Weird goings on with my A64 - potential warning!

P

Phil Stanbridge

New member
..well I've set it up on air properly now, (pics to follow) in my custom red case - it looks great along with the Mach II but for the time being I'm testing it on air using the stock heatsink. First impressions are, its quieter than the Intel affair - and XP boots a lot quicker with the AMD chip - Surprisingly so actually! I also tested Far Cry (@ 220FSB) 1600x1200 all settings maxed out via the settings panel in the game with my 5950 Ultra and it was surprisingly playable! It looked great too - especially the reflections and the water. I'm pretty sure it would play even better with an XT - I might just get one of these to test too.

But I experienced a very weird problem yesterday afternoon. I was running stable at 220 FSB - I upped it to 225FSB, and made a couple of small changes in the bios - I set DDR to 2.85,VGA to 1.6 and vcore to 1.5. I then proceeded to reboot. No problem there - until it got past the initial boot screen then it would hang. No picture no nothing. Everytime - I reset the cmos, and tried again. Nothing. The bios would work perfectly well. I could make any number of changes and save them and restart - it would not get to the XP splash screen and it would not boot into windows. The partitions were fine, the data was fine, the bios was fine - the hardware was working perfectly - for whatever reason XP had corrupted beyond repair by JUST upping the fsb to 225 and making a few changes in the bios! Fortunately I had made a recovery image so it didnt take me long to restore a working copy.

That said, I am totally baffled by this and I want to get to the bottom of it - I have no idea how those pretty minor changes could corrupt my HD in such a dramatic way?? I want to resolve this prior to applying the deep freeze.
 
this pretty much happened to me before wen i was overclocking ym 2500 to 3200 on my old unsuited KD7-Raid mobo, it wudnt do anything beyond 185x11 stable.

Anyway, is it safe to up the voltage to ure gfx to 1.5V? i was under the impression it wasnt adviseable to do this.
 
Hmm, so what you are saying is maybe I hit the limit of a working system on air? But surely that shouldnt "trash" my hard disk. lol.. Bizarre!

I found upping the VGA to 1.6 (even 1.7) on a P4 system helped out no end with benchmarking. It would kill off a lot of the artefacts in 3dmark03 and Aquamark.
 
hmmmm i mainly work arround aqua wen o/cing so ill try that out some point.

Ofc the HDD shudnt get screwed up wen u o/c, its not usually a regular occurance either (one hopes) and i still havent found a rime nor reason to an exact reason as to why it does it, howevere i was lucky a reinstall of windows was all that was needed for me...
 
i *tried* to stay arround 1.725-1.775 but wen i changed the mobo to an nforce, i was getting random system reboots wen id boot something which wud use a bit of CPU usage. I spent a bit of money replacing hardware, trying to find the problem but being unsucessful. In the end i upped the core to 1.8, this seemed to cut down on how often it happened, but it still ocasionaly did it, last week i changed it to 1.825 and its been pretty stable since!

THO there was one problem, wen i frst upped it windows gave me problems, worked fine before hand but after i upped the vcore again explorer.exe crashed all the time for no reason! after i rebuilt windows it seems to be fine tho, thankfully :P
 
well ure running a 64bit CPU, yes? coz they all work on lower cores at stock anyway, wot settings have u got to choose from? and im presuming ure using phase changing cooling so heat isnt much of a problem if u up the core?
 
yeah i can see your logi, the less things ure using atm the less things to try and fault find through, so is ure HDD completely nacked or can u reinstall widnows again and see how it goes?

(btw this thread hoping is fun :P)
 
I always get this on AMD XP chips, corrupted windows more times than I care to remember.

AMD dont seem to like FSB increases like intel, multipliers are the way to go..

I struggled with an xp2700 trying to get 200 FSB, got a 3200xp (rated at 200FSB) & no problems with same mobo & memory. Doesn't rule out memory entirely but certainly points to the CPU being the main limiter.

Looks like the 64 versions are similar.. Lots of volts required for FSB increases, roll on mobos with unlocked multi's (or 939 pin FX 53 ;) )
 
yeah thats wot im begining to belive too mcmad, when i look back ive had more corruptions in widblows than i cared to remember, i cant wait to get home and build my P4 (which has just been delivered to my house) i just hope my CPU has come also (2 diff suppliers)
 
a-ha right so I need to get to a stable FSB on air and then play with the multiplier - these chips are so different to Intel setups - I do like them though - so far I'm impressed with what I see. But like you say, the 939 FX53 is the way to go.
 
If your using the MSI NEO board then that will be using the KT800 chipset... no? Unfortunately VIA haven't included any locks in this chipset either so both the AGP and the PCI change with the FSB clocks.

Now on my old ASUS VIA board I could hit about 238FSB before I would encounter corruption, but this can change from board to board and can also be different depending on your hard disk.

If your using SATA drives, those are the worst for corruption on the KT800 chipset. I have a friend who is using the ABIT KV8-MAX3 and as soon as he hits 223FSB his SATA drive gives up the ghost and bang goes his O/S.

Your best bet if your going for UBER overclocks is to go for the nForce3 chipset as this definitely includes an AGP lock and some sort of wobbly PCI lock... we still ain't sure on the one.

Just throw some questions my way and I'm sure I can help..
 
wen i bought my new PC i had the choice overclock a P4 or buy a 64bit.

Wen i looked arround at the motherboards out for 64bits i was disinheartened. Lack of support for Dual Channel, lack of ability to seriously overclock on most of the boards was another common problem i came across. I know the 64bit range wasnt really built for overclocking (so they say) but i think running at stock is boring, i like to be *different* my mates will envy my 4ghz CPU :D
 
hmmm right so ok now I'm seeing the flaw in these boards first hand. It's quite bad actually isnt it - only 225fsb caused the corruption! I am using to SATA drives too, so there you go, you've hit the nail on the head. I havent a clue what this will do with phase-change then - surely if it breaks down at 225 on air then it will do the same on a Mach II, which means its completely pointless me trying it with the Mach II until the nf3 boards are out :(
 
YUP! that's the problem I hit so I had to go out and get a new board to allow me to use my Prommie Mach I.

Yes, you will always hit the same limit no matter what cooling solution you use due to the fact that it is a chipset limitation.

It's quite disheartening at present because there isn't an A64 board that you can buy at present that will allow you to overclock through the roof like without any mods, like you can with a lot of P4 boards.

I am using the Shuttle AN50R, but cannot get past 211FSB due to the appauling vDimm options on the board, but with the soldering iron used and the mdos in place, I can hit 255 1:1.

My ASUS K8V Deluxe hit a max of 235FSB 1:1 but that couldn't go any higher even with mods due to it being a VIA chipset.

My GIGABYTE K8N Pro hit a max of about 225 1:1 and 250 with dividers on the memory cos of again the low vDimm voltage options...

The only other board I've had is the Chaintech ZNF3-150, this one was quite nice and included all nice options and voltages as standard, but then lots of them started dying randomly, so that one never got near the Mach I
 
hmmmz there must be some other route you can take, surely? there are people out there with 64bit 3200's running at like 2.6-2.7ghz with the adequate cooling required, maybe we need to find some1 who is already running 64bit overclocked and get recomended on a diff mobo, tho if you can wait the new chipsets wud be better as they will support dual channel too :D
 
I'm sure Iv had this screenshot out already but just incase

261ps.jpg


This is done on a Shuttle AN50R completely stock but the memory on a divider due to the lack of voltage options...

There was only one way forward...

votlmod.jpg


... this mod allowed me to pump 3.5v volts through my OCZ Platinum Limited Editon... giving me this...

membw.jpg


.. As you can see, some loverly FSB's and some loverly timings on that memory rocketed me Mem Bandwidth through the roof... now when this was like this my machine was lightning fast... hitting 24.5k 3DMark scores with my XT on the stock cooler...

Any more requests/ questions
 
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