[MemoryReaction] G.Skill F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ - Low in cost, high in speed!

[concretefire]

Yeah Enjoy, as I was typing my "edited" version, I was thinking that you may have already read just my original request for help. I'm sorry. Like I said, I honestly wasn't trying to be funny or in any way trying to be hard to get along with , with my second post to you.

(^ the only reason I bring this up is because.......for whatever reason.....I seem to find a way to ALWAYS come across to people IRL as well as forums as being somewhat dickish. I'm not that way at all. I just have a knack for coming across that way. I've learned to accept that fact, even though it's far from what I am really trying to portray)

To Big.....yeah, I know, posting my system specs was/is a critical factor of information to have if I expect help. To not post it to begin with , especially in my sig was just a bone headed oversight on my end.

To Enjoy. Yeah, I promise you, I have read this thread twice. Let me back up just a second. This may clarify some things for ANYONE wishing to help me.
Enjoy, some of your questions I can answer, some I cannot, because I just don't know. (ie still confused)

I look at you guys as die hards. <not a thing in the world wrong with that, and THAT is why I come to you, the experts> We all have our indivdual talents. PC overclocking is not one of mine. (BBQ is )

So in my mind, my world, I'm a small fry in sea of sharks here at XS.
When you say divider...........? I don't know. I don't know what that means.
Sort of. The only one I really understand is 1:1. As soon as you go past that...I'm lost.

Yes, Enjoy, I could / have looked at the screenshots.....and I have no doubt I could set up mine the same way. The problem with many of the screenshots I have seen is comments made before the screenshots........for instance:
"Ok, here's 4:5 running 5-5-5-12 @ 1.9 ........may as well add "while in a crescent moon stage, and low tide"

I cringe at what I am about to say because I fear it will come across "wrong" again,,,,,,but I don't care about that stuff really. Sure, I can set up my timings just like theirs, and do some testing. But the thing is, when it's over, I have the test results, but have NO clue what they mean. Is Higher Bandwidth better than lower bandwidth? Is faster read/write times better than lower? I realize there is a 99% chance this board (XS) was probably not the best one for someone like me to come to. < XS rocks, I'm just old now, and getting older fast) I was late to this party. Most are moving on to newer sockets and i7, and I'm just now coming to p45 and quad, from a 1.4 T-BIRD.

The learning curve this go around has been HUGE for me. Anway, Enjoy, I honestly cannot say if my CPU was overclocked or not. I don't remember.

So, If I may be so humble.......maybe if we could just start from scratch? I undersand the very basics. On one side you have your CPU and FSB. You can overclock just your CPU via FSB. Then on the other side you have your ram. (won't even go there on vid card) (yet)

The CPU / FSB side of the coin tends to be easiest for me to understand. However, I'm using stock intel cooling. I'm worried about heat. So I decided to lay off that aspect of the overclock and just see what my mem can do sinec I have read that for the most part, heat is not an issue with this set.

Tell you what guys. I'll go back to step 1 with the CPU. I'll set CPU at 333X9
which is 3ghz. I'm ok with that heat. So let's test that first. Ok? Here's what I'll do. I'll leave the CPU voltz on AUTO for this innitial overclock.......and then test using Prime 95 (ok?). With each pass of P95, I'll lower the juice one step at a time until it starts to fail. Then I'll raise it up 2 notches and test again. It should pass. Until that time , I won't report anything else...

My only question now, is what should the ram setting be for this? Manual? Auto? And at what MHZ? Fair enough?

[EnJoY]

Yeah Enjoy, as I was typing my "edited" version, I was thinking that you may have already read just my original request for help. I'm sorry. Like I said, I honestly wasn't trying to be funny or in any way trying to be hard to get along with , with my second post to you.

(^ the only reason I bring this up is because.......for whatever reason.....I seem to find a way to ALWAYS come across to people IRL as well as forums as being somewhat dickish. I'm not that way at all. I just have a knack for coming across that way. I've learned to accept that fact, even though it's far from what I am really trying to portray)

To Big.....yeah, I know, posting my system specs was/is a critical factor of information to have if I expect help. To not post it to begin with , especially in my sig was just a bone headed oversight on my end.

To Enjoy. Yeah, I promise you, I have read this thread twice. Let me back up just a second. This may clarify some things for ANYONE wishing to help me.
Enjoy, some of your questions I can answer, some I cannot, because I just don't know. (ie still confused)

I look at you guys as die hards. <not a thing in the world wrong with that, and THAT is why I come to you, the experts> We all have our indivdual talents. PC overclocking is not one of mine. (BBQ is )

So in my mind, my world, I'm a small fry in sea of sharks here at XS.
When you say divider...........? I don't know. I don't know what that means.
Sort of. The only one I really understand is 1:1. As soon as you go past that...I'm lost.

Yes, Enjoy, I could / have looked at the screenshots.....and I have no doubt I could set up mine the same way. The problem with many of the screenshots I have seen is comments made before the screenshots........for instance:
"Ok, here's 4:5 running 5-5-5-12 @ 1.9 ........may as well add "while in a crescent moon stage, and low tide"

I cringe at what I am about to say because I fear it will come across "wrong" again,,,,,,but I don't care about that stuff really. Sure, I can set up my timings just like theirs, and do some testing. But the thing is, when it's over, I have the test results, but have NO clue what they mean. Is Higher Bandwidth better than lower bandwidth? Is faster read/write times better than lower? I realize there is a 99% chance this board (XS) was probably not the best one for someone like me to come to. < XS rocks, I'm just old now, and getting older fast) I was late to this party. Most are moving on to newer sockets and i7, and I'm just now coming to p45 and quad, from a 1.4 T-BIRD.

The learning curve this go around has been HUGE for me. Anway, Enjoy, I honestly cannot say if my CPU was overclocked or not. I don't remember.

So, If I may be so humble.......maybe if we could just start from scratch? I undersand the very basics. On one side you have your CPU and FSB. You can overclock just your CPU via FSB. Then on the other side you have your ram. (won't even go there on vid card) (yet)

The CPU / FSB side of the coin tends to be easiest for me to understand. However, I'm using stock intel cooling. I'm worried about heat. So I decided to lay off that aspect of the overclock and just see what my mem can do sinec I have read that for the most part, heat is not an issue with this set.

Tell you what guys. I'll go back to step 1 with the CPU. I'll set CPU at 333X9
which is 3ghz. I'm ok with that heat. So let's test that first. Ok? Here's what I'll do. I'll leave the CPU voltz on AUTO for this innitial overclock.......and then test using Prime 95 (ok?). With each pass of P95, I'll lower the juice one step at a time until it starts to fail. Then I'll raise it up 2 notches and test again. It should pass. Until that time , I won't report anything else...

My only question now, is what should the ram setting be for this? Manual? Auto? And at what MHZ? Fair enough?

Ok, lots to cover here.

I am not going to type up an entire introductory guide to overclocking for you here, as I simply do not have the will, nor the time.

First rule to remember though. Whenever you are trying to overclock one part of your system, you first need to remove the other parts from the equation. This can be difficult at times, but generally it's quite simple.

Here is an example of what I am referring too...

Say you were trying to determine your maximum fsb speed? You would want to drop your cpu multiplier to something low (I generally like 6x), set all voltages to stock (not AUTO), and memory timings to defaults. You would also want to set a memory divider that was very low, 1:1 ratio would probably be ideal and work fine as with DDR2 and DDR3, you would have plenty of overclocking headroom with the FSB before you even reached the stock speeds of most of today's memory.

From there, you would simply go up 5-10mhz at a time, testing for stability at each increment, moving up again until you hit a wall. Once you've hit the wall, increase the appropriate voltages, and continue moving upwards. Generally when clocking fsb and cpu, I prefer using windows based utilities as it is a lot faster. This way you can quickly bump up the speed, jump into super pi or prime95 for a few mins, and keep going until you error out, then back into bios to adjust the voltages. Understand?

Testing CPU, you would follow the same process, but in this case you would simply set the highest multiplier available to you, and adjust fsb up from there. Assuming you tested fsb limits first, you now know exactly what fsb frequencies your board is capable of and therefore it will not be a factor as you increase mhz to determine the limit of your cpu. And of course, your memory is on a low divider and isn't going to be anywhere near it's rated speed at any point in this testing process, so that is out of the picture as well.

Once you have the max frequencies for both your fsb and cpu, the rest is easy. You now know the limitations of both your chipset and your cpu at every voltage step along the way. Now you can set these at safe limits, and if needed, adjust them along the way as you overclock your memory, knowing that neither of them are a factor in your system's stability. To start, set your cpu to a low multiplier, drop fsb to something like 250 or 300MHz, to avoid hitting a wall too soon. And set a divider that makes sense for the memory frequency you wish to start at.

Typically, I always had my best successes in tweaking memory when I started from a very low frequency, testing lower latencies. For example, for this ram, I started at 750MHz, with maybe 4-4-3-10 timings and 1.8v? And from there I would just into memtest and see if it's stable. It is? Great, how about 1.7v? No? 1.75v? Yes, cool. So 1.75v is now my starting point. 4-4-3-10 is stable, how about 4-3-3-10? Or 3-4-3-10? No, ok well then I guess I'll stick to 4-4-3...but how about 4-4-3-8? See what I mean? It's all meticulous trial and error until you find the sweet spot. Once every is stable, you bump up the frequency, 5mhz at a time until you hit another wall? And voltage should always be the first remedy to a wall, if voltage fails, you no it's not a voltage issue but a timings issue, so you go back and adjust the timings.

This my friend, is how we overclock; or at least how I learned to do it. Some may disagree or have other methods, but these methods have always served me well.

Sub-timings are the tricky part these days, however. BIOS' these days can have so many options available for adjustment that it could literally take you weeks until you found the perfect timing combination for your RAM. This is why for you and many others I simply recommend the lazy man approach, and copy off a fellow forum member. See what other people are running for their TRRD, TWTR, TRFC, etc etc, as well as the primary timings and frequency they are running. If you are at 560MHz 5-4-4-12 and you're looking for the right sub-timings, it's probably not a safe bet to copy someone else's sub-timings who is running only 450MHz and tighter timings. Remember, the appropriate timings and sub-timings will change as the frequencies change and as the other timings change around them. As an example, the appropriate TRAS is basically always decided by what the first 3 timings are set too.

I'm already written way too much now, but this should be more than enough of a guideline for you to use to get started.

[concretefire]

Got it! THANK YOU, Enjoy.

1)FSB.
2)CPU.
3)Memory.

Picked myself up a thick notebook today and some pens. Time to start testing.

[EnJoY]

Got it! THANK YOU, Enjoy.

1)FSB.
2)CPU.
3)Memory.

Picked myself up a thick notebook today and some pens. Time to start testing.

Glad I could help. And yes, I typically go through 3-4 sheets of paper when tweaking memory.

[concretefire]

Enjoy
When you say you like to use windows apps to tweak your CPU and FSB and voltage....if I am reading it right.....you are talking REAL TIME changes, within a single instance of the windows evironment. (ie no changing and then restarting, but changing and testing)

Then when you have it figured out to your liking, THEN you sort of hard set those numbers in BIOS. Correct?

May I ask what application you use to do this?

[EnJoY]

Enjoy
When you say you like to use windows apps to tweak your CPU and FSB and voltage....if I am reading it right.....you are talking REAL TIME changes, within a single instance of the windows evironment. (ie no changing and then restarting, but changing and testing)

Then when you have it figured out to your liking, THEN you sort of hard set those numbers in BIOS. Correct?

May I ask what application you use to do this?

Not voltage, just fsb/cpu.

You set voltage is bios, head into windows and use Clockgen or a similar utility to up fsb in small increments, quickly testing each one for stability. And yes, once you have a stable setting, you head back into bios, set the new MHz, up the voltage again, head back into windows and continue clocking.

clockgen is available at www.cpuid.com

[concretefire]

Not voltage, just fsb/cpu.

You set voltage is bios, head into windows and use Clockgen or a similar utility to up fsb in small increments, quickly testing each one for stability. And yes, once you have a stable setting, you head back into bios, set the new MHz, up the voltage again, head back into windows and continue clocking.

clockgen is available at www.cpuid.com

Got it. Thanks again. I'm going to work backwards though. Since I already have a ball park # in my head of my CPU speed, and FSB, ......
^(Read, I don't have the proper cooling yet

I'm going to shoot for CPU / FSB stability @ 3 GHZ with a "set" memory timing.

Like you said, If I have a set memory timing like 800 mhz or 900 mhz, then in theory, knowing this particular memory can easily handle that , it SHOULD take the memory OUT of the picture.

Then I can work backwards, testing for stability, while slowly decreasing my voltage to the CPU, and thus lowering heat. Seems to me it's now just a matter of finding the correct voltage to run my CPU @ 3 ghz. stable.

Once I have done that, then I can focus on tightening memory timings.
Thank you again, Enjoy for your help. I know what I just posted is probably everything anti-overclocking and how to do it, but I already said I'm not much into benches, screenies, or the like. I'd rather be playing, surfing, or rendering in Poser. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I have it now.

[concretefire]

Glad I could help. And yes, I typically go through 3-4 sheets of paper when tweaking memory.

See Below.

[concretefire]

EnJoY,



Ok, disregard my previous post. I'm onto it now. Now I feel like I can ask you specific questions regarding MY screenshot vs your First Screenshot.

I don't know how to verbalize this other than the fact that what I have circled is the only difference between mine and yours in memset. (noted u were using a beta version???) Anyway, on my screenshot down at the bottom , the # is 3. Ur's is 4. Both of ours are greyed out.

Now look at the top circle........3. Ur's is 3. I noticed when I changed this number from 3 to 4, the bottom circle (greyed out) also changed from 3 to 4.
???????????????? It's definately a correlation, although I have no idea what it means.

Except this maybe?? > my middle circle is performance level 6. Yours is 5. As soon as I hit 5 and set, my puter locks hard.

I'm thinking it has something to do with the correlating #'s I posted above.
At any rate, I'm thrilled I'm on the right track now. Got any advice on this?

[pest]

I have a little problem with these sticks, maybe someone could help
They work fine up to 530Mhz with dividers.

1:1 500Mhz is a nogo, as it won't post, i tried using SetFSB but there are a lot of Errors with HCI Memtest. Loosening Subtimings didn't help.

Now I'm testing 495Mhz 1:1, it passed 10xIntelBurnTest with 3GB Memory
and 500% Coverage with HCI-Memtest, but my Firefox is occasionally crashing , even at FSB480, what could this be, as I've no idea, because it passed a lot more stressfull programms.

I'm running an E8400 on GA-P35C-DS3R [vMCH 1.3V,vDIMM 2.0V BIOS (seems to drop heavy under load)]

[EnJoY]

EnJoY,



Ok, disregard my previous post. I'm onto it now. Now I feel like I can ask you specific questions regarding MY screenshot vs your First Screenshot.

I don't know how to verbalize this other than the fact that what I have circled is the only difference between mine and yours in memset. (noted u were using a beta version???) Anyway, on my screenshot down at the bottom , the # is 3. Ur's is 4. Both of ours are greyed out.

Now look at the top circle........3. Ur's is 3. I noticed when I changed this number from 3 to 4, the bottom circle (greyed out) also changed from 3 to 4.
???????????????? It's definately a correlation, although I have no idea what it means.

Except this maybe?? > my middle circle is performance level 6. Yours is 5. As soon as I hit 5 and set, my puter locks hard.

I'm thinking it has something to do with the correlating #'s I posted above.
At any rate, I'm thrilled I'm on the right track now. Got any advice on this?

Performance level is dependent your FSB speed, so I must have been running a lower FSB than you are.