PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

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jedihobbit
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PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by jedihobbit »

To the point of ruining domestic tranquility, I bit on a promo from the 'egg's cyber Monday. Picked up a Biostar TA790GXE uATX and a "AMD Phenom II X4 945 Deneb 3.0GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor".

Anyone done any playing with one of those?
Last edited by jedihobbit on Thu Dec 31, 2009 2:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
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Re: PII X4 945.......

Post by mx6er2587 »

I'm running a slightly slower slightly older PII 925 which is 2.8ghz @125watts instead of 95. Mine overclocks very well. Its running stale at 3.6ghz with only the smallest bump to voltage and very little tweaking. I found the key to overclocking mine was to make sure the hypertransport isn't overclocked by much if any by lowering the HT multiplier. But all I did was drop the ht multiplier and determine the right multiplier to get my memory running at the correct frequency. I then upped the voltage until the computer was completely stable. (I only needed to go +10mv)

I found that my aftermarket cooler with low cfm slim fan (all I can fit in my tiny case) limited my overclocks thermally. The chip had a lot more room to push it but I couldn't keep it cool enough in my rig. All I wanted was 3.5 though so I didn't try to hard to push it any further.

With your 95w processor it should run much cooler and you should have tons of headroom for overclocking. Even at stock clocks though these processors are much faster then most people need. I'm sure you'll be happy with it
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Re: PII X4 945.......

Post by shamrok3 »

I have a PII 940. I have been running at 3.5GHz quite comfortably on stock voltage and stock cooling, although installing a big GPU didn't help with temperature. No particular advice on my part in any case.
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Re: PII X4 945.......

Post by ratNukit »

I've got the 940 BE as well, which is the AM2+ counterpart to the PII X4 945, bought it the first week it was released. I got a 790GX chipset board as well, but from Asrock.
I've got that rig for gaming only and at resolutions of 1920*1080 there is no CPU limitation in any game except for HalfLife2 as far as I noticed, it definetly is enough for gaming, but you need fast memory, after I exchanged my 800Mhz memory for 1100Mhz memory GTA IV ran alot smoother at about 8 frames per second more.

I'm quite happy with this processor up til now :)
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Re: PII X4 945.......

Post by jedihobbit »

Thought I’d bring everyone somewhat up to date on this. While fun to play with I have had to get used to doing it the “old way” as I’ve been spoiled by my last four cpus as they were BEs.

Initially had major issues with the mobo bios in the fact none of the voltage settings would “stick” and ended up doing the initial overclocking using Biostars overclocking utility. Kinda sorta reminds me of ClkGen somewhat.

What you end up doing is select the settings you want to try and then hit the “test” button. The utility runs a little stress test and if it determines nothing is wrong it will apply it to the system. The test can be seen in the upper left of this screen shot.

Image

This preset would be equal to a “boot up”. Under my initial playing ……..

Did manage a 4M run of SPi at Image

And then the equivalent of a boot at Image

Then with fingers crossed and the hope it wasn’t suicide I managed to pump this one out…

This was my last S & Gs "bootable" Image

And a screenie…..

Image

THEN I FIGURED OUT THE BIOS ISSUE…..flash the latest!

After the flash I was able to play with the real stuff. Still need to get my notes together for a formal oc’ing thread, but until then I’ll leave you with a screenie of my best 8M run of SPi…….

Image

Need to go back and play some more as time allows but this is what Kermit v3.0 is running. My current "stable" setting.......

HT & NB Freq @ 1600
Mem set at 800-5-5-5-18-24-2T
15 x 244 = 3.66GHz
vcore @ 1.44v / vdmm @ 2.1v


With the ambient room temp at 19-20C, CPU max temp was 52C will doing a prime run I stopped it after 14 hours >>>

Image

May need to do some cropping or resizing as this is off a 24”.
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
Oz1a v2.0 >> XFX MDA72P7509 750a, PI X2 8870BE @ 3.00GHZ(air), 2 x XFX GTS250, WD 250GB, F2-8500CL5D-2GBPK, Tt TR2 600W, XP Pro SP3
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by shamrok3 »

Nice. Is this with stock cooling? When you say it didn't 'stick' do you mean that you had to reapply the OC every time you boot? If you do, I seem to have the same problem. Any solution to this?
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Rig: Intel 3930K, Noctua U12P-SE2 , ASUS P9X79, 16GB RAM, 60GB OCZ Vertex 3, 2x3TB Seagate (RAID 0), 1TB Samsung F3, EVGA GTX760, CM 650 Watt PSU
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by jedihobbit »

shamrok3 wrote:Nice. Is this with stock cooling? When you say it didn't 'stick' do you mean that you had to reapply the OC every time you boot? If you do, I seem to have the same problem. Any solution to this?
As far as the "stick" thing....what would happen is I would set a new value in the bios to increase vcore, vdimm, HT, or what ever. After I would save and close I would go into windows and find out that everything was "stock" and not the changed value. Biostar had one newer bios so flashed that and it seems to have fixed that issue.

I am not using a stock cooler as I'm a Zalman fanboy and use their HSFs in my mATX builds. Currently I'm using a CNPS8700-NT that I've swapped the blue led fan for a green one from a 9500 or 9700 unit.

Image

BEFORE:

Image

AFTER:

Image

BTW this is way out of date and need to get my "stuff" together and see if I've got some screenies of the "useless" overclocks as I'm now running it at 3.6GHz.
This is Kermit v3.0 and I'll add my worklog over in modding when I get that together. I tend to ramble and use a lot of picture, also I need to actually use stuff from three logs the reason behind v3.0! :lol:
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
Oz1a v2.0 >> XFX MDA72P7509 750a, PI X2 8870BE @ 3.00GHZ(air), 2 x XFX GTS250, WD 250GB, F2-8500CL5D-2GBPK, Tt TR2 600W, XP Pro SP3
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by shamrok3 »

Hokay, so you Flashed the BIOS and it worked? I will try that myself. You're saying you did all the clocks through the BIOS rather than AMD Overdrive or such?
Multiple Exclamation marks - The first sign of an unsound mind.

Rig: Intel 3930K, Noctua U12P-SE2 , ASUS P9X79, 16GB RAM, 60GB OCZ Vertex 3, 2x3TB Seagate (RAID 0), 1TB Samsung F3, EVGA GTX760, CM 650 Watt PSU
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by jedihobbit »

shamrok3 wrote:Hokay, so you Flashed the BIOS and it worked? I will try that myself. You're saying you did all the clocks through the BIOS rather than AMD Overdrive or such?
While it takes more time I like doing most through the bios. Early on when I had the voltage issues I used Biostar's utility through XP. When I had nvidia chipsets I used ClkGen to initially test, never have used AMD's Overdrive.

I'm NOT knocking the use of the utilities BTW, as they are a quick and easy way to get the idea of what the system limits are before doing the bios part. Now that I think about it I may look into using Overdrive next time as the major problem with doing all of the testing through bios is the ability to corrupt the chip. ](*,)
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
Oz1a v2.0 >> XFX MDA72P7509 750a, PI X2 8870BE @ 3.00GHZ(air), 2 x XFX GTS250, WD 250GB, F2-8500CL5D-2GBPK, Tt TR2 600W, XP Pro SP3
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by jedihobbit »

Okay as promised some screenies from the misc testing I've done...... :lol:

12/20/09 Into The New Year!!

Have had to drop things down a bit, even though I had a 14 hour prime run at 3.66GHz. It seems that when I run Prime and GPU folding to emulate "total utility" it would not survive anything beyond an hour or less. Temps didn't seem to be the issue but guess if the GPU needed to access the proc under certain conditions it'd bork.

However I happy that I was able to do it at 3.6GHz and only need 1.44v to do it.

HT & NB Freq @ 1600 (1920 oc'ed)
Mem set at 800-5-5-5-18-24-2T (960 oc'ed)
15 x 240 = 3.60GHz
vcore @ 1.44v / vdmm @ 2.1v

Before this however my uncontrollable shotgun testing continued and didn’t have the foggiest to the when. While I was able to get some interesting values at 1.5+v vcore, my eventual goal was the highest with 1.44v. So here are some of the results of the oc’ing testing (used a mixed bag of SPi & HPi runs for “load”).…………

From the most ridiculous (8M run of SPi)……..

HT & NB Freq @ 1600 (2341 oc'ed)
Mem set at 800-5-5-5-18-24-2T (1040 oc'ed)
15 x 260 = 3.90GHz
vcore @ 1.536v / vdmm @ 2.1v
(Forgot to note my CPU-NB Over voltage [+0.100?] or HT Over Voltage [1.40?])

Image
To the more “acceptable”……..

8M Run of HPi
HT & NB Freq @ 1600 (2032 oc'ed)
Mem set at 800-5-5-5-18-24-2T (1016 oc'ed)
15 x 254 = 3.81GHz
vcore @ 1.488v / vdmm @ 2.1v
(Again forgot to note my CPU-NB & HT Over Voltage)

Image

8M Run of SPi
HT & NB Freq @ 1600 (2040 oc'ed)
Mem set at 800-5-5-5-18-24-2T (1020 oc'ed)
15 x 255 = 3.827GHz
vcore @ 1.44v / vdmm @ 2.1v
(Again forgot to note my CPU-NB & HT Over Voltage)

Image

16M Run of HPi
HT & NB Freq @ 1600 (1984 oc'ed)
Mem set at 800-5-5-5-18-24-2T (992 oc'ed)
15 x 248 = 3.72GHz
vcore @ 1.44v / vdmm @ 2.1v
(Again forgot to note my CPU-NB & HT Over Voltage)

Image

However don’t think I’m “totally” finished yet………
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
Oz1a v2.0 >> XFX MDA72P7509 750a, PI X2 8870BE @ 3.00GHZ(air), 2 x XFX GTS250, WD 250GB, F2-8500CL5D-2GBPK, Tt TR2 600W, XP Pro SP3
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by mx6er2587 »

so what frequency are you looking at for everyday use? 3.6 or higher than that?
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by jedihobbit »

mx6er2587 wrote:so what frequency are you looking at for everyday use? 3.6 or higher than that?
Actually the 3.6 is going to be it as I tried some other settings this morning and fell on my face. :( I tend to fall pray to the guys that state they managed 5GHz on half volts and popcorn and try to see if I can do it. Think I've had my fill on trying the impossible with this system and on to other stuff. :-k
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
Oz1a v2.0 >> XFX MDA72P7509 750a, PI X2 8870BE @ 3.00GHZ(air), 2 x XFX GTS250, WD 250GB, F2-8500CL5D-2GBPK, Tt TR2 600W, XP Pro SP3
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by mx6er2587 »

yeah a lot of it is luck of the draw. It seems like most of these chips will run up to 3.6ish without too much effort but once your into the 3.8-4.0 territory your throwing a lot of voltage at them and more then I'm comfortable with in my tiny case. As I mentioned mine is running at 3.5 for a few months now rock solid and its plenty fast.
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by jedihobbit »

mx6er2587, you mention a small case........my setup is in an Ultra MX6 (just need to update the sig :( ), what is yours? :)
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
Oz1a v2.0 >> XFX MDA72P7509 750a, PI X2 8870BE @ 3.00GHZ(air), 2 x XFX GTS250, WD 250GB, F2-8500CL5D-2GBPK, Tt TR2 600W, XP Pro SP3
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by mx6er2587 »

I have the original version of that case straight from Chenming, the maker of the chassis before they sold the design to a hundred different companies. Its not nearly as nice looking as your ultra but they're just about identical internally.
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Re: PII X4 945 - Started OC'ing It!

Post by jedihobbit »

mx6er2587 wrote:I have the original version of that case straight from Chenming, the maker of the chassis before they sold the design to a hundred different companies. Its not nearly as nice looking as your ultra but they're just about identical internally.
My contension has always been that most cases are made by the same Asian Knomes deep in some cave on the otherside of the Pacific!! :lol:
DreamCatcher v4.0 DOA >> SG01 Evo, TA790GXE, PII X4 945 (AQ H2O Cooled), BFG GTX280 H2OC, Seagate 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB, 2 x WD5000KSs, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF, MODU82+ EMD525AWT, XP Home SP2
Kermit v4.0 VIRUSed >> Ultra MX6, 785GM-E65, PII X4 955 @ 3.70GHZ(air), XFX GTX285, Raptor X, F3-12800CL7D-2GBPI, OCZ700MXSP ModXStream Pro, XP Home SP2
Oz1a v2.0 >> XFX MDA72P7509 750a, PI X2 8870BE @ 3.00GHZ(air), 2 x XFX GTS250, WD 250GB, F2-8500CL5D-2GBPK, Tt TR2 600W, XP Pro SP3
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