ASUS, so the Commando is gonna be worth looking at.

!975 is concidered the Power user high end chipset, while 965 is the affordible mainstream. P965 is the newer rendition, still speed binned from rejected quality !975X it does bring to the table some new features including ICH8R RAID controller hub and Intel's ViiV. Also Intel 6 SATA RAID (opposed to 6), and now ATI Crossfire multi GPU support & JBOD is now availible for P965, no word on ECC support yet,

I've used both so I can speak for them and say good overclocking on either by ASUS (P5B for my P965). The !975 has just a little cutting edge on some extreme OC'rs but for my #E6600, either was great. The P5W-DH has slightly better power mosfets and electronics onboard to run hotter under load and longer.

Summery; Both can easily hit FSB500 (CPU limited). But Comando is aired at the Gaming market, hence the series "Republic Of Gamers". Now I'm not a gamer, but for the E6600 I use, the Commando would be great since it has extra BIOS tweeks and better Q-FAN control and lots of bling-bling. A LED on rear helps takes the place of old beep diagnostics and can also show date/time/temp/custom name. I/O shield can be lit up in neon blue to help plug N' Play in the dark. More blue LED's can be lit on mobo to mark major connection locations when setting up or just maintainence (in S3 or S4 mode or ATX soft off). Can be left on for show any time you want. And easy connect plugs, you onnect you ATX wires once and remove only this easy plug from now on during maintainence. I use the ASUS CROSSHAIR based on this series and I love it now. Added: oh ya, I like this and use it a lot. These new BIOS feature 2 custom profile stores and several add ons you load from USB flash or HDD or Floppy. Creat various OC profiles and use 'em as needed. How cool is that?

Hope that helps a little

 

Additionally:

The choices are not as hard as they were back in the day of Canterwood (!875P) V/S Springdale (!P865), You actually lost something if needing CSA Intel Gigabit LAN and Server type ECC support. P865 really didn't offer "PAT" natively but ASUS tweeked BIOS to unlock this too in the end of the P865 life. Again, the x65's are speed binned rejected x75's with certain features locked out to make them stable as a new model, thus cheaper to sell. However, since they were really x75's to start, ASUS bin picks the better of what's left and unlocks most of these features to make them closer to what they once were. So Today, a good ASUS with P965 should be ably to keep up with most ASUS !975X and even out perform other brands for any !975X due to BIOS mods and tweeks. WE already have ATI Crossfire and Memory Pipeline Booster for P965.

 

I went in my local shop to order some corsair dominator ram and the bloke that owns the shop has the asus striker extreme MB and he said his board wouldnt even run on corsair? Has any one heard this before? I was ready to pay out for 4gig of dominator so my Comando was OC ready.......?
I just dont want to get stuck with ram I cant use, and that wont be cheap either!

 

I can't speak for the Striker Extreme (nV680i) but I do know nVidia chipsets do not do well with all 4 RAM slots used. Big issue since the 1st 4 slot nV NF3. Ask if he's overclocking and f so, is he running 4 sticks at once.

Might as well mentioned if not already. Even though these mobos are desighned to run 4 sticks of RAM, most mobos do not OC too well like that. Even better mobos loose high FSB OC and require looser timings to off set. For a gaming rig, less, but faster RAM can off set more but slower. This has to do with the chipset MCH addressing load. Worse for AMD since it is on die and can barely handle the new DDR2 as it is, let alone more of it. You then are asking the MCH to call (read/write access) for twice the RAM in the same time. Things can get sloppy or slow down to prevent crash cause sys needs to try and cache or crash. But even the better !975 looses points if memory bandwidth addressing is to bottled up to work smoothly. To keep from skipping a beat, you will need to loosen timings and my not be able to hit as high FSB. The !975X does do well with 2x2g single sticks but these RAMs come in poorer speeds usually aimed towards servers. So 2x1g at tight timings and high FSB is gonna be better for a high end OC and for gamers.

Furthermore, ASUS and Corsair kind of go hand in hand when it comes to performance. If you'd dig up Corsair Labs test report for all their past and present top notch RAM, you'll find an ASUS flag ship motherboards underneath most. And if not for some, it's usually cause the model was just coming out.

 

So what your saying is buy corsair but only run 2x1gig?

 

eparker89,
I know I'm gonna get it in the neck for this but frankly, I don't know if I would buy either MB at this time. I've been doing a lot of reading up on both and the DOA and failure rate is kinda high on both the P5W-DH and the Comando. And not just at Newegg either. Even there, counting a liberal dose of the "Idiot Factor", there's just to many problems with both boards. Way too many failures and a fair amount of multiple DOAs! Right now it seems to be a matter of pure luck whether you get a good one or not.

I recently went through this scenario with an Asus P5N-E SLI/E4300 build and I'm lucky to have any hair left at all. Between the problems I had with the first 2 motherboards and some folks in the forums I belong to questioning whether the 2 claimed bad ones were really bad (hinting that it might be me)! Add to that, my starting to question myself after the second one died after 4 1/2 hours, needlessly as it turned out as both MBs were confirmed by Asus Tech to be bad after they examined the returns (Thank you Trinity), we received full credit for both! I was finally successful and got the damn thing built and shipped off to Chicago. Runs very nice at 3.0GHz and She's happy with it.

In contrast a couple of weeks later I built an E4300 for myself on a GigaByte GA-965P-DS3 v.1.33 and it was the easiest build and overclock of my life. No BSODs! No "mystery" shutdowns or lockups, and it runs right fine if I do say so myself, at 3.275GHz. It was a bit of a vindication for me as well! It will even run flawlessly at 3.363 if I was willing to push the voltage past 1.40v. It would even run at 3.393 and run fine at that speed but without raising the voltage it would crash OCCT after about 5 hours or sometimes reset while in the middle of proccessing a DVD with DVDRB.

Given that experience, I would plunk a Quad Core in this MB and see what it can do in it first, live with it for a while and then when all the kinks are out of the 2 Asus motherboards in question I might move to one of them. It would depend entirely on how well the Quad Core performed in this one! V1.33 supports the Quad Core and has a native 1333MHz FSB, so I would be good to go right now! I'm totally impressed with the 965P Express chipset and the overall adjustability and features with this one and I'll bet it would do a good job with the Quad Core, so I don't think there would be any urgency to run out and buy a new MB for a Quad Core as this ones pretty well sorted out. What's really funny to me is the v.1.33 while newer and better than the older ones and has many more features and better components, it still costs less! At this point, I think it was $100 very well spent! Thank you, DocTY!

Just my thoughts!

Happy Computering,
theone

 

Sorry! AD is having some problems this morning. Double post!

Russ

 

Even though my experience has been far less painful, I'd have to agree with you. I did manage 3Ghz out of this one without changing too many settings, but the process of doing it was a joke. It may be more the nForce 650 chipset than anything else, I don't know, but having to guess which frequencies the board will 'let' you run it at is pathetic. As low as 2.3Ghz some frequencies refuse to POST, and I now run at 3Ghz using the same settings as I tried back then (Voltage, timings etc). I would try for higher speeds, but I probably won't be able to get 3Ghz back again, so it's not worth the risk. I'd also like to mention 1334mhz FSB is significantly more stable than 1333mhz.

 

sam most of the issue you had were due to you trying to force the board to use dividers it cant do. as long as i kept mine at 1:1 it would post almost anywhere.

 

Sam,

Spot on Dude! I think it's a question of some future bios revision. The difference between the 650i and the 965P is the maturity of the 965P. This was the first chipset Intel ported to the C2Ds so it's got about a 6 month head start. Mine will run right up to a 377MHz setting on the buss, but 378 gives a black screen! Most of that is the 4300's inability to handle the higher frequency being as it's only an 800MHz chip to start with. The 6300 will clock considerably higher because of it's native 1066MHz buss speed. Whether the memory slot problems can be solved with a bios flash remains to be seen. Gina's would boot up with 1 stick in slots 1 or 3 but it would BSOD if I used both slots. Using the black slots is a temporary answer as far as I'm concerned. Bottom line is that it should run perfectly no matter which pair you use. If Asus/Nvidia can solve this problem through a new bios, fine but if they can't then it's back to the drawing board.

i'm pretty sure I know why it all happened! The first P5N-Es were great overclockers with little or no problems other than the memory slot thing. I think once they got them up and running good, they changed some of the components to lower the costs. I think they went a little too cheap and are now paying the price. Witness the fact that Asus has several motherboards that are very troublesome at the moment. It can't be all chalked up to bad luck. Read the reviews and overclocking forums and it will give you an idea of how bad things are right now. It's fortunate for Asus that the design was successful at first or they would be dead in the water and stuck with a bad rep! I know for a fact that the failures of the 2 that I sent back were caused at the board component level by faulty components. That being said, it isn't always wise to buy your parts from the lowest bidder and I have to assume that the samples presented to Asus were better than what they ultimately received in bulk. I can't think of any other explaination for what happened. They knew it was good when they brought the MBs out and most were very successful at OC'ing so if that's the case then it has to be a change at the component level that caused all the problems!

When you read about folks smoking components on their motherboards on a design that had been previously good there is nothing else it could be, and all I've looked at info for so far is the Comando, P5W-DH, P5N-E and a couple of other popular MBs. It reads like a who's who of broken MBs and memory problems. You shouldn't be seeing multiple failures or DOAs the way they are being reported right now. I read about one poor guy who went through 4 P5N-Es either being DOA or DSA (dead shortly after)! He didn't go back for a 5th! He bought a GigaByte instead and got a refund!

I expect to buy the components and put them together and have it all work, at least stock. Gina's 2nd one melted down bone stock at 1.8GHz! The good thing for Asus is that they were all reasonably successful to begin with otherwise they might just be in real trouble. That's their saving grace, the fact that for the first few months there were not a lot of problems other than the memory slot thing. Your's was the lone exception to that, that I've seen or heard of. I guess that means you got a good one! I'll guarantee that if you call Asus and tell them you are getting BSODs, or the machine is rebooting itself the first question they will ask is which slots the memory's in!

I'll tell you this, if I bought a Quad Core tomorrow, it would be running in my DS3 tomorrow night! Even then it would take a hell of an improvement or overclocking advantage to make me change to a different MB at this point in time. I've absolutely tortured this one and like a Timex, it keeps right on ticking! Very quietly too! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

With the comando it says it only supports 533/667and 800mhz ram. If I still put 800 will I be able to clock past this......?

And if I can only put 2sticks of ram in there please tell me what I should be buying if I plan to push the settings?

 

tinytom,

If it was me, I would be either doing some waiting or switch to a different brand MB. I just spent all night looking around the net to see other peoples findings and a lot seem to be having problems with several of Asus's motherboards right now. Even discounting the "Idiot Factor" there's just to many either DOA or failing in short order motherboards out there right now.

Funny as hell! The Fedex driver just now dropped off my replacement 16x DVD-Rom from Asus. It was packed in a MB box so he thought it was a MB and asked me about it. We got to talking about computers and he told me he builds them as a hobby for family and friends. To make a long story short, he's on his second P5N-E and he's mad at Leo LaPorte (a local computer talk show host) for recommending it in the first place. Now that's funny!. No lie either as he showed me the box! He's taking it in to work to pack up and ship it back for exchange. Small world!

To answer your original question, I could recomend that you buy what I have and be very happy with it, but I don't want to be labeled a Gigabyte/G.Skill fanboy! LOL!! I bought it based on advice from an extremely knowlegible friend, giving him a list of what I was planing to buy and asking his opinion. He not only gave me his opinion but wound up saving me about $60 on the MB and memory by linking me to a sale on the MB, which led to my discovering the lower price for the memory as well! He's a member of the Forum but I won't say who as this wasn't on the thread! If he wants to say something, that's fine with me! Mort81 was the one who got me thinking when he questioned as to why I would go with a P5N-E when I just gotten done with 2 weeks of major problems and 3 motherboards building one. My thanks to both of them as I'm a very happy camper!

In my night long search on the net I discovered 2 things! Most folks are getting around 2.8 to 3.0GHz out of an E4300 at the moment, while I easily got to 3.275 with this MB, and there are an abnormal amount of problems with certain motherboards right now. Would I go out and buy a DS3 v1.33 knowing what I know right now? Bet your A$$ I would!

Happy Computering,
theone

 

Double post again!