The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Russ you have sent me on wild goose chace to prove you wrong..lol but your evenly right on issue of the 940..you got me really thinking to postponing a few months the asus deluxe water build for 09 and jump on a Quick Amd air build to try and sell to the public.
I see the Gigabyte 790GP-DS4H got to 4064 freq at 1.584vcore on air..
but at that high vcore that's pushing is'nt it?

Phenom II Overclocking Database
Phenom II Different with MB's

 

1.58V is ludicrous, air or water cooling. The lifetime of that CPU is going to be short, and it will use a monumental amount of power.

 

Perhaps AMD thought ahead and planned for that? But that does seem like abit of volts. Curious, what do some of you experts think of pushing the boards ram limits. What would happen? Would it simply not boot? Is it NOT recommended. 2GB has become VERY insufficient!!! And I cant get a proper answer from crucial, newegg, MSI.

 

4GB overclocks fine, as long as it's 2x2GB. Four sticks of RAM severely restricts overclocking performance.

 

Sooo... You think I could put more in my board than newegg states. Hypothetical question. A manufacturer says a board can ONLY support 2gb of ram. Has anybody EVER put 4gb in a board such as that? Would it simply not boot, or would it actually use/handle it in most situations. Anybody have odds on DESTROYING my board? 50/50, 90% chance it just wont boot? Im sorry if this seems ignorant I do need to upgrade anyway, but this could be an interesting experiment.

 

Oh I see, it doesn't support it at all. It'll just not work then, it won't do any harm though.

 

Thanks sam. Yet another reason to pull the board and replace it. Its just a measly am2 socket. Only supports upto 94W cpu's. So yah... Its done. Saving up some funds, and making the switch. I wonder if I should just wait for am3 sockets though. This is definetely a good case though. Atx slip right in there. I like that there is a CPU air intake on the side of the case. It averages 32-34c idle and 42-44c under high (dvd rebuilder) load. Though because of my PSU, I really should consider a different case too. Perhaps I can sell this computer to somebody. Its friggin FAST and smooth. People who've sat down to it are blown away at its ease.

 

A 5400+ with 2GB of RAM is good compared to a lot of PCs, but you can do a heck of a lot better. Especially if you employ a relatively minor overclock, you could double that system's performance with ease, using a CPU that cost less than $100.

 

Dont get me wrong. This system continues to impress. But, in my opinion its a lost cause for my moving forward. It will make an EXCELLENT media center and more. Besides, I have a pc Building itch that needs scratched, LOL. The board itself APPEARS to allow overclock. But the CPU is locked. Im sure one of the brisbane blacks would overclock nicely, Minus L2 cache size

 

http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us/event/IntelAMDAM2/AMDAM3.html

come on jump on board the star

 

Impressive. But doesnt it mention that it SUPPORTS am3. I want a board that says socket AM3. Built from head to toe, FOR the am3 processor. Now... Im pretty stupid, when it comes to the technical side of this stuff, but im trying Be gentle

 

You're right again Sam. I learned that the hard way! LOL!! 3.8, even on air is much more manageable and Takes a lot less juice. Water cooling I see 4.5GHz or so without near that much voltage. From what I've been hearing, the way to overclock the DS4H is raise the fsb multiplier until it crashes, then add a little voltage, and if it fires up, turn on ACC and AMD Overdrive. You can adjust damn near everything in real time, on the fly, and it saves the settings without having to make changes in the setup itself. You can revert to the previous good settings and adjust the settings some more! Far more sophisticated than the Overdrive was for the Phenoms!

Russ

 

Almost all CPUs are multiplier locked, it's down to the motherboard to do the overclocking, and abasic MSI micro board won't be very good at that. MSI's uber-cheap basic boards are fantastic value, but they're not what you'd call "enthusiast"
There is no 'socket AM3' really, it's the same socket as AM2 and AM2+, they are, a little confusingly, just different revisions of the same technology. While that might seem odd at first, it's exactly what Intel did with Socket 775 - first they only worked with P4s, then Core 2 Duo support was added, then Core 2 Quad support was added. In exactly the same way as AMD, the 65nm Quad era boards could usually be BIOS flashed to see the newer 45nm Quads, in the same way that some AM2+ Phenom boards can be flashed to see Phenom 2s, but ones that did not have the physical electronics to do so could not, for instance a lot of old P4s could never be used for Core 2 Duos or Core 2 Quads, in the same way first generation Athlon X2 boards will never work with Phenoms. All AM3 really is, other than a dedicated Phenom II platform is a DDR3 base of AM2+. I personally don't really see the benefits of DDR3 memory as of yet, yes it's mandatory for i7, but that doesn't really make it ideal. I've seen benchmarks with Intel CPUs using DDR2 versus DDR3 and generally, there's very little difference, a couple of % at most.

Russ: Call me sceptical, but if you can achieve it on air with one voltage, you can achieve it on water with that voltage. Yes, the heat will become a problem on air, but that merely means you can take the voltage even higher with water before you encounter heat issues. The CPU being on watercooling doesn't reduce the voltage you need, certainly not by half. If such an air cooler existed that was capable enough, 4.5Ghz would probably take around 1.7V, these are the sorts of voltages people are using when they go for their Liquid nitrogen tests. Because Liquid nitrogen coolers aren't remotely realistic for a continuously running system, they can go as mad as they like with the volts. The electronmigration effect is greatly reduced due to the lack of heat, but it still exists. Liquid Nitrogen gets the CPU below the threshold for severe electronmigration. Watercooling does not.

 

Actually, There's more to AM3 than you are realizing, as it has both forward and backward compatibility. There are 6 pins on the chip that were previously unused that go directly from the CPU to the + extras on the motherboard, and tells the MB that the CPU is AM2+ or AM3. Since it's directly controlled buy the CPU and directly connected to the perifial, and not controlled by software, it should save a good number of clock cycles for other work!

Russ

 

That many clock cycles to tell the board which CPU it is?
As I mentioned before, it's a nice feature, but I think perhaps you're overstating it's importance somewhat... :S

 

It all seems to work well, if you have the right MB and chipset. BTW! You should see the new AMD OverDrive! Adjustments for everything, on the fly. If it should crash, it reverts back to the last stable settings and you try again! Pretty neat stuff, nothing like the old OverDrive for the phenom at all! It's like working in the setup, only the results are in real time, while it's running!

Russ

 

on the fly Ocing?

 

That's correct!

Russ

 

nice to see it being implemented other than asus doing it lol. at least this way its perfectly tuned with a propper GUI, rather than the LCD poster, or the OC Palm to use.

 

Gigabyte EasyTune does it, believe it or not, and it kind of works, but I'd never use it over the BIOS.