Not all 0609 FAPW are made equal...
My experience with my CCB1E 0609 FPAW turned out to be a big disappointment, comparing with what others here can reach with this chip.
I had to bump Vcore for the first time at 2700, but it didn't worry me too much. I had my first doubts at 2750, when both cores failed dual prime. A new voltage bump got it right, but 2800 needed 1,5V (1,45*104%) to only boot in windows. Prime fails immediatly, followed by a BSOD.
For info, temperatures were always under control (28C idle, 36C load @2750), memory ran with 133 divider, and I bumped a little LDT and chipset voltage (shouldn't have any influence, but you never know :) )
Back to my 0550 VPMW...
Edit : The stepping is FPAW, not FAPW as in the title...
Overclocking has gotten worse over time - CPU or RAM?
I have an Opteron 170 0550 VPMW on an Asus A8N SLI Premium with OCZ Platinum Rev2 3200 RAM.
I was able to get dual Prime95 stable a few months ago at 260 FSB with RAM at 1:1 (400) 2.5-3-3-6.
I started getting some weird STOP errors that indicated RAM could be an issue and decided to run Prime95 again.
To my surprise, I am now only able to run stable at RAM settings of 3-4-4-8.
My question is, what is the likely culprit - one of the core's memory controllers or the RAM itself?
Could it be due to changes in my Windows XP SP2 environment since then such as AMD vs Intel CPU drivers, hotfixes etc.?
I read somewhere that TCCD memory can lose it's overclocking ability when run at high voltage (I was running 2.9V) over time.