msi 790 fx-gd70 thread

[shadow_419]

I know it's a long thread, but take the time to read through it a little. You'll get a sense of what's possible on a 955 with this board. You have a hybrid tec/air cooler so you'll be able to use more volts safely than air cooling but every chip is different. With that cooler and a methodical approach, I figure you can get a 4ghz overclock but as always ymmv.

[nicky.82uk]

nice i was also thinking around that too

[hellcamino]

This board takes some fiddling with nicky, set your cpu vdd around 1.25 and your cpu-nb vdd at about 1.2v and run small fft's for about 15 minutes to ensure that you have enough vcore to start with, if it fails small fft's give it a bit more cpu vdd. Set your PLL volts to about 2.7v to start and set your ram for about .05v higher than rated, set ram timings to advertised timings and speed and see if you can run prime blend for an hour. If it passes start working up your nb speed to about 2600-2800mhz and make sure that it still passes prime, you will probably need to raise your cpu-nb vdd voltage setting a bit once you get the nb higher than about 2400mhz. Once you find a happy spot there , try bumping the reference clock over 200 by small increments and test for stability using prime blend again, you will probably need to raise cpu vdd at some point here too. Once you find the sweet spots for nb, ram and bus clock you should try bumping the multiplier by stages and testing for stability, you will certainly need to add some vcore by the time you get over 3.6ghz but don't go crazy as these chips really don't seem to need much, mine is stable at 3.8ghz with 1.4v under load. PLL volts will help you with stability but I don't know where the "safe zone" ends, mine is at 2.8v. NB chipset voltage ended up about 1.36v and the reason for setting your ram voltage a little high is that I think this board undervolts your ram but by all means test at lower voltage and if your ram is stable then you are good to go!

Some of this may not be the best advice but information sharing seems to be pretty lacking from the AMD crowd here, I'm actually very disappointed by this. Good luck, take your time and if you get frustrated just walk away from it for a bit! The only other advice I would give is to redo the TIM on the board as it will drop your temps by quite a bit but make sure that you have good heatsink to board contact when you do this, I still had good contact on mine after removing the thermal pad from the mosfet cooling portion. Adding a small fan over the top of your nb will also work wonders for your temps.

[Smartidiot89]

Spent the evening yesterday to mount my new toy:

Phenom II x2 550BE (Athlon II x2 250 will arrive next week)
MSI 790FX-GD70
Crucial BallistiX 1333mhz CL6 1.8v D9JNL

So now a quicky what BIOS is best, is it the 1.3B7 and where can I download all the Beta BIOSes?

[hellcamino]

You can get the latest bios from...... MSI. 1.3 is the current stable release I think.

[nicky.82uk]

i've already updated bios frist thing i did

[Daveburt714]

Spent the evening yesterday to mount my new toy:

Phenom II x2 550BE (Athlon II x2 250 will arrive next week)
MSI 790FX-GD70
Crucial BallistiX 1333mhz CL6 1.8v D9JNL

So now a quicky what BIOS is best, is it the 1.3B7 and where can I download all the Beta BIOSes?

Smartidiot89: FWIW, I always found this site to be the best for MSI Betas....
http://msi-forum.de/index.php?page=T...threadID=89852

It's all in German, so use the translator of your choice, and as always be careful, but I never trashed an MSI board using their bios..

Of course there is always the risk with betas, so be careful!

[FlawleZ]

3.6GHz stable with 1.38V BIOS (1.36 actual under load) for over 3 hours on prime. Tweaked the PLL voltage a tad. Bumped the multi up to 19 for 3.8GHz and it is a no go again, I've been fiddling with vcore and PLL volts and even NB a little and getting nowhere

Considering it took only a small bump to get 3.6GHz, I feel I must be doing something wrong.

I'm running into the exact same thing. I've tried bumping PLL to ~2.6 and CPU VDD to 1.4375. ~3.6 is fine at 1.4 CPU vdd and auto volts everywhere else. What have you found that wants to be pushed for going past 3.7Ghz? Are you on stock HSF too?

[Tony]

There is nothing wrong, the CPUFrequency>voltage scale gets quite scary especially if you are using V64 or W7 64. I can run silly low voltages at 3.2GHZ, and it scales linear as i push the frequency higher until 3.8GHZ, then it jumps up....push to 4ghz and you need a massive increase.


its just how the cpu works

[Smartidiot89]

Smartidiot89: FWIW, I always found this site to be the best for MSI Betas....
http://msi-forum.de/index.php?page=T...threadID=89852

It's all in German, so use the translator of your choice, and as always be careful, but I never trashed an MSI board using their bios..

Of course there is always the risk with betas, so be careful!

Thanks!

[hellcamino]

There is nothing wrong, the CPUFrequency>voltage scale gets quite scary especially if you are using V64 or W7 64. I can run silly low voltages at 3.2GHZ, and it scales linear as i push the frequency higher until 3.8GHZ, then it jumps up....push to 4ghz and you need a massive increase.


its just how the cpu works

You know it's kind of funny that you mention the 64 bit thing, I had initially ordered a 2x2gb kit of OcZ and the board/cpu wouldn't oc worth a crap and was unstable at stock speeds even. I installed XP32 on it and still couldn't get anywhere with it! I had previously tested the ram and it passed memtest without issue but I didn't test one stick at a time, I popped in a couple different sticks of ram and it opened up a whole new world for this thing. Once I found stable settings with a reasonable overclock (3.8ghz cpu -2.8ghz NB- 1600mhz mem) I reinstalled vista 64, updated the os and started running prime95. When I initially got the oc stable I had done it by bumping vcore one notch at a time until it passed prime...It still passes prime in vista 64 at the exact same settings too. IMO a lot of these IMC's have a hard time with 2gb sticks as I see a lot of peeps with problems getting any decent oc when using them except those using extreme cooling. As of now if I back any one voltage down the pc will fail prime just as it would in xp32 so the 64 bit excuse is just that...an excuse, one I used briefly too.

[Sparky]

I'm running into the exact same thing. I've tried bumping PLL to ~2.6 and CPU VDD to 1.4375. ~3.6 is fine at 1.4 CPU vdd and auto volts everywhere else. What have you found that wants to be pushed for going past 3.7Ghz? Are you on stock HSF too?

3.7GHz bombed on me again. I'm at 3.6GHz rock solid stable now with only minor voltage adjustments. I got tired of tinkering for now, I wanted to use my PC I'll play with it more later.

I'm on water by the way. Load at 3.6GHz is around 52C and that is with my 4870 dumping its heat into the loop as well.

[FlawleZ]

3.7GHz bombed on me again. I'm at 3.6GHz rock solid stable now with only minor voltage adjustments. I got tired of tinkering for now, I wanted to use my PC I'll play with it more later.

I'm on water by the way. Load at 3.6GHz is around 52C and that is with my 4870 dumping its heat into the loop as well.

Yeah, I'm the same way. I get to spending an hour or so at a time overclocking and tweaking, and I get frustrated or just lose patience and want to actually use it.

You're on water and seeing 52C load? At what voltage and what program are you using to monitor temps? With AOD and Coretemp I've yet to see over 42C at 1.4000 in BIOS which is ~1.392 in Windows. Ambient room temp is 24C (75F). However, these were with 32M runs testing stability. That's only single threaded so maybe I should double check with a multi-threaded such as NuclearMC or 3DMark06.

[Sparky]

Yeah, I'm the same way. I get to spending an hour or so at a time overclocking and tweaking, and I get frustrated or just lose patience and want to actually use it.

You're on water and seeing 52C load? At what voltage and what program are you using to monitor temps? With AOD and Coretemp I've yet to see over 42C at 1.4000 in BIOS which is ~1.392 in Windows. Ambient room temp is 24C (75F). However, these were with 32M runs testing stability. That's only single threaded so maybe I should double check with a multi-threaded such as NuclearMC or 3DMark06.

Multithreaded will create much more heat because of using all 4 cores vs just the one.

I'm using coretemp to monitor. Volts are 1.39 BIOS, 1.37-ish under load (measured with DMM, CPU-Z reads a little higher than actual). The gd70 with 1.3 bios shows temps on the board as well but it reads 1-2C higher than coretemp does. Remember I have my 4870 in the loop as well, under load. If I drop the 4870 to idle I cut a few degrees off the CPU temp.

[hellcamino]

Yeah, I'm the same way. I get to spending an hour or so at a time overclocking and tweaking, and I get frustrated or just lose patience and want to actually use it.

You're on water and seeing 52C load? At what voltage and what program are you using to monitor temps? With AOD and Coretemp I've yet to see over 42C at 1.4000 in BIOS which is ~1.392 in Windows. Ambient room temp is 24C (75F). However, these were with 32M runs testing stability. That's only single threaded so maybe I should double check with a multi-threaded such as NuclearMC or 3DMark06.

Haha! Running 32M mine won't break 32c (core temp) at 1.41v load in cpu-z but Prime95 will crack that thing right up over 50c if I don't crank up my radiator fans a bit! Check your temps with a real load like that and see what you are getting as that may well be part of the problem you are having. I am guessing that PLL volts would help you get past where you are stuck at now, try 2.7 or so. I'll be pushing mine a little further here shortly when more ram and proper radiator fans show up.

[jonspd]

There is nothing wrong, the CPUFrequency>voltage scale gets quite scary especially if you are using V64 or W7 64. I can run silly low voltages at 3.2GHZ, and it scales linear as i push the frequency higher until 3.8GHZ, then it jumps up....push to 4ghz and you need a massive increase.


its just how the cpu works

So what OS gives the best stable oc? is xp better then win 7 32 or xp 64

Still haven't reverted back to xp yet win7 32 here.

[nicky.82uk]

i've given up i cant be assed anymore just use stock settings

[shadow_419]

What's the problem nicky? Are you saying you cant overclock your chip at all, or are you getting stuck getting past a particular frequency?

[nicky.82uk]

i'm not sure what i'm doing i'm use to overclocking Asus

[shadow_419]

1. You are using latest bios correct?
2. Cell menu uses +/- keys on number pad to change values for voltages
3. Set timings for ram manually and run at stock for now
4. Set Cpu vdd manually to 1.35v (you might be able to use less but start here for now)
5. Raise the cpu multiplier from x16 a full or half step
6. Test for stability
7. Repeat step 5 until you can't go any higher
8. Add voltage to go higher than step 7
9. If step 8 doesn't solve the problem add voltage to cpu-nb vdd in bios
10. Report back


good luck

[nicky.82uk]

also you know this is very strage i've got the latest bios on but its saying on AMD OverDrive i've got ddr 2 when i've got ddr 3 see for yourself

[shadow_419]

I don't know about amd overdrive. I haven't had any luck with it working right for me so all my overclocking is done through bios.

[nicky.82uk]

really seem to tricky for me also what auto overclock tech

[shadow_419]

auto overclock is supposed to find the max htt overclock possible for your chip/board combo. Useful for people that have a locked multi to give you a rough estimate of the max over clock you can get for a particular voltage. The overclock knob on the board is for on the fly htt adjustment while in the OS. Nice features but I bought an unlocked multi chip because I don't want to mess with dividers and htt.

[shadow_419]

Any reason you are using that much voltage for your ram? 1.95v seems like a lot if you are running them stock. Did you fail prime bad rounding , bsod, lock up? what happened? What kind of load temps are you getting. 1.4v nb might be a little high. What kind of case temps/motherboard temps are you getting?