How to set up GTL Ref Values for 45nm & 65nm

[Amurtigress]

truehighroller:

If you want to get somewhere, get to know what you are dealing with. There is no success without knowledge....be a real overclocker or leave it be. How do you want to draw your own conclusions if you don't want to know about what's going on on the lowest level while doing low level changes in the BIOS!?

...blind people talking about colors.

Mikeyakame:

I can tell from what you posted that you know your technology. I have had an electronics education myself and I have my devices here like DMM and a solder station of the more expensive kind, but so far I had no ways of taking a look at the in-depth specifications of Intel CPUs. My instinct led me to the following settings:

Q9300 C1/M1 on a ASUS P5Q3 Del. board (P45 based)

FSB: 460, CPU: 3450
VTT: 1.36V
VCore: 1.32V
GTL ref 0/2: 0.69x
GTL ref 1/3: 0.67x
CPU PLL: 1.58V
NB Volt: 1.28V

This puts my GTL references perfectly in the 0.8-1V range. 0.69x1.36V=0.9384V. Tho I wonder if I should try to get closer to 0.90 to have a safety margin.

During my testing phase of this new setup I had some latent instabilities that showed me how well towards stability I was when I was changing the GTL references by giving me more or less frequent calculation errors in Prime 95. This only resolved completely by putting the PCIe frequency from 100 to 101! 101 MHz gives me a way greater range of stable settings.

I've had a lot of hassle with this board, partially due to stupid memory timing defaults that ASUS seems to have taken STRAIGHT from the DDR2 versions of this board.

I seem to be hitting a FSB wall now at a bit above FSB 460.

Is there a way to circumvent it? I have had cases where I could boot the system at 480, but even more should be possible for my chip.

That's it for now.

Keep rolling folks, this is one of the most competent threads I've seen here!