[Team.AU] Gigabyte EP45 EXTREME motherboard on test bench

[Bad213Boy]

God, if I bought a board that came with a northbridge water block, I'd toss it and buy a new one that supports at least 1/2" tubing. Makes me think of cheapThermaltake crap.

[dinos22]

God, if I had a board that came with a northbridge water block, I'd toss it and buy a new one that supports at least 1/2" tubing. Makes me think of cheapThermaltake crap.

why do you need "at least 1/2" tubing"

you must have fallen asleep about 5 years ago in watercooling section and woke up a minute before you posted that

1/2" cooling no longer means what it used to....watercooling loops these days are designed differently so that wider tubing does NOT impact on performance

have a read of some of the watercooling threads.

[Omastar]

you must have fallen asleep about 5 years ago in watercooling section and woke up a minute before you posted that

Oh Lordy.

[OBR]

Easy pretty rock stable at 600MHz with DualCore ...

[dinos22]

ok you got me stumped lol

how the heck did you do that hehehe

i'm having trouble posting at 500MHz let alone anything past that hahahah

[dinos22]

omg i need to find a good red faced smilie

i am just memtesting at 600*6
thanks OBR for extra motivation

[[XC] gomeler]

Nicely done, what was the issue?

[dinos22]

the issue was that i am a

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=380702

[Vivi]

now im dieng to know how you couldnt do 500 but now 640 :o
was it just some tweak you forgot? last time i worked with gigabyte i never tweaked PLL cuase it was called something lame like "TurboDriveThingy". so i was limited to 555 fsb (x48)

[T_M]

Come on Dino, tell us what you forgot

[dinos22]

>>> basically the trick is to get all the CPU volts right (subvolts i am talking about)
CPU termination (vTT)
CPU PLL
CPU Reference
CPU Reference2

>>> and also MCH vcore

>>> also 333 strap is important here...i'm running 1:1 for obvious reasons

>>> DDR2 board doesn't automatically adjust CPU ref and CPU ref2 when you adjust vTT .........i bumped these ref volts and the board started to cooperate

DDR3 board i think probably has this tuned better as T_M and Benny didn't mentioned that they had to resort to this kind of tweaking

It also seems that you should not have higher vTT volts than NB volts or you will lose FSB OC

here are the volt settings that let me boot to windows at 620MHz FSB (single channel) ....haven't tried higher

CPU termination (vTT)    1.42
CPU PLL                  1.72
CPU Reference            0.866
CPU Reference2           0.899

MCH core                 1.38

now i hit another snag
i am getting memtest errors even at 575MHz fsb in dual channel
more testing needed to figure up what's up with that

[OBR]

I am stuck at 605Mhz because Harddisk, if is FSB higher then 605MHz my system didnot find disk and windows. i tested every PCI clocks, but no success.

[dinos22]

try IDE HDD

[Alcibiades]

640FSB woohoo yeah baby that's what I'm talking about
wonder if the ocz pc9600 1200mhz sticks will do 1:1
with the fsb obviously at 600 and the multi @ 7 ?!?!?
that would be
cpu @4.2 fsb @600 ddr2 @ 1200 1:1 on air looks feasable and probable.
Ambient temp willing of course

Since I'm waiting on the CoolerMaster Cosmos S and the Gainward 8800GT 1GB GS
Should I upsize that to a 9800GTX 512MB ??
Bear in mind my friend doesn't game at all. But things could change.
I hope Gainward produce more Golden Sample casings like the 8800GT 'cause for me, best design ever.

[dinos22]

640FSB woohoo yeah baby that's what I'm talking about
wonder if the ocz pc9600 1200mhz sticks will do 1:1
with the fsb obviously at 600 and the multi @ 7 ?!?!?
that would be
cpu @4.2 fsb @600 ddr2 @ 1200 1:1 on air looks feasable and probable.
Ambient temp willing of course

hi mate

yeah it's doing well

600 stable for 24/7 >> as things currently are i don't think so

for benching >> good chance heh

thing is my dual channel FPS drops a bit because i am at an extremely low vNB considering the FSB i am hitting here......if i can somehow convince the board to give me more

[Alcibiades]

600 stable for 24/7 >> as things currently are i don't think so

for benching >> good chance heh

Cool, But as things stand is early days yet, and from what I've seen here, I have faith this board soon or a few bios revs down the road will get the GOLD.

vNB MOD anyone?

[dinos22]

Cool, But as things stand is early days yet, and from what I've seen here, I have faith this board soon or a few bios revs down the road will get the GOLD.

vNB MOD anyone?

no mods necessary
this board has 1.8v available in bios

the thing is you should have a quick glance at the notes i made..........vNB and vFSB are in a bit of a relationship so it's hard to use one without the other

[Benny Lodewijk]

nice result Dinos22....i wonder why no CPU Reference and CPU Reference2 option in EP45T-Extreme F3A BIOS ?

[dinos22]

nice result Dinos22....i wonder why no CPU Reference and CPU Reference2 option in EP45T-Extreme F3A BIOS ?

ah interesting
have you tried using CTRL+F1 in case it's hidden

[dinos22]

wow very happy with intel RMA process
just got a replacement CPU in a couple of days
how good is that

it's a good stepping too lol

E8500 Q740A479

[Benny Lodewijk]

ah interesting
have you tried using CTRL+F1 in case it's hidden

sure i did try CTRL + F1

[dinos22]

send a request to include in the next update as it may help reach even higher clocks


btw i got an email with F5x bios so will give that a shot soon as well

[Leeghoofd]

Dinos possible to do Everest bandwith at 9 x 450FSB -1081Mhz ram check and 8 x 500FSB ram at 1000/1200 with the E8400...wanna know the PL's and how it compares to the competition

thx in advance

[dinos22]

i've only done some 585 or 590 benchmarks in 32M and i had to use PL11

not very good at the moment because i cannot use high volts for NB to bring PL down..............................i've already communicated with engineers to see if they can do something anyways

[Alcibiades]

Motherboard arrived yesterday, still waiting on case and gpu,
but I just upsized the gainward 8800gt 1gb to a Ge Cube 4870 for $24
bypassing the 8800gts, 9800gtx and 4850! Good timing
Now the long wait till July 10th