My MSI K8N Neo4 SLI/FX-55 OC adventure

darksquid

Junior Member
Apr 15, 2005
5
0
0
Hi folks,

I started this thread to have a place to post all my results, insights (such as they are), and screenshots I've gathered while experimenting with OC'ing my FX-55 (on air). This machine is my primary work machine, so stability -- rather than eeking out the last mhz -- is crucial for me. Still, I'm very interested to see how far I can push this thing.

My current rig's setup is in the sig.

My typical measurements use the following:
- Super PI 1M
- Sandra 05 CPU & Memory bandwidth

To determine relative real-world-ish differences, I also use 3dmark05 and a huge C++ compile job running MSVC 6.0.

More details to follow.
 

darksquid

Junior Member
Apr 15, 2005
5
0
0
Before I get to the benchmarks, a couple things of interest:

1) RAM
I originally had the OCZ Gold VX dimms in this board but couldn't get it stable at much past 210fsb regardless of multiplier. I realize now that I was too quick on the trigger finger when I bought that RAM; I didn't realize that it needed higher voltages than this board could supply (but I hear it's very popular in the DFI board, which can go significantly above 3.0 on the vdimm). I know there's a vdimm mod you can do on the MSI board, but that's a little more than I'm prepared to bite off. Instead, I switched to the G.Skill PC4400 LE stuff and it's been amazing.

2) Temps
Before I bought this mb, I was running on an Asus A8V (AGP) board. I had a heat problem (according to BIOS, anyhow -- I never used an external thermometer to verify..and I know MB thermos are notoriously inaccurate) because I was seeing mid 50's idle and into the low 60's under load. I tried the Thermaltake SilentBoost HSF, but it performed worse than the stock HSF. I then went to the Thermalright XP-120 (close fit) and it helped out, dropping the idle temps to around 50, and load temps to the high 50's. I was using the "half grain of rice" AS5 appplication method and was religious about cleaning the HSF and CPU surfaces with 90% iso alcohol.

When I switched to the MSI, I also switched to the Thermalright XP-90c all copper HSF. I mated that with a medium speed panaflo fan, and the temps I get from MSI corecenter are low 40's idle, low 50's underload. The highest I've ever seen is 55C, which was running /w max vcore a couple hours into a Prime95 blended torture test.

Like I said above, I know the MB temp sensors are very suspect, so I'll try to take some DMM temp readings this weekend to collect various temp readings. I'll post them as a follow-up. I gotta say, however, I really like the XP-90c. Especially after that "adventure" mounting the XP-120 on the Asus board, this thing was a piece of cake.

3) Stability
As I said in the intro, stability is critical. I use Prime95 overnight to verify stability (or lack thereof). I have found that SuperPI gives a good (and faster) indication of when you've gone "clearly too far" because he reports rounding errors, etc. After getting him working, however, I like a nice long Prime95 run to make sure things are kosher.

4) OC'ing
A couple things here. I've been doing the PC thing since around '85, and did the Coleco Adam thing before that. I was really big into mucking /w hardware back then, but took something of a hiatas from since the late 90's. I recently decided to get back into things, so I had to relearn all the current tech. I still have a LOT to learn, however, but I've done a lot of RTFF'ing and forum lurking over the last couple of weeks to educate myself.

That said, my OC'ing so far is limited to mutiplier modification, FSB modification, and use of the RAM dividers. I switched the RAM to 1T, but I haven't otherwise messed with its timings/etc. I imagine I'll get into that one of these days. I'm also going to be staying on air for the time being...but you know how these things tend to snowball. ;-)

Now, for some benchmarks

 

darksquid

Junior Member
Apr 15, 2005
5
0
0
OK, here's the first couple.

1) This one is a stock shot of the machine using the OCZ Gold VX RAM. I forgot to take a stock shot of the G.Skills, but they were a little slower...around 5800mb/s.
Stock run

2) This one is about the best I could do on the OCZ RAM at max vdimm. It was on OK improvement, but after doing a little more reading I felt I could do better with some TCCD RAM and picked up the G.Skill sticks.
OCZ @ 210FSBx13

Since I've removed the OCZ stuff, the remainder of my benchmarks will be with the G.Skill sticks.

3) Folks were right about this RAM. It screams, at only 2.75v vdimm.
This is my current best OC. Temp at idle is 43c and under load hits around 55c.
G.Skill @ 290FSBx10 - no divider



 

darksquid

Junior Member
Apr 15, 2005
5
0
0
One more for ya...I did a little reading about RAM timings and saw that, per Mushkin's Tras formula, I should really be at 8.5 rather than 8. I raised Tras to 9 and, low and behold, gained a second on Super PI and another ~20MB/s in memory bandwidth. Neato!

290x10 (no divider), Tras=9
 

darksquid

Junior Member
Apr 15, 2005
5
0
0
I haven't had time to do any further OC'ing research, but I thought I'd share the results of my migration to RAID 0+1 with ya'll.

Using Sandra05 Filesystem benchmark, here's what I was seeing with my twin raptors in RAID0:

Drive Index : 107 MB/s
Buffered Read : 231 MB/s
Sequential Read : 137 MB/s
Random Read : 55 MB/s
Buffered Write : 42 MB/s
Sequential Write : 137 MB/s
Random Write : 85 MB/s

I added two 75GB Seagate SATA drives I had lying around to the array and upgraded it to 0+1. Here's the results afterwards (BOLD means increase in speed):

Drive Index : 96 MB/s
Buffered Read : 369 MB/s (+138mb/s)
Sequential Read : 111 MB/s (-26mb/s)
Random Read : 75 MB/s (+20mb/s)
Buffered Write : 75 MB/s (+33mb/s)
Sequential Write : 112 MB/s (-25mb/s)
Random Write : 61 MB/s (-24mb/s)

So, as you can see, a fairly mixed bag -- the decrease in write performance is understandable, given the (relative) slowness of the new drives, but I was happy to see the read performance increase pretty nicely.

All in all, I'm jazzed- 140GB of speedy, redundant data storage for my primary desktop. w00t. ;-)

More benchmarking to come this weekend..

ds
 

mofrack

Member
Jan 11, 2005
142
0
0
Darksquid,

For taking a hiatus and having to relearn all the new tech, you sure sound like you know what youre doing! Thanks for posting your experiences so far...
 
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