Gigabyte MA790FX DQ6

[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..

[Majmac]

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..

From what I can just remember, it used to be that computers overclocked better under Win98 than under XP. I think that each succeeding release adds an extra level of complexity that means a previous-stable overclock cannot be maintained.

[Daveburt714]

Hey Aussie, seems like you've had the Gigabyte board longer than I have, have you played with the "AutoExpress" features in Bios?

This is a very preliminary result, but it seems like setting the CPU Optimization function to enabled does help stability..

I'm still stuck at around 230ht, but it just seems to run a little smoother/more stable.



I do worry a little about the way this board handles CPU v's. My CPU is actually set at 1.325 in bios, and without load it will run close to that, but as you can see it's pushing 1.4 under full load (running Prime 4 core).... I may be a wuss, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that.

It may very well be a bios thing, but the K9A2 didn't seem to get squirley on the HT Ref clock until 250.