Hi all.
Cant believe I've spent the last 3 days reading this thread.. LOL. This things massive.
Many thanks to all that have contributed to the knowledge of the noobs. Me being one of them. First time over clocker.
This system was put together by NCIX Computers and except for forgetting to plug the molex power into the floppy drive (yea.. it's got a floppy) this thing worked great right from the start. Thought about building it myself, but it's something new to me. Figured if they build it, there's a warranty on the whole package, and with some of the hassles others have been having, this is a good thing.
After much reading the biggest mistake made was not getting this ram
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?...=F2-6400CL4D-2GBHK&manufacture=G.SKILL
Instead ended up getting these due to budget restrictions
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?...=TWIN2X2048-5400C4&manufacture=CORSAIR
these have worked very well. Ran them through memtest86 through dos for 8hrs at the current settings with no errors.
The only issue that was a pain in the butt was with the installation of the XP OS which took 3 tries before it finally stuck. After all the updates and after market software installs, the venture into over clocking began, and here's my tale.
Really the goal here is to be stable at 3.2ghz just cause it's a kick butt speed and things run a whole lot faster. Mainly going to be used for gaming, music, surfing the net and watching movies. Not going to be running 24/7 so shutting down at night to save a couple of pennies in power is a good thing.
After reading Core2 (John) guide the first attempt went rather well... or so it seemed. Went for a simple setting 3.0ghz with a 1:1 divider. Well that was easy, or so it seemed, Orthos ran for 5 hrs before the system locked up. Turned out that the memory voltage wasn't high enough, stock was 1.9v and it needed 2.1v. Since then it's been a trial and error over the last week. Tried so many settings most of which escape me at the moment. Eventually settled on the setting in my sig. So far it's holding rather nicely.
Had many.. many failed posts and the simple solution was to stick the support cd that came with this board and hit the reset button... worked every time. Never had to reset CMOS once during the whole process. The board came with bios 0401 and has been solid since the first boot. With all the horror stories from others, it's a good thing I stayed away from flashing.
Noticed others were having problems with flashing. If your going to flash from a usb stick, it has to be formated to fat32 otherwise the bios wont see it in EZFlash. The bios automatically renames the usb stick as Drive C, don't know why that is.. but it does, and it sees the .bin file right away. Believe it or not, I actually tried to flash this board to the P5N32-E SLI bios... LOL.. boy that was fun, kept getting an error saying the file was too large, and it is, it's exactly 2X bigger. Then decided to look at the manual and seen it was the wrong bios for this board. DOH!!
Temps with the Arctic cooler have been amazing. Running Orthos in a Blend test-Priority9, according to SpeedFan and Core Temp the highest was 58C at full load on both cores. Probe sees the cpu at 51C. Idle is around 30C. As for cooling on the NB... don't have any at the moment, but it may just be something to look at in the future.
This system is in a Cooler Master Centurion 5 case.
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?...pn=CAC-T05-UW&manufacture=COOLERMASTER
It comes with a 80mm fan sucking air through the front grill, and a 120mm fan blowing air out the back. There's a spot on the side of the case for another 80mm which looks like a nice addition in the near future. Wondering if that one should suck air out or blow air in. Thinking blowing air in to help the NB.
SpeedFan reports voltages as vCore- 1.47, Probe sees the same, but because it's set to auto which seems to be the most stable, for me anyway, it jumps around a little. Hopefully that won't cause instability in the future. Gonna try a hard setting and see if it sticks. EH.. the worst that can happen is a no post. Then it's a matter of bumping it up till it does, to a point that is. May just be easier to have that on auto.
Could never get the Automatic fan speed to work in SpeedFan so ended up turning QFan back on, which is ok by me. It works rather well actually.
Through all the observations made by surfing through the mountain of posts in this thread, the biggest issue is with the memory. Turns out this was the main cause for all the instability issues for me as well. The fastest that is stable has been 715mhz@2.1v, any higher and it won't post. Getting the memory stable is the key with this board IMO.
Thanks to all who have mentored me into the ways of the Dark Side.