First of all let me say hi to all of you guys. I love this forum I been using it for years and I finally have a good reason sign up and post.

Well here is the story of my way to 2.8 with a phenom 9500 its abit long but I assure you its worth it..

The First Phenom I got from newegg was nightmare I was totally frustrated I could not get the thing Stable at all, even at its native speed of 2.2Ghz. And I was blaming it all on the M2N-sli Deluxe and its buggy Bios. After Looking at every forums on the web I could find and 4 sleepless nights this are the essential things I found as common issues with phenoms.
-ASUS AM2 mobos have to be set with Cool and Quiet On because if not you will always run at 5.5x or 5.0x Multi
-A lot of people were hitting Brick walls that didn’t make much sense and I was one of them. For example. I could get 230Mhz in my FSB and boot everything fine with at 5.5 Multi. but if I went to 231Mhz or higher I could not ever post.(I’ll explain later more about this the reason why it happens)
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So after trying every setting I could I was unable to run my processor stable at 2.2 much less 2.3 or 2.4. so I stopped and went back to the basics, I wanted to know if the problem really was the Mobo, Bios or Processor, since I got all of them at the time I needed to know which one to return or exchange. all I saw was random reboots and weird behaviors. After overclocking PCs for the past 8 years you can tell by the kind of blue screen or by the crashing behavior what is component that is unstable in your system, all you Veterans out there know what im talking about . I know when you hit a limit but at 230Mhz 5.5Multi being able to run full benchmarks and going up to 1Mhz to 231 and not being able to post makes no sense because ass many of you know 1mhz on the FSB from full stable you can go to unstable or even windows fail to boot but never a no post. I know the RAM is good... the processor is its100% stable at 5.5 x 230 but not when running at 11x 200… I wanted to Test each core but I couldn’t use AMD OverDrive, Im running Nvidia Chipset and Im using Vista 64bit, so AMD OverDrive wont work. It works with Nvidia when it 2.09 or less but Vista x64 compatibility was put in with 2.0.10 and higher but it doesnt with nvidia chipsets, sooo... I decided to Hack the damn thing to work for me, and I was able to, hehe.

note: I Posted all this in the AMD official forums and how to hack AMD overdrive but they Deleted my post as soon as they saw the hack. haha.
Ok here is how you hack it.

1. Install AOD 2.0.14 Beta then go to "C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD\AMD OverDrive\amd64" and Copy AODDrive.sys to your desktop or some other place.
2. uninstall AOD 2.0.14 and intall AOD 2.0.9 and replace the AODDrive.sys with the one on your desktop.

Now you can use AMD OverDrive in Vista x64 But nothing Works except for the Muliti Changer, but who cares... that’s all I needed.

So I went head and started the experimentation. I started moving the Multi from 5.5 to 11 in all cores. Core 0 passed. no problems, Core 1 passed, no problems, Core 2 reached 11Multi and WHAM! BSOD. oh s**t... I... I got it!. rebooted the PC moved core 0,1 and 3 to 11Multi and everything passed and worked great I slowly moved core 2 to as high as I could before BSOD and I could only get it to 2.05Ghz stable. so I got a bad core. I returned the processor and got a new one… and guess what? after 5 minutes of OCing I have 255Mhz FSB 11 Mulit at 2.8 Ghz. The thing in M2N-SLi Deluxes mobos CPU-Z does not agree with the Bios with what’s the actual Voltage given to the Processor. I think CPU-z is right because I am using the same cooler I had with my old 65nm 4300+ X2 @ 2.85Ghz 1.5Vcore and I had 52C full load, but with the quad core at 2.8Ghz full load on all cores I get 54C and CPU-Z says 1.39 and the Bios says 1.525v so there is no chance in hell that I would get those temps with 1.525Vcore. so CPU-z is right.




now here is what I learned from the brief life of this same post at the AMD official forums.

1.Everyone that could not OC past 2.4 or 2.5Ghz or had BSOD problems reported that their 3rd core AKA core 2 was the problem (im guessing production problem thus the reason for the Phenom x3, I bet that when the x3 shows up you’ll see core 0,1 and 3 but no core 2 ). People who could not get past 2.5Ghz started running at 2.7 on all cores and 2.5 on core 2.

2. the 230Mhz Brick wall was created by the Bad 3rd core, people also reported that after getting the a new processor they could OC their FSB higher even if they could not get much higher on the Processor Speed. it makes sense since Memory controller is in the Processor and since they all share even the L3 Cache if on core has problem of fails it takes all them down with it.

I hope you all got some ideas on how to fix or better tweak your processor.
all this problems with BSOD, FSB and Processor OC are common in both AM2 and AM2+ socket. I hope the B3 stepping helps this issue since I love my Phenom at 2.8ghz it kick@$$.

Final Settings in Bios
Cool and Quiet OFF
255Mhz FSB
Mem 2.2Volts
Chipset 1.5V
CPU 1.525V
5x HT Multi
1.4V On HT/CPU connection


I been waiting to post this For a long time now but I had to wait for the admins to enable my account to post or something like that.

If you guys want to see some Specific Bench Marks to see how it compare to your AM2+ system let me know what to run cuz Im curious too