Testing / comparing : Intel D975XBX2 / Asus P5B DX ***56K WARNING***

[gtj]

hi guys, great forum. just wanted to ask if 370fsb at 1.35 vcore, 1.6vmch, 1.25 vfsb is a good place to use for everyday use. this is my first time overclocking and this thread was a great resource. i stopped at 23 hrs orthos blend stable at these settings but got a bsod after playing company of heroes. but i didnt restart the computer after using orthos for that long. does that mean its unstable? since restarting and playing again ive had no bsod. i still have to check my memory with memtest. anyway, this is how i approached my overclock. im still new to everything. any constructive criticism would be great. thanks.

my first overlock attempt

note i have the bx2 with 2333 bios and a e6300 allendale. c1e eist off and power slope on. i dont trust my xclio 500w psu yet. my timings are 5 5 5 15.

Welcome to XS and the BX2! First, good for you for keeping records and working methodically. 23 hours orthos blend stable is great so right now I'd say that BSOD you got was a fluke. Tell us a little more about the system. Which memory, hard drives, OS, etc are you using?

[ArcticOC]

The only thing C1E plays with is multipler and core voltage and if you've set the vcore to something other than default, then it doesn't even affect that.

It's been reported to Intel and I spent some time with them on the phone a few weeks ago walking through the problem. Hopefully they'll fix it in an upcoming release.

Might be good for you to report it as well. Use the form at http://supportmail.intel.com/scripts...d=36,2386,2578

Make sure you use a concise description like "Disabling C1E in the BIOS does not disable C1E on the processor"

Many thanx for the link to Intel, I will shurly drop them a note.
It would be a shame if this thing can`t be corrected, because i like this mobo alot.

EDIT: Have now submitted the info to Intel! Hope all other users follow, let`s put som pressure on them

[SiGfever]

This is what I submitted which is by gtj...

Paul,

After further research...

"According to the document "Intel® Core™2 Duo Desktop Processor E6000∆ and E4000∆ Sequence Thermal and Mechanical Design Guidelines", TM2 is disabled by default and when it is enabled, it only becomes active when the processor reaches a critical temperature. Further, it appears that the 975XBX2 BIOS does NOT enable TM2 although the same document states that it is required.

The document is at
http://www.intel.com/design/core2duo/documentation.htm"

John

[purepino]

Thanks for the greet, gtj.

i have: a xbx2, e6300, 7800gt, 2x wd800jd drives non-raid, 2x 512mb ocz ddr2-800 soe edition, lg dvd burner, xclio 500w, two 120mm fans, and a subpar asus cpu cooler . i figured i try out a streamlined xp install so im using tinyxp by eXPerience. one thing i noticed as i went through my overclock was that changes in vmch helped me more than vcore. am i missing something?

[gtj]

Thanks for the greet, gtj.

i have: a xbx2, e6300, 7800gt, 2x wd800jd drives non-raid, 2x 512mb ocz ddr2-800 soe edition, lg dvd burner, xclio 500w, two 120mm fans, and a subpar asus cpu cooler . i figured i try out a streamlined xp install so im using tinyxp by eXPerience. one thing i noticed as i went through my overclock was that changes in vmch helped me more than vcore. am i missing something?

You're not missing anything. By the looks of the spreadsheet you went through the steps and determined that's what you needed. If you want to confirm, leave everything else as it is and drop the vmch a notch or two. If it's still stable, then great; you've reduced your heat load a little. If not, then you've confirmed your findings.

On my test machine, I'm always retrying settings that I thought were unstable at one time just to make sure. In more than one case, I realized that my voltages were a little high maybe because I jumped too high in a single jump or maybe just because I put the wrong voltage in the spreadsheet.

[jmpage2]

Just a quick question. I've seen lots of screenshots of the Intel Thermal Analysis Tool in this thread, but I don't see it available for Windows Vista-32. The only option I was given was to install the Intel Desktop Tools which give some very basic info on temps and fan speeds.

Is TAT available for Vista-32? If so does anyone have a link to it since I can't seem to find it?

Finally, what's the state of drivers for this board under Vista? I've seen lots of different posts indicating that some devices should be turned off or on in the BIOS and possibly removed from the system drivers in the operating system. Does anyone feel they can summarize this for those of us who are having trouble getting a handle on all of it? For example, if I let the system go to sleep under Vista, it resumes fine but afterwards certain things like Media Center will cause a hard reboot of the box. Does anyone know of a workaround for that? The idea of letting the box sleep if it's been idle for a few hours appeals to me.

So far my rig is a rock at the 9X350 settings with all stock voltages and a mild overclock of the RAM to 266/667. Now that I've put another vent in my case I am seeing idle temps in the 30's and peak temps in the mid 50's under an hour or two of load.

And, I have the bootup issue others here have mentioned, I think that it's actually one of my USB devices causing it, probably the cheezy FDD/card-reader combo drive, now that I think about it the delayed boot seemed to start up after I connected that device.

[gtj]

Just a quick question. I've seen lots of screenshots of the Intel Thermal Analysis Tool in this thread, but I don't see it available for Windows Vista-32. The only option I was given was to install the Intel Desktop Tools which give some very basic info on temps and fan speeds.

Is TAT available for Vista-32? If so does anyone have a link to it since I can't seem to find it?

Finally, what's the state of drivers for this board under Vista? I've seen lots of different posts indicating that some devices should be turned off or on in the BIOS and possibly removed from the system drivers in the operating system. Does anyone feel they can summarize this for those of us who are having trouble getting a handle on all of it? For example, if I let the system go to sleep under Vista, it resumes fine but afterwards certain things like Media Center will cause a hard reboot of the box. Does anyone know of a workaround for that? The idea of letting the box sleep if it's been idle for a few hours appeals to me.

So far my rig is a rock at the 9X350 settings with all stock voltages and a mild overclock of the RAM to 266/667. Now that I've put another vent in my case I am seeing idle temps in the 30's and peak temps in the mid 50's under an hour or two of load.

And, I have the bootup issue others here have mentioned, I think that it's actually one of my USB devices causing it, probably the cheezy FDD/card-reader combo drive, now that I think about it the delayed boot seemed to start up after I connected that device.

Same TAT package for XP and Vista. Works fine.

With the exception of the Marvell SATA controller, all drivers are included in Vista. However, there is a new package for Intel Matrix Storage Manager which updates the driver to a version greater than what Vista has. There are also updated audio drivers that allow the use of the front panel audio. Although I did upgrade to the new drivers, I didn't have any problems with the stock drivers.

I haven't had a problem with anything after a sleep but I don't use Media Center. You might want to disable the Automatically Restart option in System/Advanced/Startup and Recovery. This way if there's a BSOD you can get some adidtional info.

[argylesocks]

Does anyone feel they can summarize this for those of us who are having trouble getting a handle on all of it? For example, if I let the system go to sleep under Vista, it resumes fine but afterwards certain things like Media Center will cause a hard reboot of the box. Does anyone know of a workaround for that? The idea of letting the box sleep if it's been idle for a few hours appeals to me.

I am having the same issues. If i put my machine to sleep, it will resume fine & everything appears to be fine. WMC sometimes open, but then crash & reboot after i try to change a menu. very annoying.

someone suggested this was related to Intel Quick Resume. However, this problem exists when i have this both on & off.

Additionally, I have had issues with random "wakeups" that typically occur in the middle of the night... thus waking me up. ugh.

do a search online...you will fine that me & you are not the only ones with this problem... appears to be a Vista issue.

At this point, i have given up on sleep, and just do a hard shutdown at night....not the ideal situation... but best i got at this point (i really dont want to leave my machine on 24hrs/day, when i only use it for 3hrs/day).
interesting read:
http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/vistas...akeup-support/

[GamingDaemon]

I am having the same issues. If i put my machine to sleep, it will resume fine & everything appears to be fine. WMC sometimes open, but then crash & reboot after i try to change a menu. very annoying.

someone suggested this was related to Intel Quick Resume. However, this problem exists when i have this both on & off.

Additionally, I have had issues with random "wakeups" that typically occur in the middle of the night... thus waking me up. ugh.

do a search online...you will fine that me & you are not the only ones with this problem... appears to be a Vista issue.

At this point, i have given up on sleep, and just do a hard shutdown at night....not the ideal situation... but best i got at this point (i really dont want to leave my machine on 24hrs/day, when i only use it for 3hrs/day).
interesting read:
http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/vistas...akeup-support/

This may not have anything to do with the BadAxe2 at all, but instead be the nVidia Vista drivers. I see the sleep problem with my 8800GTX card and the 100.65 driver from nVidia. I put the beta 101.41 driver on my wife's machine last night --she has my old 7900 GT KO video card --and it seems to work better. Her rig is my guinea pig so I will see how it fares over the next week or so.

[argylesocks]

This may not have anything to do with the BadAxe2 at all, but instead be the nVidia Vista drivers. I see the sleep problem with my 8800GTX card and the 100.65 driver from nVidia. I put the beta 101.41 driver on my wife's machine last night --she has my old 7900 GT KO video card --and it seems to work better. Her rig is my guinea pig so I will see how it fares over the next week or so.

yeah, i read that in the release notes..and tried to load the drivers, but when i was doing it, nvidia says i dont have vista... ugh. not sure how to convince it that i actually am running vista. any ideas? i deleted the old drivers & then loaded the new, with no luck.

anyways, i hurd the drivers suck for games, so i may hold off a bit...

i wasnt thinking it was the XBX2, but rather vista, as the problem seems to effect alot of various hardware...

[sjoback]

Last week I thought my board had killed one memory stick (sitting in the second blue slot ) I tried all kinds of different things (higher voltage, lower timings) but it would not boot, the other stick was working just fine. So I tried it on my friends DFI infinity 975 and the "dead" stick posted just fine. Came back home popped it back in and it was working, ran orthos for 10 hours at stock speed and everything was fine.
Yesterday I shut down my computer; this morning it refused to boot. I wasn't getting usual 3 beeps (no memory error) but the board was not posting either. It seemed like it was restarting itself every 2-3 seconds. Took one memory stick out now it's posting again.

Did anyone experienced anything like this before?

Thanks for your input

I have a similar problem with my board, where I can only run with 2sticks. I am using Geil ddr2 800 4-4-4-12. I had one pair of 1gb sticks, and 1 pair of 512mb sticks. When I first installed all 4 sticks, everything seemed to work fine and I worked on my OC. Over a week or so, the system began to deteriorate. Eventually, with 4 sticks the system became unstable and sometimes wouldn't boot. With the 2gb sticks, I now have the system stable 378FSB for 22+hrs orthos large. When I added the additional 2 sticks, the system would crash in 10min.

I ended up returning the 512mb sticks. None of the sticks show any memory errors in memtest. Upping voltages with the 4 sticks made no difference (tried up to 2.4V and 1 or 2 spots up on the MCH). Currently running stock voltages for MCH, FSB, and using 2.2V for mem, and 1.425 for CPU. Have not tried any other brands/types of memory.

[GamingDaemon]

yeah, i read that in the release notes..and tried to load the drivers, but when i was doing it, nvidia says i dont have vista... ugh. not sure how to convince it that i actually am running vista. any ideas? i deleted the old drivers & then loaded the new, with no luck.

anyways, i hurd the drivers suck for games, so i may hold off a bit...

i wasnt thinking it was the XBX2, but rather vista, as the problem seems to effect alot of various hardware...

Hmmm, I have installed a couple of different released and beta versions of the nVidia drivers on 3 different Vista bxes, and never had it fail to recognize the OS. That's weird. You may want to try the beta 101.41, or move backward from 100.65.

WRT to speed, I haven't seen any slowness with the drivers at all. I can run Supreme Commander with the settings on full (16Q, 16x, high fidelity, etc.) and the thing just flies.

But I still have the sleep problem with Vista. I just don't use sleep. In fact, Vista boots so fast, I jsut shut down my PC when I'm not using it.

[argylesocks]

Hmmm, I have installed a couple of different released and beta versions of the nVidia drivers on 3 different Vista bxes, and never had it fail to recognize the OS. That's weird. You may want to try the beta 101.41, or move backward from 100.65.

WRT to speed, I haven't seen any slowness with the drivers at all. I can run Supreme Commander with the settings on full (16Q, 16x, high fidelity, etc.) and the thing just flies.

But I still have the sleep problem with Vista. I just don't use sleep. In fact, Vista boots so fast, I jsut shut down my PC when I'm not using it.

hmm. ill try again tonight or tomorrow. im on 100.65 right now.. no real problems other than the flickr every time the stupid User Account thing flashes up... anyone else annoyed with that?? im tempted to shut it off.

yeah.. i may just set up a task scheduled to shut off my computer at midnight... that way i can go to bed, but still record TV....

[GamingDaemon]

hmm. ill try again tonight or tomorrow. im on 100.65 right now.. no real problems other than the flickr every time the stupid User Account thing flashes up... anyone else annoyed with that?? im tempted to shut it off.

yeah.. i may just set up a task scheduled to shut off my computer at midnight... that way i can go to bed, but still record TV....

I don't get that flicker, but I do get the Texas Hold 'Em flicker, a well-known problem with the nVidia drivers. It's what most people try first as soon as they install the driver. That and then the sleep functionality.

I'll let you know how the 101.41 turns out on my wife's machine. She doesn't really do anything but search the web and email, but I have some games installed on her box to test things out.

[Maglin]

Well After about 3 weeks I've ran into the Killing memory issue. I had my sticks of DDR800 Ballistix D9's in slots 2&4 so I could get around the 3rd slot killing memory issue. Runnins solid for 3 weeks @ 4-4-4-10 @ 370 FSB on 4:5 divider. Today I got a BSOD and then wouldn't Post. Took out my stick in the 2nd bank and it Posted. Tried the second stick in the 1st bank and no post. It seems that the XBX2 has killed another stick of memory. I'm debating on returning the board for a 680i board.

Also I can't enter maintance mode either. I get the 3 Beeps for no memory when tring to enter maintance mode. I love this set-up when it's operational but if it's going to be killing ram something is definitly messed up.

[Zucker2k]

Well After about 3 weeks I've ran into the Killing memory issue. I had my sticks of DDR800 Ballistix D9's in slots 2&4 so I could get around the 3rd slot killing memory issue. Runnins solid for 3 weeks @ 4-4-4-10 @ 370 FSB on 4:5 divider. Today I got a BSOD and then wouldn't Post. Took out my stick in the 2nd bank and it Posted. Tried the second stick in the 1st bank and no post. It seems that the XBX2 has killed another stick of memory. I'm debating on returning the board for a 680i board.

Also I can't enter maintance mode either. I get the 3 Beeps for no memory when tring to enter maintance mode. I love this set-up when it's operational but if it's going to be killing ram something is definitly messed up.

The possibility of you having a bad stick of RAM is higher than the XBX2 actually killing your RAM. If the XBX2 killed RAM as some users want us to believe, this thread would have been full of users experiencing this problem. My bet is that you have a bad stick of RAM. I have ALWAYS run my RAM in slots 1 and 3 and have NEVER had a problem. How do you explain that? My RAM is in my sig. If on the other hand, you mean that the XBX2 kills Corsair Ballistix D9s specifically, then it becomes an INCOMPATIBILITY issue, in which case I'd recommend you contact the RAM manufacturer so they can warn unwary customers about the issue. They may even be able to fix the issue with an SPD release, and/or work with intel to fix the problem in a future bios release.

[Zucker2k]

411fsb, 266/533 3-3-3-1 at 2.35v 24/7 results in:

Read: 10350 MB/s
Write: 7515 MB/s
Copy: 7420 MB/s
Latency: 41,6 ns

Nice sticks. Are yours the 667: 3-3-3-8, or 800: 4.4.4.10?

[GamingDaemon]

Not that this thread is about RAID, but there certainly has been quite the discussion about it here recently. So now my curiosity is piqued. I'm happy with my 1 SATA2 320GB HD, but was wondering just how much speed improvement I would see if I went to RAID 0, and is it worth it? i know that the only real bottleneck I have no is my disc speed, so how much would it help?

[Speederlander]

No one answered my earlier question about 30 pages back.

How is the on-board sound compared to, say, a Creative X-Fi? This is for watching movies and gaming.

[GamingDaemon]

No one answered my earlier question about 30 pages back.

How is the on-board sound compared to, say, a Creative X-Fi? This is for watching movies and gaming.

I don't have any experience with the Creative X-FI, but I can speak to the on-board sound. I jsut have 2 speakers and a sub and it sounds awesome. I have nice sized house, and when I play Company of Heroes at night, I have to lower the volume lest I wake my little one. Does this help?

[Maglin]

Just got off the phone with Intel and they say as does the website that the XBX2 doesn't support memory over 1.9v. Kind of strange IMO.

None the less. I'm going to RMA the memory and go again. I might kept them as close to 2.0v as possible. I love the board and performance. Not being able to go into maint mode in the BIOS is a little strange. I'm worried about even flashing the BIOS as If I can't get into it to turn off watch dog I would be pretty much stuck at stock. When the new memory gets here I'll see how it does.

[purplehaze]

my system just froze in the middle of playing company of heroes and the video card went into 640-480 mode, restarted and said the system wont post. I dont know whats going on here.

i mildly overclocked my e6300 to 2.8 ghz on the ballistix tracer memory running at 667 speeds and it locked up.

did i set the voltage wrong or something. i basically copied supertim0r's settings on the first page

[jmpage2]

Not that this thread is about RAID, but there certainly has been quite the discussion about it here recently. So now my curiosity is piqued. I'm happy with my 1 SATA2 320GB HD, but was wondering just how much speed improvement I would see if I went to RAID 0, and is it worth it? i know that the only real bottleneck I have no is my disc speed, so how much would it help?

Anandtech did a great article about a year ago that investigated the "speed improvements" of running RAID 0 vs. running a single drive. They looked at the high speed WD Raptor 15K discs and put them against slower drives like the 7200RPM Seagate Barricudas.

The result? Virtually ZERO speed improvements with RAID 0 in games or regular windows applications.

So unless your box is running a web server or database, I would recommend that if anything you go to RAID 1 so that you have a little extra insurance in the event a drive goes out on you.

[Speederlander]

I don't have any experience with the Creative X-FI, but I can speak to the on-board sound. I jsut have 2 speakers and a sub and it sounds awesome. I have nice sized house, and when I play Company of Heroes at night, I have to lower the volume lest I wake my little one. Does this help?

That's promising. Anyone have thoughts on full surround for gaming and movies? Clear, clean and good?

[jmpage2]

Hmmm, I have installed a couple of different released and beta versions of the nVidia drivers on 3 different Vista bxes, and never had it fail to recognize the OS. That's weird. You may want to try the beta 101.41, or move backward from 100.65.

WRT to speed, I haven't seen any slowness with the drivers at all. I can run Supreme Commander with the settings on full (16Q, 16x, high fidelity, etc.) and the thing just flies.

But I still have the sleep problem with Vista. I just don't use sleep. In fact, Vista boots so fast, I jsut shut down my PC when I'm not using it.

I think it really depends on the game. I've seen benchmarks for some games that take as much as a 50% performance hit when running under Vista.

I run BF2142 under Vista with the release version Nvidia drivers on my 8800 and enjoy a nice solid 99 frame rate in the game. It runs buttery smooth in single player, but I get a lot of lags/hiccups when playing multi-player even though the framerate counter never drops below about 50fps. It definitely feels like driver/OS interaction issues going on. Also if I turn up all of the details in BF2142 I've had some weird application crashes, etc, that I suspect are driver related (seeing as the rig is stable in testing for up to 12 hours with no errors).