Phenom 9500 w/ MSI K9A2 Platinum

[KTE]

Quick update 2:

You see my work boss is pretty good. Let's me bring in my system to work if I can get my job finished early.

Today, only once OverDrive worked and never crashed. BIOS voltages for all except RAM worked once. HT multi 3x worked once. WPCREDIT worked once to set NB multi 5x. Sadly RAM did not allow more than 1.9V and auto which is multi 1:2... but still, I have some quick new results before BIOS change. Read on further below...

The BIOS is very bad. Everything is to do with the IMC(NB). It controls yur RAM ratio. You can set 1:1 and 1:2 and that's it. Any higher and no go. You need to give the IMC more volts for it (mine only allowed it once). I mean, how many of you can run DDR2 at 1.9V tWTR 6? Yep, the BIOS only allows this value and this is very low -> will crap out before most 1.9V RAM can reach 820MHz.

Sorry for the stupid question, but how do you think Phenom would be for everyday use with a small OC? I was thinking of the 5000 BE or this, and im really thinking about the 2 extra cores

Inquiry isn't stupid bro. You have nothing to be sorry about.

You can run 2300/2400/2450 quite easily stock volts stable. Problem is RAM. Can your RAM bootup fine at 800-900 5-5-5-18 tWTR 6 @ 1.9V? FYI RAM is normally rated tWTR 10-14 at DDR2-800 2.1-2.2V. If yours can run tWTR a6 at 1.9V, then you can later drop timings from 3-3-3-3 to whatever and you should be OK. If not, then you'll have too many problems, probably not even a bootup.

More than 2.4-2.5GHz would start to get pretty unstable because of the IMC. They need to sort out IMC issues.

It seems you're using version 3.6 which doesn't support multithreading. You need to update it to version 3.7 (only patch is available, no stand-alone version exists).
http://www.povray.org/download/

Thanks mate. Yep, v3.6 is single threaded and I used it because 3.7 Beta was stuck at 4kB/s download the last I tried. I've just d/l 3.7 again for you now at same setup. There were two versions in there: one was povengine and one was povengine_sse2. I ran both:

POV-Ray 3.7


POV-Ray 3.7-SSE2


Power draw: 173-177W AC

IIRC stock QX6700 B3 gets ~2200 in that... ?

Here's some quick OC results:

PCIe = 110


PCIe = 172


PCIe = 195


Never gave any errors. Should be good for 3D benching.

2.6GHz to 2.86GHz



I was at 2.9GHz when I knew the RAM is going to bust any minute. Opened EVEREST fine. Opened CPU-Z fine. Opened Memset to change RAM timing to higher and on Apply-> it froze.

I hadn't even captured it yet. But I took a pic of it with phone. Here ya go:



If you want to see the volts, don't look at anything but these:

CPU VDDQ is VCore.
Mem VDDQ is VDIMM.
NB Core is what it says.
CPU HTT is HT voltage.

All of those are real BIOS values.
CPU VID isn't related to real VCore.

I set 1.480V VCore BIOS, 1.375V NB and 1.3V HT in BIOS. RAM remained auto at 1.9V. It reached 526 at 5-5-5-5/12 tWTR 6 at 1.9V. Not bad at all.

Some CPU-Z 1.42 validations:

2596MHz 472 5-5-5-5: http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=275584

2706MHz 492 5-5-5-5: http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=275586

2805MHz 510 5-5-5-5: http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=275588

Also, a request. Less of the PMs please. Make your queries or asks here, it's much better. Cheers.