Foxy@OC'D

well my friend is having a wee bit of trouble with his q9550 and not being upto date with intel know how, thought I'd see if you guys could enlighten me/him.

Ill give you the cpu-z screen shot first...




He is telling me that he can pass small fft prime 95, and memtest for 5 hours but when he runs occt, or prime95 blend etc his computer craps itself



[NGG] Fluff Myster: it is 20 runs linx stable with all memory
[NGG] Fluff Myster: the memory passed 5 hours of memtest

[NgG] Foxy: do you bsod when you run occt and prime 95?
[NGG] Fluff Myster: i never bsod unline my old cpu. prime95 says rounding error - gets 5 when it should be 4 or something
[NGG] Fluff Myster: usually a worker stops on prime95


any ideas would be gratefull.

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TwoCables

Since I don't know which motherboard he has (or any of his other specifications for that matter), this will be rather basic.

I'm going to say that he probably needs to increase the core voltage a little bit, but it shouldn't need much more. However, the more important voltage adjustments lie in the FSB (VTT, or Voltage Termination) and the Northbridge (MCH, or SPP).

So, for the FSB voltage, I would suggest anything from 1.35V to 1.4V. For the NB (MCH or SPP) voltage, I guess I would suggest about the same, but even 1.30V could be enough.

The Southbridge (ICH or MCP) may need to be adjusted as well. The voltage I would recommend for this can depend on the motherboard, though. For example, my motherboard's lowest possible setting is 1.50V. Other motherboards go much lower (like 1.10V). The same thing is true for the northbridge voltage in a similar way: my motherboard's lowest possible northbridge voltage is 1.20V, and the highest possible selection is 1.55V. So, my suggestions for the NB and SB voltages are a shot in the dark.

And depending on the motherboard again, there are probably other adjustments that can be made which can greatly help with stability. Some of those adjustments are like PLL voltage, GTL Reference (or "GTL_REF" or something), and some other things like that. Unfortunately, I don't know what to set these other things to, but they can really help to fine-tune it and arrive at a very, very stable overclock.

Now, I also want to say a few things about stress testing: when he is ready to finalize the overclock, he needs to know that it's imperative that the overclock ultimately needs to be able to do the following:

50-100 runs of LinX using all available memory (or as much of the memory as possible as sometimes the test simply won't run with ALL of the available memory used)). If he doesn't understand why, then have him read the Read Me that comes with LinX. It explains everything pretty well.

12 hours of the Small FFTs test.
12 hours of the Blend test.
12 hours of the Large, in-place FFTs test.

10 passes in Memtest. It's far more important to go by how many passes it does than by the length of time. Granted, 10 passes could potentially take 5 hours, depending on how much memory is installed in the system. But the more memory there is, the longer each pass will take. Note: one pass is when Memtest completes all 8 tests one time through.

Also, Memtest86+ is just for error-checking. To stress the memory, use HCi's MemTest. I don't have any personal experience with this one yet, so I'll just leave the rest of this paragraph blank.

Now, if the overclock can withstand all of this, then it is truly stable. But some tweaking will inevitably be necessary in order to increase the stability so that it can do all of these tests. And they're not really tests; they're just programs that overclockers use to test the overclock since they each do a great job at testing the stability of the overclock.

So, post his specifications in detail. This way others who have the same motherboard and memory will be able to help in greater detail. It also wouldn't hurt to include his GPU solution and power supply (brand and model). The power supply can sometimes make or break the stability of an overclock, but not always.

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umgill45

Ok first off tell him to run the tests for at least 8hrs.
(Thers no need to run it for 8hrs if you get an error.
If there is an error stop the test , adjust voltages in the BIOS and try again)
Keep tweaking voltages until you have an error-free 8hr test.
Do both BLEND and small FFT.
Also I need your settings for MCH voltage and MCH ref.
Looks to me like you need more MCH voltage.

Give me more info on the BIOS.
I'll help you out.

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Foxy@OC'D

Right I will try and find out some more info on the matter or just direct him in the way of OCN and this thread

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fluffmyster

Hey guys I'm the one foxy's talking about, thanks for all the advice so far.

Specs are in my sig.

In terms of the settings I am using I have tried countless combinations of voltages up to 1.4 Vcore (llc on and off), 1.38 vtt, 1.59 pll, 1.46 MCH, 2.2v ram and others. I know the procedures to take when stability testing but I've pretty much tried the max safe voltage for everything and OCCT still fails within 15-20 mins @ high memory / priority. What concerns me is when I run it at stock settings it still fails.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

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CPU: Q9550 w/ OCZ Vendetta 2 Mobo: GA-EP45-UD3R RAM: Crucial Ballistix 2x2Gb @ 950Mhz C5 GPU XFX GTX 260 216 HDD Western Digital 640Gb Caviar Black Case Asus TA-M21 PSU OCZ 600w StealthXStream DVD Drive LG GH22NS40 22X SATA

umgill45

ok here's what you do.
Take out all the RAM sticks except 1.
Run the OCCT and see if stable.
Try to run Memtest 86 also.
Check each RAM stick individually like that.
For the time being : Getting stable at default settings should be your priority.
Keep your BIOS settings at default and try to get stable.
If not, u probably have faulty hardware since at stock you should be rock stable.

Also post screen shots of CPU-z (show me the memory tab)
Make sure the RAM is set to 1:1.

Also I want to see the settings in your BIOS.
try to write them down here if you can.

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We spend way too much time trying to impress people we don't like, by buying things we don't need, with money we don't have" - Will Smith

TwoCables

This is from the Original Post:

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umgill45

Dunno how I missed that

thanks for pointing that out.
Hope the OP does the rest of the stuff I told him to do though.
Unstable on default isn't a good sign.

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We spend way too much time trying to impress people we don't like, by buying things we don't need, with money we don't have" - Will Smith

TwoCables

hehe you're welcome!
But you're right. I mean, it's like "yeah, ok: unstable at stock. Wth. "

However, I am curious about those Ballistix. I mean, if they are the single-sided sticks, then maybe that's the problem. Or, it could just be a bad memory slot.

Or wait, perhaps the sticks are in the wrong slots. I mean, after all: they need to be in the same-colored slots. But I've also seen people solve problems like this by simply moving their memory from channels 0 and 2 to channels 1 and 3 (1 and 3 to 2 and 4).

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fluffmyster

The sticks are double sided. Testing the sticks individually or in different slots is somethig i've not tried yet so i'll give that a go (just a bugger on my motherboard as I have to remove the graphics card each time). Looking forward to giving it a go though.

__________________
CPU: Q9550 w/ OCZ Vendetta 2 Mobo: GA-EP45-UD3R RAM: Crucial Ballistix 2x2Gb @ 950Mhz C5 GPU XFX GTX 260 216 HDD Western Digital 640Gb Caviar Black Case Asus TA-M21 PSU OCZ 600w StealthXStream DVD Drive LG GH22NS40 22X SATA