after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

[joeblough]

greetings all,

my ex58-ud4p was seemingly stable for quite a while OC'd to 3Ghz at bclk=150, 20x and memory at 8x (1200MHz).

after almost 80 days uptime, i had to reboot and my problems started up in earnest. the machine started to lock up on me after a few hours of runtime.

i went back to memtest86 and found that very occasionally i had a memory failure. i've got 12GB of corsair xms ram that's supposed to be good for 1333MHz; 9-9-9-24 is the published spec.

i fooled around with the memory multiplier, but in the end i decided that the only thing that worked was changing tRC from 24 to 30.

that seemed to work for a while, but then the lockups started again. i found a 64-bit capable version of memtest86 that i could run after booting my OS and i was still seeing some errors... so i then decided to back off again to 10-10-10-30 and memtest would pass, but the lockups persisted.

i ended up going back to the bios defaults and so far everything seems stable, so i think there's a problem with some of my overclock settings.

i'm on bios F8a. before i post all my settings and start tweaking again, should i upgrade to bios F10d? i've had bad experiences after upgrading/downgrading bios so i'm a little gun-shy.

this is the 4th or 5th homebuilt PC i've made and i've never had so much trouble with an overclock. i understand that the x58 chipset is very complicated, so this kind of stuff is to be expected... still its pretty frustrating.

[wazza300]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

set ram volts to 1.66 use rated timings and speed,set qpi volts to 1.28000 set cpu voltage to normal see if you have better luck,if not set ram timings to auto and make a note of what bios sets them at,also upgrade to latest bios as it will have all the latest fixes

[joeblough]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

thanks for the reply.

i'll have to go back and look at what i had, but i did definitely crank the ram voltage up above 1.6. can't remember about qpi. the bios set the memory to 8-8-8-<something> which seems like a bug since 9-9-9-24 is printed on the dimm. of course by default i think the bios had underclocked the memory, so perhaps 8-8-8-X would work.

i'm a little freaked out that the official bios on gigabytes website has a letter appended to it; i thought the letters were just for beta versions. the reason i was on f8a is that it was the first bios i found that sleep/wake would work properly.

[wazza300]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

thanks for the reply.

i'll have to go back and look at what i had, but i did definitely crank the ram voltage up above 1.6. can't remember about qpi. the bios set the memory to 8-8-8-<SOMETHING> which seems like a bug since 9-9-9-24 is printed on the dimm. of course by default i think the bios had underclocked the memory, so perhaps 8-8-8-X would work.

i'm a little freaked out that the official bios on gigabytes website has a letter appended to it; i thought the letters were just for beta versions. the reason i was on f8a is that it was the first bios i found that sleep/wake would work properly.

i have no issues using beta bios's its up 2 you but i would update to the latest one it should have the sleep fix too,also dont raise ram volts higher than 1.66 as its plenty and higher will cause damage in the long run 1.66 in the bios means 1.64 in actual voltage

[joeblough]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

well, that's interesting. i checked my qpi voltage in my overclock profile, and it was low, so i bumped it up.

i then booted up and started 8 threads of mprime. prior to this tweak after a sleep/wake cycle one mprime thread would always die, which i interpreted as the memory timing not being set right after a sleep/wake cycle. however, after fixing the qpi voltage this behavior stopped and mprime was running great after 5 sleep/wakes.

in all mprime was running for about 2 hours when i decided to fire up another program. at that point the system hung. i wonder if there is something wrong with my boot disk? it would be a shame because it's a 250GB velociraptor and it cost a chunk of change.

of course starting up a new program also beats up the memory a little bit but compared to what mprime is doing it doesnt seem like that much extra memory activity would kill things.

very strange...

[Salty]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

Perhaps was more stable than before, but not stable enough.

Read the bios flashing sticky at the top of forum. Do not use @bios.

Mprime is the linux version? If using Prime95, failing a large fft test usually means problems on the ram side and failing small usually means problems around cpu.

Copy all settings before flashing, as profiles and settings will be lost. Set optimised defaults in bios and reboot into bios before changing any settings.

Enter settings manually rather than load saved to disk/usb profiles from an earlier bios.

To the best my memory...

[wazza300]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

well, that's interesting. i checked my qpi voltage in my overclock profile, and it was low, so i bumped it up.

i then booted up and started 8 threads of mprime. prior to this tweak after a sleep/wake cycle one mprime thread would always die, which i interpreted as the memory timing not being set right after a sleep/wake cycle. however, after fixing the qpi voltage this behavior stopped and mprime was running great after 5 sleep/wakes.

in all mprime was running for about 2 hours when i decided to fire up another program. at that point the system hung. i wonder if there is something wrong with my boot disk? it would be a shame because it's a 250GB velociraptor and it cost a chunk of change.

of course starting up a new program also beats up the memory a little bit but compared to what mprime is doing it doesnt seem like that much extra memory activity would kill things.

very strange...

you might need a bit more qpi voltage to be stable dont go any higher than 1.3000 tho not for stock cpu speed

[joeblough]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

okay, tonight or tomorrow night i'm going to upgrade the bios and re-tune everything. when you say "stock cpu speed" what do you mean? i have bclk set to 150MHz and 20x so i'm at 3GHz, which is higher than stock speed.

salty - yes i am using the linux/unix mprime. i've been doing big ffts to concentrate on the memory. i should do some ffts that fit in cache just to see if the CPU might be the problem.

[wazza300]

Re: after almost a year, still no stable overclock (ex58-ud4p)

okay, tonight or tomorrow night i'm going to upgrade the bios and re-tune everything. when you say "stock cpu speed" what do you mean? i have bclk set to 150MHz and 20x so i'm at 3GHz, which is higher than stock speed.

salty - yes i am using the linux/unix mprime. i've been doing big ffts to concentrate on the memory. i should do some ffts that fit in cache just to see if the CPU might be the problem.

no qpi at 1.26000 should be fine for 3ghz its only on higher around 4ghz that you need more qpi voltage i was just making sure