Gigabyte MA790FX DQ6

[BertM]

i just tried lowering the drivestrengths, result is even a lower crash frequency.
first i need better cooling before i can go further with higher fsb and higher cpu voltage.
3.07ghz is about the max i get stable with this small air cooled heathsink.

[drunkenmaster]

can anyone tell me exactly what settings the green button(black/yellow/red circle around it) changes?

something to do with errata fix at all? I have a 3870x2 in the system and from stock bios settings with tlb enabled, in the final f3c i think bios(ds5 not the dq6) i get a poop cpu/3dmark score 10-10.5k. from bios i disable the errata fix and i get to windows, basically the same score. If i open up amd overdrive and set green button from black to yellow and apply, i can't actually see a single damn setting change, but after that i run 3dmark and it jumps up 800 points or so on sm2 and sm3, and cpu score from 2900ish to 3100 ish. Is bios option not really disabling the errata fix and AOD is when on a "boost" setting?

Whats the best settings for benching ati cards these days on 3dmark, 06 mostly. I tried the mipmaps to highest performance and it seems to up sm2 score but sm3 score seems to drop a lot, while on the first notch up from highest performance i get a decent boost to sm2, and only a slight drop to sm3.


Seem to have lots of booting issues with this setup with a 9600be when overclocking from bios. i can occasionally get 220 or 230mhz htt from bios but changing other stuff seems to cause it to crap out and need a cmos clearing before it will boot again. where from windows AOD is doing a great job so far, occasional lockup but cpu multi, htt seem to be doing pretty well, aswell as voltage setting changes.

What are people cooling with, i didn't have a spare decent cpu cooler so went with the stock, didnt' want to attach watercooling yet as i was using bits from my last system which had died and wasn't sure what had died, so wanted to be able to switch stuff out/pull it apart quickly. how are people doing with stock cooler, i've got the odd bench done at 2.7-2.75Ghz, cant' get higher, gets warm but not crazy hot. guess i might try it again with watercooling and see how it goes, then on to some real gaming and see how it plays, tbh should be as fast as any intel setup when gpu limited i'd expect, but wondering how stable it will be without the errata fix on, if i need to enable it will real gaming performance drop, if so might look into rma'ing it.

[Aussie FX]

I'm not sure why bios is not disabling the errata fix. It does on mine.
Try an everest mem bench, that will show if it's disabled or not.

No idea about setting 3dmark 06 for highest score.

Overclocking Phenom isn't easy atm, so a lot of patience is required. IMC speed can be an issue over 2ghz.
I'm using a 6000+ cooler, I too have wc here but I don't really need it.
You shouldn't need to enable the tlb fix. The chances of it happening are almost none and if you don't use virtualisation you will never see it. It just isn't an issue. People here have tried to invoke it but can't.

[KTE]

can anyone tell me exactly what settings the green button(black/yellow/red circle around it) changes?

TLB caching/boosting. See here for the button effects + Ganged Vs Unganged DCT mode: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...&postcount=950

What are people cooling with,

Stock cooler with 1/3 reused paste.

Get decent cooling, it'll clock stable/bench higher MHz better. I've ran out of 2 tubes of paste and don't really want to buy another anymore hence why I've not attached a better cooler yet. Try staying sub 51C/1.39V loaded, I start getting random instability at those parameters at any setting.

[justapost]

TLB caching/boosting. See here for the button effects + Ganged Vs Unganged DCT mode:

A german forum mentioned that it does also enable so called AutoXpress extentions, googled that word and it seems to be pci-express/ht related stuff must do more research.

[KTE]

We have the AutoXpress option in the BIOS and it didn't seem to improve anything in the one or two instances I tested it.

[Aussie FX]

Talking of bios, mine locks up constantly. I just did 7 resets trying to change my boot order. It's as stable as a rock in windows.
Anyone know what's going on here, or better still how to fix it.

Using f4b f3 final was also giving me a headache.

[Aussie FX]

Bingo there is provision to change the nb multiplier in the F4B bios, but it doesn't work. Is that correct?

[drunkenmaster]

yeah, i can be 100% solid in windows now(since found my p35 gigabyte board decided to start killing memory, 3gigs down ) but quite often, infact i'd say more than 50% of the time boot either gets stuck at dmi installation, or it cycles for a while before even getting to first boot up screen with bios info, and then will ask to boot last known good config. happens way to much. from what i recall as long as settings were stable enough for windows booting was fine with original bios with board which i think was just F1. on f3 final at the mo and booting is complete pain.

still can't work out what aod is changing that i haven't done in bios myself that can cause a drop in performance. meh, will track it down eventually.

[Aussie FX]

Thanks for the reply

Sounds like bios then doesn't it.

[AlabamaCajun]

Talking with a Gigatech yesterday, he blamed my GSkills. He said to get Corsair, Micron or Kingston RAM, I pulled teh trigge on Corsairs.

I think the TRC (Row Cycle) number is borked. Look in your JEDEC settings for 1000-1066 it's in the 40s. When you overclock from 800 settings you can't push TRC above 26. This seems to play a big role in giving refresh cycles enough waits to provide the time needed to get all the cells back to charge. Raising the voltage improves it but at what expense.

I had a hard crash and was unable to get anything stable. GA-Tech told me to pull the battery trick, set first to reset to default then optimized and start over. I did than and also dropped in some cheap ram. At first it would not post. I dropped to a single stick booted set CMOS then shutdown for the second sticks return. Upon boot it say the RAM and proceeded to install Vista. I wrestled with the board on several occasions and from what I can see. If you bork an OC, chances are RAM timing is screwed even though it looks normal in the settings. What I suspect it a stored value from learned settings eventually comes back to bite your tail when you progressively OC. From these experiences, you have to pull the RAM and drop one stick of different timing RAM to get the number(s) to correct settings.
Anyone want to back up or prove this wrong, go for it. I would just like to see my board work.

[KTE]

still can't work out what aod is changing that i haven't done in bios myself that can cause a drop in performance. meh, will track it down eventually.

The AOD button? Or a half enabled patch?

What I suspect it a stored value from learned settings eventually comes back to bite your tail when you progressively OC. From these experiences, you have to pull the RAM and drop one stick of different timing RAM to get the number(s) to correct settings.
Anyone want to back up or prove this wrong, go for it. I would just like to see my board work.

This is exactly what happened with my Phenoms on both a DFI and an MSI. Esp. if you use AOD to get a failed oc, when it reboots, the BIOS doesn't clear the settings, so you fail bootup until you clear CMOS, but the problem is, *some* BIOS settings don't get cleared even with the battery out unless you leave the system off without power for over 8-9 hours. Then you can attempt to boot with minimal components installed and just one DIMM and it should work fine... until you repeat such a procedure. Many times that'll kill your Windows install totally, I mean you won't be able to recover your HD docs which makes me think, it's actually the PCIe gettin stuck at highr than 100MHz which causes these problems in the first place

I am still working on it with the devs to see if its a BIOS issue but I have tried clocking using AOD at time, closed it and restarted it to see the PCIe at plus 120MHz, sometimes reading 150-190MHz and then crashing.

[Aussie FX]

I have just noticed that cpuz 1.43 & 1.44 are both reporting my PCIe slot running at 8x. Has anyone else noticed this.
I can't find anything in bios to change it. It's currently set on auto.

I'm using F4B bios.

[BertM]

with cpuz 1.44.1 , bios F4B and 5000BE i have pcie on 16x.
2 of the pcie slots are 8x and the other 2 are 16x.
you have the card not in the first slot near the cpu?

[Aussie FX]

Yeah it's in the top slot

[Daveburt714]

Hi Folks, I just picked up a 790FX-DS5.
How similar is this for OC'ing to the DQ6?

I guess what I'm asking is can I use the info from this thread on the DS5?
Any BIOS preference using a Phenom BE?

Thanks in advance.... Dave

[Aussie FX]

Hi Dave, yep it's pretty much the same as a DQ6. F4B is the latest Beta bios and it's nice and stable.

I still can't get my pci-e slot to run at 16x. I ran optimised defaults in bios to try to fix it - no luck.

Does anyone know where you change the pci-e speeds on this mobo?
I'm stuffed if I can find it

[Aussie FX]

Ok I found the problem with the pci-e speed being low.
It was the fingers on the card. I inserted my Evga7900GT and it came up running at 16x, so I got out an alcohol swab and wiped down the fingers on the 8800GTX. Bingo it now works at 16x.
One thing that is troubling me though is my 3dmark06 score. sm 2.0 was 4312 points and sm 3.0 was 4929. This card is supposed to be faster than an ultra (it needs a 50mhz tweak to the memory) I thought I should be scoring higher in those two results.
It is an old windows install with 65+ processes working so I don't know if that's the answer to the low scores.

[destsh]

F4F is available for download from Gigabyte:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/M...ProductID=2690

[Lightman]

F4F is available for download from Gigabyte:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/M...ProductID=2690

Thanks!

Waiting for my Phenom ....

[Daveburt714]

Thanks for the Info Aussie, and the BIOS link Destsh..

Hey Aussie, if that card gives you trouble again, try using a pencil eraser on the contacts works much better than alcohol IME...

I was running an MSI K9A2 but it died during a BIOS flash, so I bought the DS5... So far it seems like a nice board. The bios features are pretty good although I do miss the option to up the NB V's.

I've only had the board for a couple days. If you guys have any tips on these to help the OC (other than the obvious lower NB/HT speeds) I'm all ears!

I haven't done alot of testing yet, but it seems like the "Disable TLB option" on this board actually fully works! Can anyone verify this for me?

[Aussie FX]

Thanks for the Info Aussie, and the BIOS link Destsh..

Hey Aussie, if that card gives you trouble again, try using a pencil eraser on the contacts works much better than alcohol IME...

I was running an MSI K9A2 but it died during a BIOS flash, so I bought the DS5... So far it seems like a nice board. The bios features are pretty good although I do miss the option to up the NB V's.

I've only had the board for a couple days. If you guys have any tips on these to help the OC (other than the obvious lower NB/HT speeds) I'm all ears!

I haven't done alot of testing yet, but it seems like the "Disable TLB option" on this board actually fully works! Can anyone verify this for me?

NP Dave.
I have found I have a wall at 233htt that I can't overcome, although I haven't really thrown voltage at it yet. I have given it 1.35v which makes no difference to 1.25v.
I'm waiting for summer to finish here in Aus before I try 1.4-1.5v as I get insane ambient temps where I live. For example it was close to 50deg C today
I am happy to inform you that "Disable TLB" actually works on this board. You should notice that when you disable it in bios and then open AOD that the TLB button (top right) is yellow.

As far as tips go, it's pretty much business as usual with Phenom, you can lower the NB multi in bios which helps me get to 233. I'm not sure if MSI give that option.

Sorry to hear you killed your K9A2, My 1st DQ6 died with a bios flash too. Gigabyte replaced it with no questions asked. When flashing I would advise doing it with Q Flash. If you choose this method make sure @bios is removed from your system This is really important, you will kill the board if this is installed while using Q Flash.
I think mine died because of a corrupt file I downloaded. It was more than likely the bios was corrupted during the DL process as others used the same bios without problems. Anyway it killed the backup bios too, so that's why GB think it might have been corrupted.
Let us know how you get on with F4F if you use it.

BTW, usually I use an eraser, this time I couldn't find one so alcohol was the next best thing.

[Daveburt714]

NP Dave.
I have found I have a wall at 233htt that I can't overcome, although I haven't really thrown voltage at it yet. I have given it 1.35v which makes no difference to 1.25v.

I managed to hit 240htt using AOD at stock v's (240x11x8x8), while running 4 instances of Prime95. I played with it there for awhile and it seemed stable so I slowly bumped it up 1 step at a time, it finally locked up when I hit 250. May be the limit of the cores, I never got it that high on the MSI (2.55 limit) but I was running Vista on that machine. I'm on XP now.

The wierd thing was, when I applied those settings (240htt) in BIOs Windows hung at the start screen. I've only had the board a couple of days, but one thing I noticed was CPU-z and Everest shows my CPU @ 1.28v's, while Bios and AOD show it as 1.25v's, so I'm taking it kind of slow...

I'm waiting for summer to finish here in Aus before I try 1.4-1.5v as I get insane ambient temps where I live. For example it was close to 50deg C today

Whew, thats warm!! It's winter up here ambient isn't a problem..

Sorry to hear you killed your K9A2, My 1st DQ6 died with a bios flash too. Gigabyte replaced it with no questions asked. When flashing I would advise doing it with Q Flash. If you choose this method make sure @bios is removed from your system This is really important, you will kill the board if this is installed while using Q Flash.

Glad I didn't install the @BIOS utility then. Because I did flash the F4f's using Q-Flash. Just my perliminary impression of the new Bios is that they don't play as well with AOD as the F3 version, other than that they seem pretty solid but I haven't had a chance to do much testing yet...

[Aussie FX]

These boards have great voltage regulation so cpuz is reporting correctly.
AOD just reads the vid setting from the bios. So you will get a slight overvolt at any setting, that's what I have found.
At least it's not a huge droop like Asus...

250htt sounds pretty good to me.
I wonder if Vista is giving me the 233 wall, I have seen a lot of guys get stuck there.

I have found AOD and F4B bios play reasonably well together, I get the occasional bsod but it could be worse.

[Daveburt714]

250htt sounds pretty good to me.
I wonder if Vista is giving me the 233 wall, I have seen a lot of guys get stuck there.

Most of my testing on the MSI was done under Vista64. I only had a few hours under XP before the board died, but it did seem to offer better OC potential. If you don't have too much invested in your Vista install and you have a copy of XP it would probably be worth the switch.

I played with the HT Ref clock quite a bit last night, and I can still get close to 250 using AOD, but trying to get it to boot from BIOS above 235 was pretty much impossible, it may be a limit of my board...

I even cranked up the HTT/HTR/SB voltages and it still seemed to hit a wall..
I know the chip will do 250, cause 250x10x8x8 was my everyday stable on the K9A2... Just thought I'd let ya know my experiences..