Originally posted by: clockhouse
Earlier in the year I purchased an Asrock 4coreDual-Vsta mobo, two weeks ago I added an E4300 cpu, Crucial 2gb DDR2 PC2-5300 CL=5 unbuffered non-ecc DDR2 - 667 1.8v, Artic freezer 7pro. My aim was a modest overclock to around the 2.4 or 2.5 which I thought would be easily achieved. I have the latest bios update 1.70 set to its optimum settings, I have steadily increased the cpu frequency in steps of 10 from 200 to 210 and then 220 all appeared steady but when I went for 230 it booted up into windows xp pro but I have skype and msn messenger to load automatically and two windows came up to say there had been a critical error and in fact i couldnt load either. Also avast came up and said it needed to reboot, I rebooted pc three times each time the same problems coming up. I dropped the frequency back to 220 and pc boots up fine, compared to many this is really low oc and I am more than a little disappointed. I have read all the recommended guides listed in the forum but I was wondering or hoping some one could suggest any ideas. Thank you.
My rig is similar to yours except I'm running with 2 x 1GB DDR2-667 sticks of Kingston ValueRam. Video is AGP with an ATI X800XL. I've managed to run rock solid at 2,619 MHz (9x291). To get there I set BIOS :
- FSB to 291
- Overclock mode to CPU,PCIE Async.
- Memory frequency to DDRII 533
- Memory flexibility option to DISABLE
With these settings I end up with an effective memory speed of DDR2-582, running 1:1 with the FSB. I belive the AGP bus ends up at 73 or 74MHz which is all my ATI card can handle (default is supposed to be 66Mhz).
This configuration gives a Vista Windows Experience Index of 5.5 for both the CPU an the Memory.
Timing specs on the ValueRam are 5-5-5-15 at 667 and 4-4-4-12 at 533. I found a significant performance increase over CL5 when set to 4-4-4-12 at 582. Increased the WEI memory score from 5.3 to 5.5.
Took me a couple days of experimenting to get from 2.40 to 2.62. Probably could go higher but I haven't found how yet. I don't see how anyone is getting to 300 or 315 without mods. The few reports I've seen at these levels never give the details. I'm considering the volt mod to 1.4v but I'm guessing this may not do anything for this rig as the AGP bus is most likely my limit. Memory is not holding me back as it is actually underclocked at the moment.