Who has a GA-P35-DS3L? Best Bios Settings?

[Kaos Kid]

I've been playing around with one of these for the last few days. I have a newer Gigabyte board, but it doesn't have as many bios tweaks available. Yesterday I put a C2Q Q9450 in it and have been running Prime95 for 12 hours on the small POS air cooled hs/f (you know, circular hs and cheapie plastic pin mounting system *bleh*). So far so good. What I'd like to know is what bios settings are y'all using for the best performance. With the settings I enabled it runs fairly cool at 2GHz idle, and tolerable at 3.264 Ghz under load with the Extreme Performance setting. I can't find any settings for playing with memory timings, only lets me set a divider and then automatically adjusts the timings based on clock speed. Thats OK I guess but it doesn't let me use the Extreme profiles built into my OCZ Reaper memory, so it looks like I have to increase performance through other means. Any suggestions from current owners about their own successes using various bios settings in this board to overclock? Thanks!

[Major_A]

You have to press Alt+F2 in the BIOS or something like that to get the memory timings to show up. And unfortunately you have to do it every time. I forget the combo but you can Google it fairly easily.

As for overclocking that board it isn't the most stable board out there. I'm sitting at 3GHz with the E5200 in the board. I haven't pushed it much but I know the E5200 will do 4GHz on my GA-EP45-UD3P without much effort (then again I was running it in a WC loop instead of a stock HSF). I did find this about the board.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/24567 ... 8#t1742852
Sorry it's Toms but it is specific to your board.

One important thing. DO NOT USE EASYTUNE. The software is garbage and I've never had one bit of success with it. To put the icing on the cake if you do hit the Turbo (or Extreme, whatever it's called) and it works it trashes your voltages and memory timings. This is hypothetical so don't take it as pure fact. Let's say you manually overclock your CPU to 3.5GHz and you find it requires and additional 0.5V to run stable then Gigabyte's EasyTune may give the CPU 1.0V volts. It's adding heat that doesn't need to be there. I've also seen where EasyTune will turn your memory timings to something ridiculous to assume stability. Again let's go to 3.5GHz. Well in the BIOS you can manually adjust the memory divider. EasyTune will try to clock it from where the memory is at when you hit the button. But again let's assume the end result is DDR2 at 800MHz. In the BIOS you may have the timings at 6-6-6-12. EasyTune will likely do something like 8-8-8-20 so it will remain stable. Any of that make sense? If not let me know and I'll try to reword it.

[Kaos Kid]

I saw that you had one of these boards, I thought perhaps you had taken it for an autobahn run, lol. I have the v2, don't know if it is improved over v1 or not.

When I tried manual overclocking in the bios it seems like temps were much higher even with only 366fsb, there was no way to manually lower voltages, only raise them with the overvoltage controls. At least with the bios enthusiast settings combined with the energy saving settings I have been able to use this vanilla hs/f and it states that it is a 23>25% OC going at 408fsb 5-5-5-18 CR2 for 3.264Ghz. I'll be happy with that until or unless I luck into a better hs/f.

I don't use easy tune in the one I'm on now, I didn't like it either. I use PhenomMsrTweaker on my AMDs it does what I require. Thanks for the tip on the timings, I'll try that and see. Turns out the special timings menu is F1 at the main bios screen, then go into MIT, if you go into MIT first you don't have it. I changed all the Performance settings back to default so I could play with the memory first. Currently the OCZ DDR2-800 reapers are at 4-4-4-15 CR2 while at stock 333fsb x 8 multiplier in Prime95. I'm going to run Prime95 blend LORT for a few hours to see how well that holds that timing. Then I'll see how much I can run up the clock speed until I need to loosen timings.

This is some screenshots of Core32 when I had all the other enthusiast settings selected in the bios, and the memory on auto. Even at the memory OC of 979 it was using the 5-5-5-18 CR2 timings.




Thanks for the link, I'll refer to that as I play. All I really want to do is see what it is capable of on this lousy air-cooler, I doubt I'll upgrade the cooler unless I come across something priced to good to pass up.

What I'd really like to do is trade it for an mATX board that will run the Q9450 but I haven't had any bites on my ad on CL. I've had my eyes open for one I wanted for awhile but it is still priced to much for an older DDR2 board. I doubt if someone will trade a DDR3 board for this lol. Oh well, it fits in an old Sonata1 case I have so I can test it. I'd rather be able to put the quad in a smaller case and only do a mild OC.

Thanks for the input as always, and if anyone else has this board and wants to share, go right ahead I'm listening.

[Major_A]

The Corsair HSF units are better than stock and are constantly on sale, even at Best Buy.
Corsair A Series HSF
http://www.buy.com/prod/corsair-air-a50 ... 22103.html
http://www.buy.com/prod/corsair-air-a70 ... 22102.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835181012
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835181011

[Kaos Kid]

OK, taking it off of auto settings I was able to hit 420>425fsb on my Q9450, running OCZ Reapers DDR2-800 (with 2.4 divider) but I believe anything much higher on the fsb is unstable (make it 1680>1700fsb on a 1333 value-rated board isn't too bad I guess) and the reapers seem OK up to about DDR2-1000. There are reports that DDR2-1066 RAM causes problems, so maybe it isn't just native DDR2-1066 RAM but perhaps anything clocked over about DDR2-1020. This is with stock volts and stock HS/F. I also ran ram at lowest divider (2.0) which dropped it down to 860 or so and that didn't get me much more fsb out of the cpu so I think I'm hitting a fsb wall on the cpu itself (only 8x multiplier). I did put a small fan (I think it may have been from an old Skt 370 heatsink, lol.) on the northbridge and it did drop the system temp down a degree. Since the bios' own OC settings get it to 3.264GHz from 2.66Ghz (600Mhz, around 23-25% OC) and the RAM plays nice at DDR2-987 and Prime95 stable that's where it will stay for now. What I did like about the motherboards' built-in OC settings is that it would idle at 2Ghz for cooling and energy savings but then jump up to 3.264 effortlessly when called upon to do so. I am going to start another thread in the cpu section to see how high others have gotten the Q9450 to see if it is worth spending the bucks on a better HS/F and/or better board (P45 chipset?) since it is already old tech.