O/C X2 4400+ on MSI K8N Neo2

[Vin]

Hi

I was hoping to push my 4400+ up to 2.4ghz on an MSI K8N Neo2 board.

I used the dynamic overclocking on this board, as supposedly the safest, and put it at 9% [General] the 5th level out of a possible 6.

Given I have read and heard of people easily o/c'ing this chip to a 4800+, I thought this was the safest, quickest & easiest route.

However on booting up, the machine just sat at the Platinum boot logo, whilst doing its background POST for longer than it would on a normal boot cycle.

I left it for maybe 20-25 seconds before hitting reset, entering the BIOS and switching off dynamic overclocking. Left it that way since and all is fine.

However, I would like to get this chip running at circa 2.4hz if possible, safely.

After I rebooted when the POST locked, I checked temps and it wasnt going above 42c. That CPU runs pretty cool and varies from 39c-42c depedning on my rooms ambient temp.


Any advice/ideas please? Is it more complicated than dynamic overclocking, a feature of this board?

Is it down to watts/volts? Do I need to adjust. As I have seen the posts on the 89w & 1xxw versions.

Any assistance appreciated please.


Thanks

Vin

Rig:

Coolermaster Centurion 532
Hiper 580w Type-R modular
MSI K8N Neo2 NForce 3
AMD X2 4400+
2gb 4xGEiL Dual DDR 400
Hitachi 160gb SATA II 8mb cache 7200rpm
Radeon X850 XT PE
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Platinum
LG 16x DVD-RW

 

[Kholonar]

You should easily be able to get up to 2.4 ghz on your processor, my 3800+ X2 is set beyond 2.4 ghz on stock voltage. I recommend you do all overclocking in your bios, don't use automatic anyything.


I don't know your specific motherboard but here's some of the main points

1) lock down your pci bus to 33mhz and pci express to 100mhz or whatever it is (there should only be one value)

2)Set your cpu voltage, the stock voltage for your processor is 1.35v, set it to that, you can raise it later if stability is a problem but it should be fine (don't go above 3.4v until you are sure of your temps).

3) Set your HT multiplier, your Hyper transport should never run above 1ghz (there are two of them so it's 2ghz). For this, reason, turn your multiplier down to 4x.

4)Set your ram voltage,latencies and multiplier, check with the ram manufacturer's website, you should get information on what it should be set at. You can overclock it later but for now use a divider to lower the ram so it is stable and works at close to DDR400.

5)Set your CPU multiplier to x10

6)Raise your HTT/FSB to 240MHz. Raise it in small increments just in case, it should.

Now all of this is for a 3800x2 so you can probably do alot better. Try google overlock and 4400 x2 you'll probably get more information. All of this works on standard air cooler.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Hrmmm... I simply up'd the HTT to 220Hz. My CPU is running at 2.42ghz, ram at DDR440, and HTT at 1100mhz.

I tested stability by running two instances of prime95 (1 per core) for 24 hours and memtest86 for 24 hours and everything checked ok.

I know you're supposed to keep the HTT at 1000 or less, but mine seems to be fine at 1100 (5 x 220).

Guess it just depends on your mobo & ram.

 

[Kholonar]

Because you are using a better proc than the 3800+ you get the *11 multiplier which is probably a better thing to use than my *10.
As for the RAM at DDR440, go with it if it works, because I've had to raise my fsb 40mhz by RAM is never gonna be stable with low latencies at DDR480 so I had to knock the ram divider down.

I'm still a bit confused about how much damage overclocking your Hyper transport would be. All I know is that current processors don't go anywhere near to using all it's bandwith so you can underclock it without losing performance.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Yes, but he has a 4400+ also so his default multiplier is also 11. I was just suggesting that he may be able to just increase his HTT to 220 mhz. If his mobo and/or ram don't run stable he can always drop the HTT multiplier to 4x and run a memory divider.

I don't want to steal the topic, but does anyone know if running the HTT bus overclocked ,1100 mhz in this case, can cause unforeseen problems?