*** MSI P6N SLI Platinum OVERCLOCK 650i ***

[iluv2fly]

Sli-Platinum Bios V1.3 is out.

 

[Assimilator1]

Thanks for the info ,any improvements in overclocking??

 

[imported_JaaP]

Hello guys

Im new to this forum so hello to all!

I have the following system:
Antec Performance One P180 with 4 fans (nice flow )
E6300
P6N SLI Platinum
2 gb. OCZ platinum xtc. rev.2
RAID0 setup with 2 WDcaviar SATAII
ASUS 2900XT

I have my E6300 clocked at 3ghz with the following settings:

fsb clock:1718
memory 860mhz
cpu voltage: .250
mem voltage auto
NBv: 1.45
SBv: standard
fsb vtt v:0%

I used to have the tiny NBfan which comes with the board installed but since i have installed a Scythe Infinity i had to remove it or else the Infinity wouldnt fit....
My question is: Is it safe to put your NB at 1.45V without the fan? I can touch the coppersink that is ontop of it but not to long becouse it gets very hot :S

Thanks in advance!!

 

[Assimilator1]

Welcome to AT

I would say that's a bad idea if its not getting any direct airflow ,if you read back through my posts in this thread (I think it's this one anyway!) you'll see I used a laser themometer to read NB temps ,its not good without a fan ,& that was with a lower FSB & voltages than yours!.

You need to somehow rig up a fan to blow air over it ,I suspended a 70mm AMD fan some way over it using cable ties ,it ain't pretty but it works
Mind you I still wasn't able to get over 1600MHz stably ,your mbrd has done nicely! (I tried 1.45 NBv btw ,no joy)

 

[imported_JaaP]

Ok THX

I clocked my NB back to 1.4 to find that it runs great with that setting too :S Thought that didnt work, must have mistaken myself.....

But still the NB is very hot, i can touch it for a couple of seconds then it gets to hot.....Also, when i clock my board back to normal it feels the same :S Is this normal? I really don't have any clue if your NB can get this hot or not...cant find anything about it on the net

 

[Assimilator1]

I've no idea what a safe limit is but if it's virtually burning hot (as mine was without the fan) then it is probably too hot ,stick a fan on it!
And like I said ,if you read my earlier posts you'll see my before & after NB temps.

I'm going to try again to get 1625FSB stable with raised RAM & NB voltages.

 

[imported_JaaP]

I have replaced my Infinity so that the NB fan go's back on again....it does make one hell of a noise!!

Is there anyone who has the newest bios in use? I tried it but it wouldnt accept my overclock :S .......

 

[iluv2fly]

I use Bios version 1.3. for my Platinum it works great. Double check you settings again using the guide on the first page.

Regarding you NB fan. You could use a fan mate to slow it down.

 

[Xcom1Cheetah]

actually i m about to buy this board for my Q6600, so I just want to ask from all of you who own this board...

1) Does it have any stability issues.?
2) What abt the 4Gig memory slow down issue... actually i have got 2 Gig and i m going to get 2 Gig more for the system from the day one.. so is this issue really got fixed.?
3) How about Vista Support for the onboard addins.?
4) Is the onboard sound reasonable enough or should i order the extra sound card.? i m not very much into sound, usually use headset while playing games... but only worry for my is the extra cpu cycle the onboard sound eats
5) How much slow down is it there going from 16x to 8x on SLI.. i want to run SLI with 7900GS..?

Hopefully will be a part of your community pretty soon.. Other option is gigabyte but i m learning into this one for having better cooling and heat pipes

 

[Assimilator1]

1. Approaching the 400MHz FSB area yes ,below 370MHz no probs,but that's with dual core ,with a quad it might be lower ,I know Anandtechs review covered quad core o/cing ,check that out.

2. No idea ,wasn't aware of that!
3. Pass ,I've got XP
4. Seem's fine to me on my Cambridge 3 speaker setup.You're worried about CPU cycles on a quad core??
5. At insanley high resolutions (2500x2000 ish,I can't remember exactly) thier's about a 5% drop off with 8800 GTXs SLIed ,below 1900x???? it has no significant impact ,again AT covered this in a review ,can't remember which though ,sorry

 

[Xcom1Cheetah]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
1. Approaching the 400MHz FSB area yes ,below 370MHz no probs,but that's with dual core ,with a quad it might be lower ,I know Anandtechs review covered quad core o/cing ,check that out.

2. No idea ,wasn't aware of that!
3. Pass ,I've got XP
4. Seem's fine to me on my Cambridge 3 speaker setup.You're worried about CPU cycles on a quad core??
5. At insanley high resolutions (2500x2000 ish,I can't remember exactly) thier's about a 5% drop off with 8800 GTXs SLIed ,below 1900x???? it has no significant impact ,again AT covered this in a review ,can't remember which though ,sorry

If you r given a choice to buy a new 650i chipset motherboard.. which one will you go with.? Same or some other.?

 

[Assimilator1]

Hmm tricky, I was thinking the other day I wanted a mbrd which could do higher FSB speeds ,maybe the Asus 650 ,but I had specific reasons for not buying that at the time (can't remember what without re-reading the review).
But I was also contemplating buying a 975 mbrd & buying a PCI IDE card for my DVD writer ,which ironically was what I was going to do in the 1st place.(I don't need the SLI part of the 650s)

The 650 chipset seemed to be the all round answer to my problems ,but finding the right combination of overclockability,PCI slots & general layout was trickier than I expected ,but anyway the P6N seems a decent enough mbrd ,if only I could overclock it another 20-30MHz I'd be perfectly happy with it ........except the annoyingly overbright LEDs on it

Oh 1 oddity I found with this mbrd ,if you really overdo the overclocking it seems to 'lose' the boot drive (IDE in my case) saying something like 'system boot disk error' ,its an easy fix though turn it off & back on again & its ok!

If I wasn't limited by having 3 IDE devices (or I bought a IDE PCI card) & I didn't care for SLI I'd go for a 975 chipset mbrd next time,one of the monster overclockers:evil:

 

[imported_JaaP]

I would buy the P6N if i had the chance to choose a 650i mobo again. I have got it running at 430FSB stable and i think the heatpipe structure is great. Also the fan for the NB which comes with the board is nice (although it does make a lot of noise) A friend of mine has the Asus P5N-E but he has stability problems with it...i'm happy with that couse i was i doubt of buying this board or the P5N-E lol

 

[Assimilator1]

What settings did you use to get 430MHz?

<---- is jealous

 

[Xcom1Cheetah]

Does MSI platinum edition board uses 8 phase voltage regulation or 4 phase voltage regulations.?

 

[Assimilator1]

I don't know ,doesn't Anandtechs review say?
ATs P6N review

 

[imported_JaaP]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
What settings did you use to get 430MHz?

<---- is jealous

I used the following settings:
fsb clock:1718
memory 860mhz
cpu voltage: .250
mem voltage auto
NBv: 1.40
SBv: standard
fsb vtt v:0%

Im planning on getting a Q6600 and clock that mother to 3 or perhaps 3.2 Ghz...anyone experience with a quad on a P6N?

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: iluv2fly
Sli-Platinum Bios V1.3 is out.

Thought I posted on this already, but updating my BIOS from 1.0 to 1.3 was required before I could get 4GB (4x1) to run stably with Vista 64. Still tweaking a bit to get stable OCs, right now if I push to 3.0-3.1GHz I start getting Page Fault BSODs. Also having some crackling problems with my X-Fi that weren't existent before (seems to be a problem with all Nvidia chipsets and their handling of the PCI bus). Overall not too happy with the 650i chipset, I'd probably look at something else at this point (P35 or even 965/975).

 

[Assimilator1]

Does v1.3 give you higher overclocks?

Don't tell me Nvidia chipsets are having problems again with sound!:frown: ,I had that before with my old Nfrc2 mbrd.

Jaap
Looks like you just have a better mbrd than me ,I have those same settings (except cpu vcore is just +.0125v) & I can't get it stable over 1625FSB ,higher vcore doesn't help btw.
Or maybe the MSI NB fan cools better than my setup.....

Oh inccidentley ,don't expect that NB fan spinning at an insane 8500RPM to last long!

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
Does v1.3 give you higher overclocks?

Not sure yet, I didn't try to OC with 1.0 because I still had the stock cooler in. I dropped in a new Tuniq once my last 2 GB of RAM came back from RMA and found my system completely unstable even at stock speeds until I upgraded the BIOS to 1.3. Most likely a memory timing issue with all 4 dimm slots populated as I was getting similar symptoms as when my RAM died.

After changing the cooler, updating the BIOS, adding 4GB of RAM and updating my X-Fi OpenAL drivers, I started OC'ing to the previous speeds achieved on my P5N-E SLI and started hearing crackling on my X-Fi and getting Page Fault BSODs. Now I'm just trying to narrow down a few problems as there's just way too many moving targets/problems right now to determine if an OC is stable.

I may try OC'ing again before I fix this sound issue. I didn't realize people were cranking up their NB voltages so high in order to achieve stable OCs (I only had to go as high as 1.325V on the P5N to hit 3.0GHz).

Don't tell me Nvidia chipsets are having problems again with sound!:frown: ,I had that before with my old Nfrc2 mbrd.

I've never had a problem before on an Nvidia chipset, but apparently its a chronic problem that seems to have carried over to the 600-series. I'm guessing its the south bridge, as Creative keeps pointing the finger at NV and how their chipsets handle interrupt requests on the PCI bus (basically competes with the X-Fi and makes it wait...a very long time). Sound support in Vista sucks to begin with....experiencing an obscure hardware problem only makes it more frustrating.

 

[iluv2fly]

Regarding crackling sound from your X-Fi. I had that problem on a nforce4 board. The solution was to put the sound card in a different pci slot. Try moving it around.

 

[imported_JaaP]

Wow does that tiny fan spin at 8500RPM??? That's insane lol

Btw. Does anyone know if the upcoming Intel Penryn processors will work on the P6N? I saw a Crysis demo and it was running with a Quad Core Penryn on a 680i motherboard......

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: iluv2fly
Regarding crackling sound from your X-Fi. I had that problem on a nforce4 board. The solution was to put the sound card in a different pci slot. Try moving it around.

Yeah, thanks for the insight. I narrowed it down to the X-Fi's IRQ/PCI slots giving me problems. I moved it to the middle PCI slot yesterday, got some stability back, then all kinds of progressively worst stability problems. NV driver stop/recovers, then I couldn't even load into Windows without weird IRQ related BSODs (bad pool, irq less than etc). Finally yanked the X-Fi out of frustration and boom....all fine and dandy again. Problem now is I'm down to 1 PCI slot that I haven't tried....after that I guess I can mess around in the BIOS some more and try to statically assign IRQs and mess with some of the PCI latency delays. If that doesn't work I guess I'll just have to wait for a BIOS update, since this definitely seems like a motherboard/chipset issue more than anything else.

To JaaP: 600-series should be able to support Penryn @1333 FSB, some boards may need a BIOS update first. Problem with higher default FSB though is they'll eat into your OC overhead without any guarantee that max FSB headroom will increase. From what I'm seeing in this thread and others about the 600-series, they're definitely not the "easy OC" solution early reviews made them out to be.

To those looking for a good NB cooling solution: I picked up an Antec Spot Fan with my Nine Hundred Case and it works great for cooling the NB. Its small and quiet but still pushes a good bit of air and can attach to your case/mobo virtually anywhere. I got it free with my case in a promo, but they run for $15-$18 and can be purchased from lots of retailers (CUSA, BB, Fry's, MicroCenter etc).

 

[chizow]

Just wanted to post an update:

I ended up going with the path of least resistance and pulled my X-Fi. Really disappointed with Microsoft/Vista, NV/MSI, and Creative (in order of fault imo) for homogenizing sound in Vista and making it universally sucktastic. Amazingly, pulled the card and cranked my OC back up to 3.1GHz (same settings as on my P5N-E) and its been running there stably since.

After updating the BIOS to Rev 1.3 I couldn't OC at all without stability problems, and shortly after, couldn't even run stock clocks without BSODs. Kind of a double-edged sword I suppose, since 4GB wouldn't run stably with Rev 1.0, but my X-Fi worked fine. Its definitely related to the board and how the chipset handles PCI devices. I'm not ruling Vista out either as its shown time and time again to have a much lower fault tolerance relative to XP. Creative is also to blame for making the X-Fi such a high maintenance resource hog.

So now I'm stuck with sound that's definitely not as good as the X-Fi when it was working properly, but much better and more stable than the crackling/popping X-Fi that eventually led to BSODs and restarts at stock speeds. Overall back to being happy with this board. Got my OC back to where it was at with my P5N-E without frying my RAM and allowing me to run 4GB. Downside is I'm no longer enjoying my X-Fi. Upside is I still have sound and the benefits of running 4GB on a 64-bit OS are a lot more tangible than the significantly better sound of the X-Fi.

 

[raywood]

I'm just starting out with OCing. I have a MSI P6N SLI Platinum. For some reason, on my system the Memory Voltage option in AMI's CMOS Setup Utility v. 2.61 is set to AUTO and greyed out. I have Crucial RAM rated at 4-4-4-12, 2.2V. I've gone into Advance DRAM Configuration to set tCL, tRCD, tRP, and tRAS accordingly. But I can't change the memory voltage, and I don't know why not.