New DS3 BIOS

[Killer4Hire]

I like what Gary is doing with the DS3 board and it will pay off in the long run.. i am coming over from AMD and Abit boards so i am still learning the Intel math of overclocking.. I don,t know what kind of scores your e6300 and e6400 get with your heavy oc but my DS3 with an e6600 on board and the Corsair pc6400 2x512mb XM2 kit will crank out over 9300 points in 3DMark05 cpu test and thats at all stock speeds on watercooling at 19c idle and thats over 2000points better then my 30% OC AMD 3800+ x2 running 1to1 at 2.6Ghz and 520Mhz on the ram at 2.5-3-3-8 IT timmings..

I would hate to think what this e6600 could do at the oc you guys are pushing.. keep up the reseach and when i get the never i will download the F8 bios and give it spin..

 

[DazzaB]

I've read plenty about this motherboard and it's problems related to overclocking however that is not my problem. I have 2 gigs of PQI DDR2 TURBO (link below) ram and this board refuses to run it at the default specs.
http://www.pqi.com.tw/product2.asp?oid=&cate1=79&PROID=195

The ram is rated a 3-3-3-8 but the board will only run it at 4-4-4-12. I've contacted PQI who have told me to the settings manually in the bios which I've done. However if I do this the board will always boot with a beeping sound which I assume is a bios error. I have no interest in overclocking I just want this ram to run at the correct settings without errors. I've also contacted Gigabyte and they have suggested I buy a more "famous" brand of memory. I've tried all bios's including the latest F8i beta. Any help to resolve this would be much appreciated.

 

[bleeble]

I just upgraded from F7 to F8i and performance went DOWN (except Sandra Mem. Bandwidth). I ran each of these tests several times and took the best score.

Test: [F7 score] to [F8i score]
SPi 1M: 18.250 to 18.390
Sandra Mem. Latency: 81 to 83
Sandra CPU Arithmetic: Dhrystone - 25707 to 25568; Whetstone - 17809 to 17518

I tried putting my specs in my sig, but I don't think it worked. So here they are:
Core 2 Duo E6600
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
OCZ Plat 2x1GB DDR2-800 4-5-4-12 (OCZ2P8002GK)
XFX 7900GT
OCZ GameXStream 700W

I'm currently running at 465x7 (seeing how far the RAM will go). RAM is running at DDR2-930 5-5-5-15 @ 2.2V (+.4). 465 is completely stable but 470 won't even POST, so I don't know if that's a mobo or RAM issue...

vCore @ 1.26250 (stock)
vMCH @ 1.5 (+.3)

All the BIOS settings are the same as they were before I flashed to F8i. First I restarted and reset all the settings to stock. Then I flashed the BIOS. Then I restarted again and loaded the optimized defaults. Finally, I changed all the settings back to what they were pre-flash.

EDIT: I can't think of anything other info to add right now. Let me know if there's anything I forgot to mention.

EDIT 2: I can't change my avatar OR edit my sig? I can't even change my timezone! WTF?! :|

 

[Fiddy]

Update with the F8i BIOS.

Running with the 4:5 ratio I've been able to hit 475 FSB, 1187 on the ram 3325MHz CPU.
What I've discovered is that it's better to leave the Vcore at 1.31 than running it at 1.525 as it keeps the temps lower allowing higher overclocks.

TAT Idle temp: 51C, Ambient Temp 25C

I can get it to run for a few seconds at 478 FSB, 1195 before it freezes. Once I have my Thermalright HR-05 northbridge cooler and Artic Silver 5 it should help get the temps a little lower.

 

[redhawk56]

I decided to try F8I again and after some initial weirdness, it seems to be fine at my same overclock as on F7. 288fsb and 766 mhz ddr. The bios recovery features seem to act a lot different than with F7 (hence the weirdness). But it is memtest86 and super pi stable here. Very nice overclock for my 2.8ghz presler. I still think this is a great board.

 

[redhawk56]

OK......I promise I wasn't smoking anything before I typed this.

As a part of my testing of F8i this afternoon, I was testing my memory overclocking. My memory has run at DDR904 on another motherboard so I wanted to see how close I could get.

Apparently I was smoking something :>

Everything is cool!

 

[Gary Key]

The F8 final release is in qualification testing as of today. Unless further issues (major) are found we can expect a official release late this week or early next week.

I will release a DQ6 public beta later today.

Redhawk56, you were not dreaming, look at the screenshot I sent you.

 

[imported_Stin]

Any update on when this BIOS is being released? I keep checking, but no update yet.

 

[imported_Stin]

Wasn't this bios supposed to be out a week ago!?! Lemme at it.