A8N-E will not boot over 245Mhz?

[cryogenic666]

No matter what I do, my A8N-E will not boot at FSB's over 245. I set the CPU multiplier to 4x to test to see what the max FSB the board will boot at is and the highest I can go is 245Mhz. I've tried setting the HT bus to 4x as well (keeping it under 1000) and still won't work. PCI-E is set at 100Mhz and PCI is set at 33Mhz. Ram is on an 83% divider, which puts it at 207.5 (it's fine up until about 212Mhz, so that shouldn't be the problem). I've even tried loosening the timings on the RAM and no go. It basically gets to the point where it detects IDE devices, finishes that and then never gets any farther. Anyone have any suggestions I can try? My specs are in my sig, but for those who don't feel like looking, here goes:

Asus A8N-E rev 2.0 (1010 Bios)
3200+ Venice core (wk 0505)
Rosewill 6600GT PCI-E
Tekram U2W SCSI card
ATI TV Wonder
WD800JB 80GB hard drive
WD1200JB 120GB hard drive
Seagate X15-36LP 18GB 15k rpm SCSI drive (boot drive)
Coolermaster RealPower 450W power supply
NEC ND3540A DVD-RW
LG DVD/CD-RW combo

 

[Unkno]

the exact same thing happened to me, mine couldn't boot over 230Mhz....try resetting your CMOS

 

[cryogenic666]

Yep... already tried that after it refused to boot... didn't help any at all.

 

[Unkno]

did you enable floppy in the bios.

 

[WobbleWobble]

There was a problem with the HTT sticking. You would set it but it still would be locked at 5x.

Try flashing your BIOS (in DOS, not in Windows), load Setup defaults, save, reboot then try overclocking. That should unstick it.

 

[cryogenic666]

Floppy is enabled in the BIOS, however I have no way of flashing the BIOS from DOS because I don't own a floppy drive. It also appears the the HTT isn't locked @ 5x because when I load the Asus AiBooster app, it says the HTT is @ 981.64Mhz. Sandra also reports the same. Sounds like I'm stuck with a board that won't boot over 245 Perhaps trying a different BIOS version might help?

 

[WobbleWobble]

Then try BIOS 1001

 

[Unkno]

well, i've never gotten the HTT stuck but if BIOS 1001 doesn't work, try 1008, 1008 is pretty stable....i myself have never tried this but would setting the HTT to auto then overclocking work?

 

[Xenofin]

I have this board with AMD64 X2 3800+ and I'm running with settings: 247 MHz FSB, multi 10, HTT 4, RAM 333 MHZ, Vcore 1.4725V, Vmem 2.7V (Twinmos DDR3200, 2.5-3-3-8) . It is "mostly" stable but cannot stand hours of Prime (core 0 is the weak link). Tried 250 MHz but core 0 is stable only for about 10 min. Bios v.1010. CPU cooler Zalman 7700Cu. 240 MHz FSB is rock solid though with Vcore 1.45V.

 

[Hauk]

Did you try loosest RAM timings possible? CAS 3, 4-4-10 and tighten from there?

 

[o1die]

Remove the motherboard battery for about 1 minute. If that doesn't work, asus has special instructions for flashing the bios using the motherboard cd with the drivers. It's not too difficult, but I've never tried it. It's been described in previous posts.

 

[cryogenic666]

the RAM isn't the problem... I even set the RAM @ 100Mhz and CPU multi @ 5x to find out the board's max overclock, thus taking the rest of the components out of the equation... As such, it'll boot fine @ 245 and won't boot at all at 250. As far as the HTT goes, I've tried both auto (works fine but still won't boot over 245) and 4x (shows same HTT speed in windows as when it's on auto).

 

[Unkno]

i'm pretty sure it's not the motherboard that you can't get over 245FSB, must be doing something wrong....try flashing to older bios version, if that still doesn't work....not sure if you can but see if there's an overclocking program that you can use to set the HTT to 3X.


The problem your having is that it won't go to 3X (what about 2X) HTT, am i right?

 

[cryogenic666]

wrong... it'll go to 3x just fine and STILL won't boot at over 245... the only thing I haven't tried is an older BIOS rev, which I'll do when I get home from work in the morning. The HTT setting works perfectly fine without issue and the AUTO setting works great as well. Basically when I try to go over 245FSB, it refuses to boot right after detecting all the IDE drives. It just sits there and never gets past that point.

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

The A8N-Series has a problem going over 245MHz if the command rate is set to 1T. If you drop it to 2T (Advanced --> CPU config --> DRAM Config), you'll be able to go higher. Performance hit may not be worth it though.

 

[cryogenic666]

I was under the impression that the 2T performance hit was on the order of 3-6% depending on application.... am I wrong? Or is the performance GAIN from the higher HT setting less than the 6% performance loss you get from going to 2T?

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

Again, it depends upon how far you can push it.

 

[Unkno]

Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
The A8N-Series has a problem going over 245MHz if the command rate is set to 1T. If you drop it to 2T (Advanced --> CPU config --> DRAM Config), you'll be able to go higher. Performance hit may not be worth it though.

strange, i don't have that problem with the a8n-e...

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

Originally posted by: Unkno

Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
The A8N-Series has a problem going over 245MHz if the command rate is set to 1T. If you drop it to 2T (Advanced --> CPU config --> DRAM Config), you'll be able to go higher. Performance hit may not be worth it though.

strange, i don't have that problem with the a8n-e...

I know the regular A8N and the A8N-SLI Deluxe had the problem. It was supposedly resolved with the Premium, but from what I've read over on XS, 25-50% of the Premium boards also have difficulty with HTTs over 250 and 1T command rates. I just assumed the A8N-E was also affected.

 

[cryogenic666]

I don't know that going over 250Mhz is going to do me a whole lot of good since my RAM doesn't seem to want to go over 210Mhz anyway... on top of that, I have to run 1.525vcore just to get it stable @ 245x10. I don't think I have much headroom left as it stands.

 

[srsanka]

Hi cryogenic666!

Congratulations for having an A8N-E. In the beginning I was not able to overclock above 220 Mhz FSB. But now I've gone till 260 Mhz * 10 = 2.6G. What I've done?=

1. Reduce RAM freq to 333 or 266 or 166, as u need.
2. Reduce HTT multiplier to 4 or 3, so that HTT * FSB <= 1000
3. Reduce Vcore to as low as possible, if ur CPU allows. With my 64-3200 [e3] I dropped my voltage from 1.5 [default] to 1.285 V. It runs cool at 42-degrees [no load], 53[full load, continuos]
4. Set RAM timing to 1T from 2T.
5. If ur RAM's hi qual then go for 2.5-3-3-6 timings to start with then test with 2-2-2-6.

Good-luck

 

[cryogenic666]

Well aboiut the only thing there I haven't tried is going to 2T instead of 1T ram timings. It's been perfectly stable @ 245x10 and I haven't really had much of a need for anything over that so I've not bothered tweaking it anymore. I might play with it some this weekend but I'm not so sure I want to putz with it since it's not broken at the moment. Thanks for the tips, though.