Alright...finally. After having my Venice rig staring at me from my desk for a week, I finally have gotten it up and running, despite being unbelievably busy working. I haven't placed my Zalman on it yet, so I've yet to see my production/week code, but I was so eager to start overclocking it that I decided the stock HSF Monarch gave me would do for now. Rig is as follows...
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice
DFI Nforce 4 Ultra-D (4/14/05 v3 BIOS)
2x512MB Mushkin C2 UTT (Brainpower)
Leadtek 6600 PCI-e
Enermax 460w 24pin PSU (33A 12v line)
60GB 7200RPM 8MB IDE Deathstar
120GB 7200RPM 8MB IDE Maxtor
Crappy case
Crappy opticals
Crappy airflow
(I'm waiting on my CM Cavalier to solve the third to last and last items)
Preliminary exploration....
Settings...well, I immediately set my LDT to 4x, and flashed to the 4/14/05 v3 BIOS.
Memory settings at 166 divider, 2-3-3-6, DRAM drive strength at 8, Command per clock enabled, dual channel enabled. Onboard SATA, ethernet, firewire, raid, all that crap, disabled. Who needs features?
Sandra seems to tell me that a TRAS of 6 on my memory (UTT) suits me best with this board. I tested 6, 8, and 10. Subjectively, 6 also feels slightly more responsive, but that's probably my imagination. I'll tighten my other timings later on (I know my UTT is good for 230FSB 2-2-2-10 @ 3.1v from my DFI NF3, even with weak DRAM Drive strength in retrospect, which is suppose to hinder UTT/BH-5/Vx overclocking)
Stock voltage (DFI undervolts to 1.38v according to BIOS, speedfan). Sitting at 250HTTx9 = 2250mhz not a single issue to speak of. Small FFT load of 45C after 30 minutes of priming, with an idle at 36C. I'll keep going with this HSF until I hit 45C idle. That's my comfort zone. Time to go OC some more.
2340mhz @ 1.38v, yum. LDT at 3x now to ensure stability. If I can breach 2.5 on default voltage, I'm going to be excited. I may hit the lucky 2.8 that I've been hoping for.
2430mhz @ 1.38v
I'm going to skip P95 and go do some gaming. Haven't gotten to game in a while.
Prime just ran great all night over night at 2.43, so that should be a sufficient burn in to continue with today's boost
Just as a side-note, CnQ doesn't appear to be working with my chip, even with the newest BIOS, which really sucks. Ah well.
2520mhz @ 1.41v (1.45v selected in BIOS, but this thing is starting to undervolt very heavily) and priming strong.