[Official] ASUS M2N-SLI and M2N32-SLI Club! - Page 1000

I think you should be a bit careful with overclocking your CPU so that you don't go too far. If I recall correctly that M2N-E has one power phase less than its bigger brother the M2N-SLI Deluxe and although the M2N-SLI Deluxe is not exactly a weak motherboard it is not the strongest motherboard either.



I have done some further testing with my new Sempron.
CPU seems to be stable at 4.5GHz using air cooling.
I did further testing with the memory & IMC too, although I did not make really make any progress with that.

Doc, you got the post for page 1000!!! Woohoo!

Assumed you were on a different board (I do that a lot). I'm not quite sure how hard you can push that particular board. In fact, I believe there may be a more important concern that a 125W part is too much for the lower end boards, but I'll let someone else make that definite confirmation.

But let me say this on your getting "settings to stick" question. Neither Nvidia Performance Tools (NPT) nor PMT have the ability to do that since the higher end Deneb processors are not officially supported on any of the M2N series boards to the best of my knowledge, so as OS based tools, they can't force the BIOS remember the settings. What they can do is "poke" settings into the active configuration after the the OS is booted. Because PMT runs as a service, it becomes transparent to you as a user.

The other important point is that we've seen enough cases of NPT interfering with the operation of NVT, that it is recommended to uninstall the former. Once you have PMT sitting alone, you should be able to change speeds and voltages, however the range is probably limited by the design of the power distribution that board supports.

What I'm mostly concerned about in your case is the low Vcore value given in CPUZ. You really need to be over 1.35V if you want to run at 3.7GHz. Has your setup been able to survive a Prime95 run for 15 minutes?

Lastly, the default examples given in PMT are for reference only. You should decide what you want. You really only need to use 2 power states to get the power savings, but you can of course do the full five available. Just because, I'm using four P-states, no particular reason. But when I need to such as for gaming, I lock the max power state so I don't have any lag due to switching.
Edited by gr8sho - 2/19/12 at 8:16am

That's a single core I guess, so as such doesn't throw as much heat and likely explains why you can run it so high. But it is neat to watch.

On a separate note, I'm about ready to hit the buy button on a CHV and CM HAF 932 purchase.

Yes, it a single core CPU and when I tried to unluck it on a AM2+ motherboard the second core turned out to be broken, so the CPU is not terribly useful. It still fun to have a nice overclockable CPU to play with though. :-)


Good luck with your upgrade!
Since th XS forum still appears to be down I did some gooling and actually found a thread on this forum where those highly overclockable Samung memory sticks are discussed:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1210482/amazon-samsung-2x4gb-low-voltage-ddr3-1600-kit-for-40-ocing-to-2200

Feel free to ask if you have any questions when you get your new parts (although I have no experience with the Crosshair V, I have done plenty of tinkering with my Crosshair IV and the 890FX & 990FX are apparently almost identical).

Newegg has a decent sale this weekend for presidents day. They have 8GB of GSkill Sniper RAM for $40 which seem decent. Is it important at this time to jump all the way to 16GB? I just don't know if I should pull the trigger.

The Samsung memory is a bit more expensive. I may be able to source it locally since there is a CompUSA in driving distance.

But from what I've learned to-date, the 965BE won't be able to deal with those faster speeds, right?

Well, as I mentioned earlier you can get close to 2000Mhz with the Deneb CPU. High end RAM would give you the advantage of being of using tighter timings at those speeds. You could always upgrade you RAM later though.

The only reason I can think of for buying 16GB would be if want to use a part of your memory as a RAM disk for storing things that you access frequently (You should be able to use the hibernation feature to write the contents of all the RAM to permanent storage when you turn off you computer so that you don't lose anything that you stored on the RAM disk).

My son has a Rampage III extreme here, so I've been able to see and use one of these ROG boards. UEFI is new to me and I'll need to understand that better. Granted this is Intel architecture, but the settings on that board are many and will require new learning on my part if its AMD counterpart is anything like it.

Hopefully my OCZ SSD will be able to play nice with the AMD 990FX at proper SATA-3 speed.

Beyond that, I'm hoping to be able to at least achieve the same setup I have a now with a faster memory and I/O subsystem.

I haven't yet decided how I want to go about cooling the CPU. Once I get the new case, I will see if it is able to accept the Corsair H100. If that doesn't make sense, I might investigate an outboard setup.

Okay, sorry, i misinterpreted what you said about the 2000MHz thinking you meant NB instead of RAM. The G.Skill Sniper SDRAM has reviews saying that 2000MHz is okay even though only rated for 1600MHz. But you say the Deneb may have trouble getting up there, right? I noticed even the Samsung is only advertised as 1600MHz speed, but evidently is able to achieve the higher speeds with less difficulty. I'm going to roll the dice now and see what's what. Worst case I will exchange the parts.

And I will go with the 16GB for now since I'm interested in the Vdisk idea. Kinda reminiscent of the old DOS days, right? I just hope the SSD is willing to deal with Hibernation.

Well, perhaps I should have written 1000MHz instead since that is the real frequency and less confusing. Anyway, I have gotten my CPU + RAM 100% stable at 970MHz and judging from what I have read in the forums this is a rather typical max memory overclock for the Deneb CPUs.

I came across this table on Wikipedia the other day that might be of interest to you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas_latency#Memory_timing_examples
As you can see the difference between high latency, low speed DDR3 & low latency DDR2 is not very large at all (I can confirm that these numbers do, at least in some sense reflect real life performance).
You should also be aware that overclocking the L3 cache to 2600-2800MHz or so using your new AM3+ motherboard will boost performance much more than faster RAM will.

For me the RAM disk brings back memories of my first computer, the Amiga. The AmigaOS had a RAM disk built in right from the start. :-)




Well, the Phenom IIs/Athlon IIs do benefit allot from improved cooling (and I imagine that this is more true for in your case since you live in a warmer climate). A H100 should give good enough cooling and is cheaper and simpler than custom water cooling, but you will be missing all the fun & joy from build a custom water cooling setup.
Edited by DrSwizz - 2/20/12 at 2:37am