Overclocking Amd X2 4800+ & XFX 8800GT

[Rollercoaster]

Hey guys since my last system upgrade i wasnt willing to OC soon but got crysis a few days back. Right after i got my new XFX 8800GT 512mb. I is a big step up from the last 6600GT

Anyways, I started crysis on All High settings and man oh man i was hooked into the beautiful jungle and the volumetric effects and the hi res textures and ll that what crysis is famous for. But alas as i played a few levels things got sluggish as the levels and fight got bigger. I switched to medium and almost felt as sad as a kid who is hungry for the whole day and gets a big basket of candy only to be taken away after the first mouthful.

With everything on stock speeds i have a crysis benchmark of
(All in DX9)
GPU=29/CPU=28 @ 1440x900 and
GPU=38/CPU=38 @ 1024x768. (bad for me as my LCD (16:10) has scaling issues)
the scores are pretty low and quite unplayable at complex scenes.
I feel as all 15k i sept went down the drain. anyways i turned to overclocking. and there are the results

Hardware-
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
(OC -> HTT=4x, Vcore = 1.4250v, Ram Voltage = 1.8v)

AMD X2 4800+ AM2
(default 12.5x200 = 2.5Ghz)
(OC 12.5x240 = 3GHZ equiv to AMD X2 6000+)
Max Temp during Crysis 65C, and Torture 73C

XFX 8800GT 512MB Alpga dog edition
(default 600Mhz/1500Mhz/900Mhz)
(OC 720Mhz/1782Mhz/1050Mhz)
^default automatic FAN control and max temp 67C (while crysis) and 71C while torture test.

2x1Gb Transcend DDR2 667Mhz
(OC 750Mhz @ 5-5-5-15)
tried tightening the timings but had 2-3 errors in PRIME95

New crysis benchmarks
(All in DX9)
GPU=35/CPU=34 @ 1440x900 (95% playable now) and
GPU=50/CPU=47 @ 1024x768.

Other tools i used - Memtest86, SuperPI, Prime95, ATITool, RivaTuner, CPU-Z and the now lame Nvidia control panel with ntune performance tabs, No artifacts in Crysis.

Since i am OCing after very long time I wanted to ask you guys where i can squeeze a little more juice. esp in RAM

 

[darklord]

Nice clocks there.3G on X2 is neat but the temps under load look scary.Till you dont care about it, dont clock so much.
Regarding the RAM, Well you are feeding only 1.8V VDIMM so thats not going to give you much of a boost or headroom.
Try increasing the VDIMM to 1.9~2.0V which should give you nice headroom to clock them more.
Most probably the Transcend sticks you have will be either Elpida/Powerchip/Promos/Hynix ICs.
Depending on that whether they will clock good or no can be guessed.
As for memory timings, dont try to play with timings first,try to find how much your memory cab scale.once you know that limit,try to tighten the timings and see how much it scales.It will definitely not scale as it did with loose timings.
safe voltage for the ram would be 2.1v dont go over that.Because only Micron loves volts and there is very less chance your sticks have micron chips on them.

I hope that helped

 

[Rollercoaster]

the problem is that my motherboard has nooptions to set incremental clock speeds or dividers for memory. the only once are DDR200,333 and 400.

I cant set 400 as that would take the clock too high.

 

[kayos]

it will help others a lot.. nice info there...
thnx darklord..

 

[shantanu]

i guess you can tke out another 5%, your OC skillls are pretty good as it looks.. i guess your BIOS (motherboard) supports automatic frequency recall, so no problem...

 

[Rollercoaster]

yes all this functions are there. i can even save my bios into profiles and all that jazz but there are no memory divider options other then the standard ram speeds. ie DDR200 DDR266 DDR333 and DDR400

so i leave it at standard for my ram. i.e DDR667 which is CPU/8 => 3ghz/8 = 375Mhz

----
anyways my aim was to play crysis at High settings @ 1440x900 which is almost achieved now. Hopefully it wont buckle after a few more levels if the complexity increases more.

 

[shantanu]

best of luck man !

 

[darklord]

yes all this functions are there. i can even save my bios into profiles and all that jazz but there are no memory divider options other then the standard ram speeds. ie DDR200 DDR266 DDR333 and DDR400

so i leave it at standard for my ram. i.e DDR667 which is CPU/8 => 3ghz/8 = 375Mhz

----
anyways my aim was to play crysis at High settings @ 1440x900 which is almost achieved now. Hopefully it wont buckle after a few more levels if the complexity increases more.

Those are basically the dividers.I know AM2 dividers are extremely weird.
Here what you can try,
set divider to DDR400 keep CPU stock so basically its using 1:2 divider.
Make VDIMM = 1.9V
Dont touch the timings.I am sure it should boot.
If it does, you do have some good memory out there, which is capable of doing 800.
If its unstable,feed 2.0V not more than that.
Cheers !
Amey

 

[PCWORM]

Hi Darklord....what is that as ur forum avatar???
can u gimme a link 4 d enlarged picture...?? looks lyk uve done sumthin to cool
ur graphics-card or mobo..!!

 

[nvidia]

^^Thats something cool done to the processor.
*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75279
Have a look at the thread

 

[PCWORM]

Kewl!!!!!

 

[Rollercoaster]

Those are basically the dividers.I know AM2 dividers are extremely weird.
Here what you can try,
set divider to DDR400 keep CPU stock so basically its using 1:2 divider.
Make VDIMM = 1.9V
Dont touch the timings.I am sure it should boot.
If it does, you do have some good memory out there, which is capable of doing 800.
If its unstable,feed 2.0V not more than that.
Cheers !
Amey

man if i set DDR400 the resulting ram clock would be 500Mhz ie 1Ghz. it obviously wont run . LOL i think u r confused abt the timings too.

check this out *www.overclock.net/amd-memory/146129-ddr2-ram-dividers.html

 

[Harvik780]

That high OC for your video card is not good.I have heard that most 8800GT(s) overclock to a lesser extent.
I recommend you to test these games.
Call of Duty 4(Hangs During game play when OC is High)
Stalker(BSOD when High OC).
And also try GPU utility called ATI tool which might give you some errors with that OC and will take ur card to its temps limits.
Otherwise i expect XFX 8800GT to be excellent for overclocking.
Download riva tuner and set fan speed to 85%.
Also water cooling is best when overclocking to such extent.
I mean you have taken it to 120 more Mhz which is a lot.

 

[Rollercoaster]

i have run atitool artifact detector for hours and have been playing crysis almost nonstop. temps are real nice. less then 65c. it gets near 70 only during torture tests but those tests are they are not real world. And i did experiment with fan speeds but even at 100% there is only a diff of 2-3 degrees. i would have left it at 100% if i had temp problems.

i think living in dehradun helps it is quite cool here. i am sure it would give probs in summer tho.

anyways i will only keep it OCed for crysis as is the only game for which even an 8800gt is not enough. all other games run well..

 

[hellgate]

i think ur sud do 800MHz @ 4-4-4-12.just try and see.set vdimm to 2.05-2.1v and u sud be able to reach 850MHz @ 4-4-4-12.
at least for me the Transcend 667MHz did 870MHz @ 4-4-4-12 (vdimm - 2.1v).
so just try and see.

 

[Rollercoaster]

but i cant get 870Mhz. that is the whole cry. i cant set any divider other then the standards. i can either set ddr667 => 750Mhz, which is at present or ddr800 =>CPU/6 => 1000Mhz !!!

nothing in between. if i want to change it then i will have to lower my CPU.
like set cpu to 2.6Ghz ie 208x12.5, this will result in DDR at 870Mhz. that will make things pointless as my stock cpu is 2.5Ghz

anyways i will definitely try 4-4-4-12 and vdimm <2.1v

 

[hellgate]

u can try by lowering multiplier and inc the fsb

 

[dOm1naTOr]

In case of AMD, lower multiplier nd higher fsb ll be more stable nd u can attain higher clocks.
I once managed to OC my X2 4200+ 939 from 2.2 to 3Ghz. But the ultiplier was lowered to 10x from 11x and increased the fsb, nd thanks to my transcent DDR400. It easily manages to get past 485Mhz with 2.5-3-3-5 @1T, nd i got more than 8300MBps in sisoft sandra nd everest with 40ns latency.
But the temps of my room at noon is very high and even i feel hard to breath. So CPU touched 71c, but was stable.

And with ma new system, my transcent 667 was able to get to 750+- Mhz @ 5-5-5-15 @1t. It can go beyond 800Mhz but only @ 2t.
But 667@ 1T was better than 800@ 2T. So u just have to see if its at 2T command, ie CR1.
Also i pumped 2.0v to dimm . But performance rise was negligible[coz it has only onbord X1250 gfx.] I was trying to run Crysis in 800*600 @ low smoothly, nd it did work.

 

[darklord]

@ Rollercoaster,
Yeah man, that AM2 multiplier,divider thing really annoys me.Maybe i missed something.
I will check it up on my M2N32 and get back to you. Long time since i played with AMD.
Need to do a quick refresh

 

[Rollercoaster]

aah well. did a whole lot of experimenting with my ram and was really really freaked out by a few things.

Here are the details-

Ram - Transcend DDR2 667Mhz 5-5-5-15-2T 1GBx2 in dual channel.
Benchmark - SisSandra lite 2008.1.13.12 Memory Bandwidth test

Benchmarks =>
*CPU on stock speeds
1. 667-5-5-5-15-2T-1.8v => 6921 Mbps
2. 667-5-5-5-15-1T-1.8v => 7083 Mbps (@dOm1naTOr's 1T/2T theory didnt work)
3. 667-4-4-4-12-2T-1.8v => 7154 Mbps (i was starting to believe that tight timings are not that much of an advantage)
4. 667-4-4-4-12-1T-1.8v => 7326 Mbps

*CPU OC to 240x12.5 = 3Ghz (CPU/8 for DDR667 and CPU/7 for DDR800)
5. 667-5-5-5-15-2T-1.8v => 8293 Mbps (actual ram clock 750Mhz)
6. 800-5-5-5-15-2T-1.9v => 9200 Mbps (actual ram clock 857Mhz) Winner
7. 800-4-5-4-12-2T-2.0v => 9293 Mbps (actual ram clock 857Mhz)

So here it is at last. The real thing that matters in performance is the Megahertz not the timings for ram overclocking.

Wierd thing 1 -> on normal mobo and info from the web DDR800 should be CPU/6 but in my mobo selecting DDR800 sets divider CPU/7

Wierd thing 2 -> When i ran the 6,7,8 benchmarks above. i also played with the cpu clock via the nvidia control panel to check the affect. The wierd thing is that the result of sissandra bandwidth test did not change even when i returned my cpu's clock back to normal. Very wierd. I set the CPU clock back to 200x12.5 from Nvidia CP and it was confirmed by CPU-Z as well as AMD clock utility.

Normally this should mean that the RAM clocks would also go down based on the FSB. And CPU-Z also confirmed that the ram clock went down to DDR667 standard. But the sissandra benchmark showed the same bandwidth. no effect of cpu speed!!!

I also tried it the other way around. started the system with standard clocks for everything and the bandwidth was same as 1 above. But when i OCed the cpu from the Nvidiacontrolpanel , and the clocks changed for ram to in CPUZ, the benchmark still showed results for standard clocks.