OC X6800: Am I on the right track??

[BobaFettm]

Okay... I've been reading a lot... and I've OC'ed most of my other PC's... but none of them ever cost me this much! So this time I'm gonna bite the bullet and push self righteousness aside and ask for help... I'm gonna post everything that Im pretty sure I know how to do... I just need some yes or no's... and maybe guidance if im way the f**k off...

k first part! As you can see in the sig.. thats my setup... I'm gonna run the X6800 OC'd to the amount that Tomshardware had theirs on air cooled... I'm thinking this is a stable amount of overclock...

Part a) I'm gonna bumped the multiplier up to x 11.0

This will allow for higher Mhz to near 3.66mhz and 1333 FSB... I might even bring it down to x 10 to call it safe... What do you guys think?? Then I need to increase the CPU input voltage from a stock 1.3 V to 1.48 V...

Part b) With the OCZ ram I know it can be stable at higher speeds... I then need to switch my ASUS board to "DDR2 - 889 MHz" on the DRAM freq.

and with my Ram running at that high of frequency I need to switch the timing over to 5-4-5-14 2.35V which is near 1112 DDR2... is this part correct? I have not overclocked ram before... yet I probably should on my other system lol...

Anandtech review of my memory

Too me this seems this seems all correct so far but I wanted to make sure that I wasnt doing something wrong to a very expensive chip!

The XFX 7950GX2 is super easy to OC and I'll just use coolbits or whatever works on the new cards to bump that up to some higher freqencies also... I'm not new to OC'n NVIDIA boards...

I'm sorry to look like a noob and be begging for help like this, but I've gathered all this info and I just wanted to make sure I'll be doing this right!

 

[4Ryan6]

Looks like a nice little chunk of money you've spent there, I'd hold off on the OCing at least a while to burn off the new, your rig should be quite fast enough as is, take your time research out your OC potential and OC later when the sting of the purchase has worn off.

When I first bought my FX57 I weighed out the pros and cons and actually bought it to OC, but after the amount of money I'd invested to get it started to jog my reality, I decided to wait and I don't regret that decision she's OC'd today but she's not top of the line anymore either, but I didn't want to fry her up in the beginning, which is always a possibility!

Do what you want its up to you but I'm just throwing you a thought, erring on the side of Caution, OCing is always a later option.

 

[BobaFettm]

Thanks for that! I've never OC'd anything new before either... usually all older and I dont mind if it pops... But the potential of this chip OC'd is pretty nuts also... I will wait a bit to burn off the new like you said... probably smart to break it in a bit then I'll OC!

But I know myself... it will be a day or two of burn off then I will be iching to OC and see the benchmarks go up lol!

 

[4Ryan6]

I know what you mean that OC itch has to be scratched, we're hopelessly addicted to OCing, shake it but don't break it!

 

[Heyyou27]

You lucky bastard.

 

[BobaFettm]

ha thanks...

am I actually on the right track with this though? Anyone?

 

[zpert]

Part a) I'm gonna bumped the multiplier up to x 11.0

This will allow for higher Mhz to near 3.66mhz and 1333 FSB... I might even bring it down to x 10 to call it safe... What do you guys think?? Then I need to increase the CPU input voltage from a stock 1.3 V to 1.48 V...

Part b) With the OCZ ram I know it can be stable at higher speeds... I then need to switch my ASUS board to "DDR2 - 889 MHz" on the DRAM freq.

and with my Ram running at that high of frequency I need to switch the timing over to 5-4-5-14 2.35V which is near 1112 DDR2... is this part correct? I have not overclocked ram before... yet I probably should on my other system lol...

Anandtech review of my memory

Ok, I follow just fine with the processor OC, with the FSB running at 333, quad pumped is the 1331.7, and 333x11=3666. What keeps messing me up is all the DDR2 OCing. I can't for the life of me follow all of it, and it's pissing me off :x haha, so please help me out. I'm a quick learner, so all I need is one good explaination. Here's what I know. PC8000 is DDR2 1000, and I pretty much know what the timings do, and voltage. However, I get mixed up with everything else, because since it's DDR2 1000, it is divided by 4 to get the bus speed to the RAM? so that would be 250, but since the FSB is set to 333, you need to have the RAM ratio to .75?? This is all total guessing from what I've read, but I've never gotten it explained to me. There's the RAM frequency, ratio, bus speed, FSB, and it all seems to affect the final speed. I'm not a noob at computer building and parts, but RAM is one area that I've tried hard to understand, but just haven't made that connection yet. Thanks guys!
-Paul

 

[BobaFettm]

lol... no one has actually answered the question

was my posts correct?

 

[zpert]

Ya I know I thought of that when I wrote that, haha. Sorry, I'd answer it if I knew more about it than you, but I don't. What I do know, and I'm sure you're already doing this, is if you do OC it, keep a close eye on temps and voltage. Get to a voltage that is safe, I'm not sure what that is with the X6800, and don't go any furthur, even if you'd like to try and squeeze more out of it. One thing I try to keep in mind when OCing, it's fun to try and sqeeze more, but if you do too much and burn it out fast, it's definitely not worth the few months or weeks of slightly better performance. What I'm going to do with my X6800 is get it to that safe voltage, and then go until it's unstable, then probably even go down 200Mhz or so and leave it, maybe more. That's the best I can give you, I wish I knew more, but that's where my questions start too.
-Paul

 

[graysky]

You can automate the process if you wait for the nForce 590 chipset to get released (official press release here) and use nTune to do it automatically. It's pretty slick. Not depicted in the screenshots is the auto. tune mode where it tweaks settings and records values (crashing your system many times in the process). Worked very well on my old XP 3200+ system.

I'm waiting for the nForce 590 SLI chipset to put together a new system based on Core 2 Duo chip.

http://www.softpedia.com/screenshots/nVidia-nTune_1.png
http://www.softpedia.com/screenshots/nVidia-nTune_2.png
http://www.softpedia.com/screenshots/nVidia-nTune_3.png