Strategy for overclocking a CPU to its limit! Will this work?

[V3NOM]

well i just got my S1963 (S1283 was like double the price and only 5 degrees better plus the added size and weight ) and it only dropped my cpu temp 10C with AS5 compared to the stock heatsink with stock paste so i'm a little disappointed but nevertheless i overclocked my E4400 (2.0GHz) to 2.9 which is a fair bit higher than 2.66 i got on the stock cooler... anyway that appears to be all i can go to! my motherboard just will not get to 300MHz FSB for some reason 🙁 and unfortunately, it's a Via and i can't change the vcore - its either automatic or it doesn't change at all 🙁 i have a feeling its the mobo holding me back unfortunately not the cpu or ram.

 

[pcxxy]

sounds good.

so i've found my minimum stable voltage for running at 3.6 GHz

unfortunately, prime95 kept giving me errors in large FFT and blend torture test after a few hours. i know it's not my ram coz i ran memtest86+ and it passed 23 cycles. i know it's not my harddrive coz i've done a surface scan and there're no bad sectors. i've even tried upping the northbridge (edit: MCH) voltage from 1.1v to 1.3 but that didn't help either... would anyone know what's going on?

in case you guys wonder, i've tried oc'ing my friends computer and right off the bat i took it to 3.8ghz at 1.3625V (set in bios)! unfortunately the temps (by realtemp) were 72C so it looks like the HSF wasn't installed properly... but otherwise it looks like he's got a better chip xDD

 

[randomizer]

i've even tried upping the northbridge (ICH) voltage from 1.1v to 1.3 but that didn't help either

ICH is southbridge, MCH is northbridge 😉

 

[pcxxy]

whoops for my typo 😉 but would any of you gurus know what other reason can cause prime95 to get errors in large FFT tests?

 

[V3NOM]

possibly ram? have you blended for a couple of hours?

 

[pcxxy]

yeah I did blend too and it would give me errors anywhere from 1-6 hours... I've done memtest86+ for many hours though without errors.

i've read that i should trust the results from memtest more, but if my rams are ok then i can't figure out what's wrong... -.-;

 

[V3NOM]

>.< if blend fails then it's just not stable imo... what's the voltages, speed and latencies of your RAM?

 

[pcxxy]

i'm running stock timings for my ram which is 4-4-4-15, and i haven't played around with subtimings (although in the motherboard for memory performance, i chose the 'extreme' profile instead of standard or turbo... (default is 'turbo', but i should test it with standard at least once too...')

the voltage i'm currently using is 2.00V (default voltage is 1.9-2.1V but up to 2.2V is fine). This is the minimum required voltage to be free from errors in memtest. I've put it to 2.10V too but I still had errors in prime95.

In case you don't want to scroll up, my FSB is 400MHz and I'm running in synchronous mode, so that's not even overclocking my sticks.

Anyways, i'm going to run it at lower timings and performance profile and see if things are ok first, and see what's going on.

update: in the BIOS, at 5-5-5-15, 2.00V, "standard" ram performance enhancement profile, i get errors at with blend tests after an hour or so when using fft length of 896k.

i should probably try one ram at a time this weekend... -.-;