[Person of Color]

Just overclocked my Phenom II to 4.0GHz. Prime95 stable over 8 hours.

Even with the high as fuck voltage I'm only hitting 44c under load. But the VRM (voltage regulator module) was running hot (but within spec), so I ripped the fan off an old Pentium heatsink and screwed it on.

It should be about 10% slower than an i5 3570k.

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[TerminX]

Nice! I have a couple of Phenom II X4 boxes in the other room that were both running at 4.0 for a while. The particular chips I have aren't really the greatest overclockers and one of them required even more voltage than this.

What kind of board is that? It looks like it could be a MSI board by the color scheme... if so, watch out! The 4+1 phase power design on those things tends to shit the bed pretty easily and you run the risk of coming home to smoke, unhappiness and tears. If the board has an 8+2 design you likely don't have anything to worry about with that though.

[Person of Color]

It's a Biostar TA970XE. It has a 4+1 phase with Low-RDS mosfets. I'm well aware of MSI's dogshit VRM's. You couldn't pay me to run an MSI board.

I'm running it in this case, with every fan spot filled, and with this cooler. It's completely silent on full blast so I just shut the smart fan off. I have a two high flow (70+ CFM) low noise fans, front and rear, to help keep it cool.

Micro Center is the greatest fucking store ever. I got the case for $37 after rebate and the cooler for $15 on clearance.

[TerminX]

Ah, okay. The boards I was using to hit 4.0 were a Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P and a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5. Really, be careful running that kind of voltage on that board if you plan on running it like that all the time.

[Person of Color]

I'm keeping it pretty cold.

[Person of Color]

Aw shit it started locking up like crazy...it might be the new ATI drivers. It was fine till I put those in.

[Person of Color]

Overloaded the VRM's. I'm pretty sure it's cause I ran them at 1.6v by accident during one of the initial tests. I hope they honor my warranty.

[TerminX]

I don't think it was the 1.6v for a brief time that killed it, I think it was the almost 1.6v for over a week. They'll probably honor the warranty but you should definitely look for a different board (or just lay off the overvoltage) when you get it back. I'm not sure how Biostar's US warranty process works but I know some of the other manufacturers (at least Gigabyte and MSI) seem to use a repair facility in California where they actually fix your board by hand if they have to. I sent a Gigabyte board in once and they initially declined to honor the warranty due to damage to the PCB itself (they found a blown trace), but when they sent the board back they included a note about how they had repaired it anyway and it had a very, very small wire meticulously soldered to both sides of the break in the trace in question. More importantly, the repair worked and I'm still running the repaired board.

[Person of Color]

Yeah it's a bummer, but it's whatever I guess. Many people had gotten 4.0GHz out of the ASRock 970 Extreme4, and others commented that the TA970XE had similar quality VRM's, plus I noticed the heatsink was twice the size. I guess it either doesn't, or I got a bad one. But I got it on sale at Micro Center for $60 last year so I can't really bitch.

I'm kind of surprised MSI repairs boards. I'd sooner trust a Yugo.

[You]

My phenom runs at 3.9ghz at 1.4v, most of them will as well. Why bother raising the voltages so high for 100mhz?

I'm on the asrock extreme 4, great board.

[Sangman]

That's cool as balls!

[Person of Color]

You, on 29 April 2013 - 09:11 AM, said:

My phenom runs at 3.9ghz at 1.4v, most of them will as well. Why bother raising the voltages so high for 100mhz?

I'm on the asrock extreme 4, great board.

It's kind of a penis size thing.

My Mustang has 275hp. It pisses me off It's not at 300.

Everything has a threshold where it's straight up legit.

[Person of Color]

Fastest repair service ever. Between me mailing it out and getting it back it only took ten days! They repaired it the very same day they received it.

A+, Biostar. A+.

[You]

486DX2, on 14 May 2013 - 05:37 PM, said:

Fastest repair service ever. Between me mailing it out and getting it back it only took ten days! They repaired it the very same day they received it.

A+, Biostar. A+.

Use some sense this time!

[Tea Monster]

Biostar (shudder)

[Person of Color]

You know that after the whole Abit accounting scandal a few years back all their engineers went to Biostar, right?

[TerminX]

Yeah, but ABIT completely sucked by that point anyway. Their really good engineer was named Oskar Wu... he invented BIOS based overclocking (ABIT SoftMenu) and he started working for DFI in like 2002 or so. They might not be the worst ever, but I wouldn't be caught dead with a Biostar board in one of my rigs... at least they aren't as awful as anything made by ECS/PC Chips, though.

[Forge]

noob cherry faggot stuff
i just unlocked the cores in my athlon II x2 220, but i'm scared as hell to overclock it or my 9800 gtx+ vid card because it's an asus board with ami bios (the gpu runs at 60c under load & is supposed to be rated to run at 105c safely. the cpu runs at 44c under load and is supposed to be rated at 73c max)

i'm going to give it some time before i shut off the smart fan. it's constantly running.

they say if you can catch all the smoke and put it back into the component, it'll fix it

[TerminX]

Hahaha. The 9800 GTX+ was a good card... when I got married in 2010, Plagman gave me one as a gift--I was still on an AGP system at the time and some other friends had kindly donated enough old hardware to build an outdated but workable Athlon64 rig. I still have it running in my Linux box, but I've since flashed the BIOS on it to turn it into a GTS250 (the 512MB GTS250 was the same card as the 9800 GTX+, just rebranded).

[Forge]

TerminX, on 08 June 2013 - 09:22 AM, said:

I've since flashed the BIOS on it to turn it into a GTS250 (the 512MB GTS250 was the same card as the 9800 GTX+, just rebranded).

does that unlock something?

edit: did some reading and from what i came across there's no significant reason to do it except to sli it with another gts250 card

i have nTune and can overclock from the control panel
right now it's sitting at factory
Core clock: 185Mhz - 1480Mhz (factory=740Mhz)
memory clock: 275Mhz - 1320Mhz (factory=1100Mhz)
shader clock: 459Mhz - 3672Mhz (factory=1836Mhz)

fan is set at auto control. so i can change it to manual and crank it up if it gets too hot from overclocking

i've built plenty of rigs over the years, but i never really got into messing with overclocking cause i'm afraid to blow shit up. i know to experiment tiny increments at a time until an unstable state is reached, then back down a notch or two. i usually blow my tiny budget getting the desired components and don't have the money to run out and get replacements so as long as the thing runs and does what i want - i don't "fix" what isn't broke

[TerminX]

You aren't going to fry anything by overclocking unless you're increasing the voltage to do it. About flashing to GTS250 BIOS, I was mostly just bored and wanted to make sure I had whatever BIOS fixes that were implemented between the two. I also have a habit of re-flashing my cards so that the stock clocks are whatever I find the card can overclock to, so since I was flashing it anyway I figured I would find the newest BIOS for that PCB that I could.

[Forge]

i thought it might overheat if overclocked. that's something that can be monitored, but i'm always afraid that it'll happen when i'm not around to catch it. the stock case isn't exactly the best for air flow and i don't have a back or front fan. Don't want to uncase it cause then it'll fill with dog and cat hair.

i'll do some research on the gpu & cpu & see if i can find a consensus on stable performance and manageable temperature without having to buy a bunch of cooling stuff or case modifications

it's a older "economy" rig, but as it sits i can play maps like Tribute to Action II with dukeplus, polymer, & HRP and get by well enough to avoid lag-hell.

i'd like to tweak it around a bit and see if i can get better performance during maps like the E1L1 tribute level
http://www.scent-88....M/map1/map1.php

it was unplayable it bogged my system down so bad.


edit: i could always go whore myself out on a street corner to get enough scratch to buy two more sticks of 4Gb ram bringing the total to 16Gb. the board will also take an AM3 Phenom II X4 945. I'd like to have gotten a black edition phenom II, but most of those that are worth the extra $ are 125W (the 555-570 are 80-95w) and the board is only rated to handle 95W

edit2: without huge amounts of tweaking to the bios, just putting it in overclock mode and selecting the highest option of 10% overclock the following items have changed:
cpu temp: from 45c to 50c under load (still within reported safe specs of under 73c)
core voltage: 1.344v to 1.440v
core speed: 2812.5 Mhz to 3080.2 Mhz
Bus speed: 200.9 Mhz to 220.0 Mhz
HT Link 2009.0 Mhz to 2200.2 Mhz

not going to win any benchmark tests, but better than nothing. i'll let it alone for a week or so to make sure it stays stable, then i may overclock the 9800 gtx+

if that goes well and temps stay reasonable i'll shut off that smartfan in the bios. it constantly runs and isn't exactly the quietest

[Person of Color]

TerminX, on 07 June 2013 - 08:19 PM, said:

Yeah, but ABIT completely sucked by that point anyway. Their really good engineer was named Oskar Wu... he invented BIOS based overclocking (ABIT SoftMenu) and he started working for DFI in like 2002 or so. They might not be the worst ever, but I wouldn't be caught dead with a Biostar board in one of my rigs... at least they aren't as awful as anything made by ECS/PC Chips, though.

I used to work in a shop and we custom built a ton of low end systems using Biostar boards and they were fucking bulletproof. One defective board out of 50 on average is pretty great. I also used a Biostar TZ77XE4 in my friend's PC and it took his 3570k to 4.5GHz without any vdroop, and ice cold VRM's.

Also LOL PC chips. I've actually seen their "fake cache" boards in the flesh. They used to make Pentium/486 boards with cache chips that were plastic squares with tin legs on them. My ex's dad had a couple of those. The only good ECS board I've ever used is the P5HX-A in my DOS rig, which is a Soviet tank of a board. Everything but the cache and keyboard controller is socketed...

[TerminX]

Ha, I remember the fake cache myself, though the time period when it happened was really before my time in tech. I have seen some "interesting" ECS boards, however... once saw one with both SDRAM and DDR slots. We thought it would be funny to see what happened when both types of slots were populated; it caught on fire.

About preferring Biostar, eh, I've seen a successful PC shop that swore by ECS and detested brands like ASUS and MSI and Gigabyte, so the preference of a particular shop is far from conclusive.

[Forge]

not getting much out of the vid card. think the cpu is holding it back

Core clock: (factory=740Mhz) 765
memory clock: (factory=1100Mhz) 1100
shader clock: (factory=1836Mhz) 1900

when i bump the core clock to 780 and run OCCT, the driver fails. it'll recover a few times, but eventually it'll dump to a BSOD within 10 minutes

[TerminX]

Try a beefier power supply if you've got one. Years ago I had a system with a 6800GT in it that would only do about 20MHz on the core beyond the stock clocks... the PSU eventually failed and when I replaced it, I tried pushing the card again for shits and giggles. It ended up making the difference between the GPU running at ~400MHz and the GPU running at ~450MHz, so it was a relatively substantial change.

[Forge]

makes sense. minimum power requirements is 450w. my psu is 450w (my 500w took a crap & the only backup i have is another 450w)

looks like i'm back to whoring myself out to get the funds for new components

[TerminX]

You should have a rig in no time then; it's the world's oldest and most stable profession!

[Person of Color]

TerminX, on 08 June 2013 - 06:40 PM, said:

About preferring Biostar, eh, I've seen a successful PC shop that swore by ECS and detested brands like ASUS and MSI and Gigabyte, so the preference of a particular shop is far from conclusive.

OMFG HAHAHAHAHAH

That's DISGUSTING.

That's worse than telling all your buddies to buy Chrysler.

[TerminX]

Heh, I just looked the shop up and it looks like they closed down for good about a month ago. I'm actually sort of surprised, they were an otherwise decent shop with TONS of electronic parts of pretty much every variety. If I ever needed ANYTHING electronic (except for PC hardware) I went to them first. Fans, capacitors, heat shrink tubing, all kinds of shit. They had an extensive supply of vintage stuff that would come in sometimes, too... once I went in there and ended up buying a whole box of IBM Model M keyboards for 5 bucks each!

Kinda makes me wish life had forced me to live in California for a few more years... I bet it was one hell of a going out of business sale.

Edit: after letting it set in for 5 minutes that the place is gone now, I sorta feel like another part of my childhood is dead and buried. Damn it. That store was almost as old as I am...