Official MSI P7N Diamond (780i) Discussion/Review/Overclock/Guide/BIOS Thread

[Cal]

Hi

loaded bios 1.18 again today and reinstalled vista so far so good i have installed all my hardware apart from my ram im using 1 stick of 512mb pny ram (5.5.5.18 1.85v) going to try my ram in a mo after i have made a back up for quick fix if vista dies on me, forgot all about it before.
Funny thing is when i tried to install vista yesterday i couldnt finish the install it would die at the last min and ask to redo it, tried all sort in the end re-flashed my bios still with the same bios 1.0 and it installed this is why i updated to 1.18 just to see if things work better this time round as maybe just maybe i had a bad flash last time and it was that giving me a hard time.

With 1.18 i know its now using real volts not useless numbers so for TERM and GTL what sort of volts should i aim for i think im ok with the TERM more volts holds better FSB but im still guessing with the GTL volts im looking for a 400fsb clock nothing to high just yet
My VID (taken with core temp) is 1.3125 im sorry to say so its not the best chip around.

As always cheers for any help

[AaronYuri]

With 1.3125 you're looking at about 1.55v for 3.6GHz. So forget about that. 1.40v should get you 3.33GHz. Just have a tweak and increase the voltages when needed.

[Cal]

Cool thanks for the info i thought i would need lots of volts to get anywhere
Im now using my other ram only things i have had to do is set the speed,volts,timing myself to get it to load into windows so im now running at 1333/800
Ill try and keep the ram at this speed and up the cpu

cheers

[theYipster]

1.3125 is about as high as VIDs go for Q6600 G0s. For B3s, it's right about average, but keep in mind that very few B3s can run at 3.6ghz. As Aaron said, you'll need quite a bit of voltage to maintain 3.6ghz. While not impossible, you'll great cooling (i.e. water) to make it happen.

[Cal]

1.3125 is about as high as VIDs go for Q6600 G0s. For B3s, it's right about average, but keep in mind that very few B3s can run at 3.6ghz. As Aaron said, you'll need quite a bit of voltage to maintain 3.6ghz. While not impossible, you'll great cooling (i.e. water) to make it happen.

Sorry im running a 6850 i will redo my sig
Im also using phase change so temp isnt a big prob. I have just done a small 3.6 run and it would seem it was the NB volt that had to be bumped more than the cpu i set the cpu to 1.55 and the NB to 1.45 and got a bsod so i upped the NB to 1.5 and it went into windows just did a quick 40min prime and alls good so far ill back the cpu volts off a little tomorrow and prime again for the full 8 to 12 hours

cheers

[Cal]

Ok now running at 3.8 (1700) and looking at my vcore i could be having these probs down to the vdroop never seen one this big idle is 1.6v load drops right down to 1.544 hope there is a trick to fix this soon

[loonym]

New official 1.1 bios at msi date 5/21/08

I haven't tried it yet.

[Cal]

Nice one i was on the site last night waht time did you see the bios i must of just missed it

[loonym]

I'm a bit of a night owl so it's not unusual for me to be up at odd hours. On the surface 1.1 appears to have all the voltage options and settings of beta .118, running 3.6ghz with a q6600 with good stability so far. Still haven't gotten to the yorkfield testing but I'll make time soon.

[Cal]

I'm a bit of a night owl so it's not unusual for me to be up at odd hours. On the surface 1.1 appears to have all the voltage options and settings of beta .118, running 3.6ghz with a q6600 with good stability so far. Still haven't gotten to the yorkfield testing but I'll make time soon.

Nice one
After running mine at 3.8 i found it was stable in windows but after turning it off for a few hours it wouldnt boot up again untill i took my ram out and put my 512 stick back in might try the 1.1 bios and see how it goes if its still no good ill look at rma'ing my ram only thing is memtest shows no errors in the ram

Good to see a official bios come out i was getting a little worried there wouldnt be anything other than beta bios coming from msi

[loonym]

boost the vdimm ref voltage to 1/2 whatever you run your ram at and see if that helps?

[Cal]

boost the vdimm ref voltage to 1/2 whatever you run your ram at and see if that helps?

Thanks Dude

Testing that now one stick at a time I have kept my cpu settings as it seems stable with the 512 stick.

In truth i have never changed the Vdimm Ref from auto as i didnt know what it did.
Would be very cool if that fixed my probs as im running @ 3825mhz with only 1.312v (load) instead of 1.56v

cheers

[loonym]

The setting seemed to help me in earlier bios when I had minor coldboot issues. Dunno really what it does either, I just make it up as I go along

[Cal]

lol a man after my own heart

testing my ocz ram didnt go well locked up after 15 mins of load testing. running memtest now to see what comes up

[loonym]

I don't really have a similar cpu to yours but if it will help I'll take a photo of my q6600 settings from bios and post it up.

[Cal]

Thanks for the offer but like you say i dont have the same cpu as you i think you would be going to trouble for nothing but nice of you to offer

Cheers


I have not seen anyone with the same mobo and cpu yet think i got on this mobo with a old cpu really everyone is with the q6600 or the new 45 chips i only went with the 6850 coz the 4 cores on the q6600 would have been to much for my LS DOH

[dlong500]

I have been searching the web for any information on the P7N Diamond's (or any other 780i based motherboard) support for running multiple Areca PCIe RAID cards.

I haven't found much information so far, but I'm worried because of problems other motherboards (with different chipsets) have had running RAID cards in some of the PCIe slots. It seems that many of the manufacturers have coded their BIOS in such a way that the PCIe 16x slots work reliably only for graphics cards (even though the whole point of PCIe is supposed to be a unified interface for any type of device).

Can anyone here comment on experiences running multiple PCIe RAID cards (especially Areca cards)? I would love to get this board if I could run 1 graphics card and three Areca RAID cards (like the ARC-1220).

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[andrew2004gto]

anyway i was just bored thought i would go to msi see if they had a bios and i have updated it, and i have a q6600 and im running 3.6ghz at 450fsb perfect stable and before i could never even get it to turn on, so just to let u guys know

[bluspikez]

Hey all, long time lurker, first time poster. Just figured I should share my results for my overclock. I got my E8400 (C0 Q808A179, VID of 1.0375v), up to 3.825gHz. I stopped there, didn't really push much farther, but I know it will be able to do better. This was on the P07 bios, am now on 1.1 and messing around with the settings in it.

My rig:
P7N Diamond
E8400 w/ TRUE cooling (turned 90 degrees)
2x2gb Crucial Ballistix DDR800 (4-4-4-12 @ 2.2v, still tweaking for 1T)
2xECS 8800GT's SLi'ed (w/ Acrtic Cooling Accelero S1's)
Thermaltake 700w Modular PSU
Antec 900

The settings I used:
FSB: 1700
DDR Freq: 850
CPU Mult: 9
DDR Timings: 4-4-4-12-2T
Vcore: +0.2v (can surely be lower, still tweaking it)
NB Volts: 1.4v
CPU GTL: 25/0.87 (still tweaking...)
FSB Term: 63/1.313 (still tweaking this too..)
All other settings AUTO

With P07, I am prime stable (9hr run) at 3.8, but can't get 4.05 (450fsb) to be stable. Not really sure what I need to tweak, but I am still messing around with it. Temps are a steady 55C-ish under load (prime 95) on the cores with these settings. The same holds true with the 1.1 bios.
On another note, does anyone know what the SLi memory setting does? Kinda curious as to what it does.

Oh yeah, and kudos to a great thread. This helped me decide on this mobo when I was building up this compy.

[Vladik]

Same as the previous thread, I'm running at 3.75 stable,
FSB: 1666
DDR Freq: 833
CPU Mult: 9
DDR Timings: 5-5-5-15-2T
Vcore: +0.15v
DRAM voltage: 2.1
NB Volts: 1.35
FSB Term: 1.25

I'm on the 1.1B8 BIOS. I could boot with incredibely low voltages, but it wasn't stable. Failed everest stress tests at about 15 minutes. WIth these settings I can run it for a few hours, no error. It's the queerest thing, for a few days I've been trying to boot at 3.6Ghz, there has to be a FSB hole because it won't boot at 1600FSB. Any lower or higher and it's fine which is dissapointing because thats my goal clock speed, but 3.75 is fine too.

[Kano1977]

Anyone going to buy a intel nehalem when they are released? I am but it going to put a whole in my pocket i guess you have to buy a new motherboard and memory

[theYipster]

Like the introduction of Core 2, the release of Nehelem will likely be a game-changing event. I'm very much looking forward to it, assuming info about them remains positive. What will be most interesting is how nVidia and SLI will fit into the Nehelem world. Will nVidia be able to produce a competitive Nehelem board? One positive of the memory controller moving to the processor, I suppose, is that there is less to screw up with the Northbridge -- a real net positive for the Intel nForce world.

[Vladik]

" * 1.1x to 1.25x the single-threaded performance or 1.2x to 2x the multithreaded performance at the same power level.
* 30% lower power usage for the same performance.
"
I can play Battlefield 2 on high, crysis on high. I think I'll pass on the Nehalem for now, and quite possibely past the Sandy Bridges. I know new games are going to have incredibely high requirements but the game developers aren't going to leave us in the dust. I don't feel the need to upgrade to Nehalem when I just purchased a Wolfdale.

[GOLDFISH]

Hi everybody!
I just upgraded the bios to the new official version 1.1 and it nearly gave me a heartattack.
When the update program had just finished the prosess the computer rebooted itself (prob because my ram runs on 2.1volts, and by reseting bios setting the computer rebooted)

What's new you might ask? Well, new problems.
My computer won't boot if my dvd is 1st boot-priority, it just reboots to post in an endless cycle. I just "upgraded" 10 min ago, so haven't found anything else yet.

BTW, the REF voltages are not -63 - 80 values anymore, they changed it into volts instead of "just numbers".

Best regard, the GOLDFISH

[AaronYuri]

I should have some spare time Wednesday or Saturday. So I will start tweaking, once again.

I'll post my findings once I'm finished.