To all Phenom users with x64bit OSes

[KTE]

Aye, glad you got the Phenom you've waited for.

There is one thing I haven't tested. How increasing CPU NB vcore affect stability. My board doesn't have an option to adjust it.

Lightman, how are you clocking high without feeding NB volts? Or are you dropping NB speed when you clock HT high?
Most Phenoms will need NB volts to clock decent using HT and all would require them to clock past 2.2GHz NB stable. My present one would crap out at 2GHz all first 5 weeks but now 2.214GHz at 1.250VID (1.232V) is something I can run fully stable. This again is weird, I made it very clear when I first got it that it would not boot plus 2GHz NB for 2 weeks and now after over 6 weeks of hard use and testing it runs fine 2.214GHz 1.250VID. I found it by chance too, didn't look for it because I didn't expect it from previous testing.

With regards to ES samples I think they are using different manufacturing parameters to make them clock faster. In other worlds if you will measure power consumption of AMD Phenom ES and retail Phenom at the same clocks I'm sure ES will use significantly more power. I saw this behavior in one or two reviews.

Gotta agree with you there. Something is iffy with ES samples which clock higher at lower volts, the power use in them is not like the ones I've had and that's 5 now. You can see the one I have in total system power use at 2.626GHz here after tweaking: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...12#post2810312

I must admit after almost 7 weeks with this chip (or more), I'm still not even started on it. The problem is, it reacts totally different at the beginning, to the middle, compared to after 6-7 weeks. So you have do redo everything again as I'm doing now for the nth time. Stable first 3-4 weeks is not stable later, with all my chips so far and of some others. The biggest oddity is, you might have 2.8GHz 100% stable for the first 3 weeks in all conditions you honestly tested but after that, one day, at a random attempt, you may find for 5-6 days that no matter what volts you cannot even boot the same MHz with the same OS, no modifications, same drivers, same everything. I am totally stumped, first time for me and I can't figure it out no matter how hard I've tried.

Then suddenly she makes a live connection to my dream to reveal to me she's still virgin and after some more... so I go at her once again.

I will mention one problem in stability though.. ATi drivers. For some reason or another, they crap out or become slightly corrupt after a few crashes and lockups, which make your system very unstable even if the CPU/RAM is stable.
In the link above that's my lowest volts fully stable so far, i.e. no problems whatsoever and I've tested very stringently this time due to the problems with many users including myself before. I've ran Gutsy Gibbon and Feisty Fawn on them before. I'm about to try running some VMs and then I'll try installing something 64b at those MHz to check it out. Here is what is my latest testing and it's fully stable so far (waiting for the idling freeze to occur): With CnQ.





This was not possible before (without the freeze) for over 7 weeks! But now I've been testing low volts for about 9 days and they are working much better than high volts.

All I can say is, just don't give up and make quick conclusions but work with it. Because it has shown consistently not to always behave the same and proven my findings wrong repeatedly. It's very strange and hard to predict.

Hot spot? Anyone with chilled water or sub-zero cooling to investigate that?

Unfortunately, I don't really want to guess where in the process the problem lies nor delve on what's been covered many times in the appropriate sections, it would be too random and juvenile a guess even though I know pretty much the little data we do have on K10h, but the problem with clocks is in the chip itself. Cold doesn't make a difference to mine for better clocks than air. I would assume it has something to do with the respective embedded channel stressors and the chip materials used at various gates. SiO2 dielectric will just be too thin, almost 3 atom layers thin at this level, which will leak immense current and also deplete (degrade) very quickly, experiencing the tunneling effect and in this situation, the electrons are not only in a particle behavioral state but as waves too, so there's no guarantee of controlled behavior over such a transistor - EM is also worst here (especially with increased voltage). A thicker metal gate and dielectric replacement would allow them to decrease FO MOS, latencies of various CPU subsystems, a combination of mix alloy stressors to increase FET drive ability and increase frequencies while keeping gate and source-drain channel leakage lower than at this node. That's my opinion.

I would install 64b to test right away if I had a spare drive here. Unfortunately I don't, all 7 are booked with crucial data. Maybe I can partition this one more and install Linux distro dual boot 64b now... hmm. Have left playing with Linux for a whole now. What's a good 64b Linux distro, good support for Phenom+RD790 and little hassles installing?
If it has a good manageable bootloader, it would be better. Don't want to mess with bootup hassles at this stage.