Some tips on taming the FX60 under cold

[mike]

I have played around with a FX60 in the last week trying to figure those buggers out and have the following findings that should hopefully help some FX60 owners - these findings were mainly under subzero cooling and on an Expert board and UTT based memory.

Here in very brief some observations:

- you will not be able to get the same clocks on UTT/BH5 type memory as you are able to get on a single core AMD

While on an FX57 some of my ram did ~270mhz on the FX60 it did more like 260mhz. Don't try to get your ram to clock the same as it was on your single core - or you'll run into a wall.

- You need to run might softer Data and Drive strengths - especially for Phase Change.

With UTT/BH I found 5/2 - 5/3 to be the best combo for me. it is mandantory to play alot with both these settings in order to fully unleash you FX60 under cold.


- Most FX60 will find a Vcore barrier - in my case I got the best results @ ~ 1.67V. While I have run FX60s as far as 1.75V - lower vcore appeared to be better. VCORE played a mayor role for me - having too much VCore killed many clocks

- You can run FX60 much colder with a higher multi and lower FSB. Slightly below subzero - the B2 controler seems to crap out @ ~ 258HTT, -20C @ ~ 230HTT and -35C @ ~ @218HTT.
Mayor has already posted about the updividers and I can only recommend using them. Higher multis will give you 216/233/250 while lower multis sometimes only give you 233/250 iirc




I think most B2 FX60 should easily be able to handle almost 3.5GHZ. I was able to test three 60s and was able to push them all to that speed.

I am still have not managed to have the time to properly bench the FX60 - but if you are able to control your temps - 3.6ghz+ benches are very well possible. The key thing is to either lower your temps during load - and raise them again after you bench is finished - or to have something put a load on your system immediately after the bench is finished. MPS Multi could help - but I haven't personally tried it yet - when I updated to the MPS muli driver from ACPI - my XP install on one drive wouldn't boot anymore - and I haven't bothered to try to get it to work yet ( I assume I must install MPS from the XP setup...)

My fastest 3Dmark05 CPU speed was 3.63GHZ - unfortunately I was running my 7800GTX 256MBs on high quality - otherwise I would have been easily faster than my previous personal best on 256MBs SLI cards and easily broken 18K

As soon as I remember some more things to add I will post them.




Some fun OCs:

While I was able to push my FX60 past 3.9GHZ with a single stick of memory - I only managed to get 3.868 GHZ Validator file saved:

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=75052




Dual SP2004 screeny @ 3.71 - I actually let it run for another min and raised the clocks to 3.74 - which it lasted for about 20 secs - but crashed and froze my system before I could get a screenshot this was with 2X512MB ram with an updivider for the ram ( believe 216 or 233)