Can't overclock E6300 with 7600GT card installed

[madad2005]

Hi,

for some reason I can't overclock my E6300 ever since I've had my 7600GT card installed. I had a good overclock using my AGP card, but now not a single Mhz without instability.

Does anyone know why this is or have a workaround?

Cheers,

madad

specs: E6300 Core 2, 775Dual-VSTA, 3DFuzion 7600GT, 2x1GB Kingmax DDR400,120GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Audigy ZS 7.1, Enermax Liberty 500W.

 

[13thmonkey]

Hi,

for some reason I can't overclock my E6300 ever since I've had my 7600GT card installed. I had a good overclock using my AGP card, but now not a single Mhz without instability.

Does anyone know why this is or have a workaround?

Cheers,

madad

specs: E6300 Core 2, 775Dual-VSTA, 3DFuzion 7600GT, 2x1GB Kingmax DDR400,120GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Audigy ZS 7.1, Enermax Liberty 500W.

First thought would have been power supply, the 7600 drawing more power and hence causing instability at the greater power of an overclock. However your PSU would tend rule that out.

Does your 7600 come with a molex connector? if so can you can the lead it is plugged into, it could be that all the load is on 1 rail? Have you untied the FSB to PCI-E for overclocking? that would have had no impact on AGP but it might do on PCI-E? effectively your card becomes the limiting factor.

What are the symptoms, no boot, no windows or no chnage in settings? edit (instability, yes I see it now).

BTW what do you think of the board, mine is on order, due on monday with an E6600. also doing the slow upgrade of ram, gpu and HDD's

 

[Scarchunk]

for some reason I can't overclock my E6300 ever since I've had my 7600GT card installed. I had a good overclock using my AGP card, but now not a single Mhz without instability.

I'm by no means an expert on overclocking, but I think you need to set your PCIe to 100Mhz in your bios. When you overclock your FSB it clocks everything else as well and I think you need to manually set your PCIe. Maybe Wusy can help you, but here is a link to his C2D OC guide for now.

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/Core2Duo-Overclocking-Guide-ftopict197995.html

 

[madad2005]

Cheers for the fast reply. I'll try and give you as succinct an answer as possible.

The card didn't come with a molex connector. Infact, with the CPU at stock I can run the card fine at 630/1844 (from 560/1400) and it is stable in all the benchmarks (example score of 6780 in 3DMark05 with this overclock). The system runs smoothly as long as I no longer overclock my E6300. Previously I had a 6800xt unlocked (16,5) and overclocked to 390/785 (from 300/700) and I was able to overclock the CPU to 2.1Ghz (300FSB) no problem. I have set the FSB and PCI-E frequency to be asynchronous ie the PCI-E bus is fixed at 100Mhz.

The instability is like this every time: 1) POST's fine and loads up XP. 2) Goes to user account selection screen. 3) Now, depending on the CPU overclock, I get serious lag in selecting any account (the higher the FSB setting, the slower (and I mean SLOOOOOOOOOOOW) it gets). Infact, it will stall with some bootups at which point I just resent manually and remove the overclock.

The board is a great board for the price. The voltage options, unfortunately, are only low, normal, or high, which isn't very helpful, and the board FSB seems to be limited to 285 with DDR2 RAM and 305 with DDR1-400. Anything higher and you get an error in POST. I am happy with the performance boost with my 7600GT from the 6800XT even without the CPU overclock, but this is a bit annoying.

Tonight I will try and re-install my AGP card as well as the PCI-E card. I'll select the AGP card as main boot device and see if I can load with my overclock.

 

[jap0nes]

what if you overclock the cpu and not the video card? does it work?

 

[madad2005]

Nope. That is what I tried initially when I wanted to benchmark to see if the card was CPU limited. With the scores I have in 3DMark05, I don't think it is even at the stock speeds.

 

[13thmonkey]

I think that one of the other posters mentioned it, and it was hidden in my original post, try to untie the overclocking options so that you leave the PCI-E speed alone when raising the FSB. I think that the std setup is raise FSb by 5% and it raises the PCI-E bus by 5%.

 

[madad2005]

As I said, I have it setup so the PCI-Express bus speed stays constant at 100Mhz. I could try reducing this by the same percentage that I increase the fsb by. I'll try that tonight as well.

 

[wolfman140]

Have you looked for the latest BIOS version for your mobo? I have a Gigabyte 965P (a diff. board I know) but a lot of cards weren't working/overclocking with it until they released a BIOS that accepted more memory brands and graphics cards.

 

[madad2005]

I have the latest BIOS (1.7). I've e-mailed AsRock technical support as well as 3DFuzion. 3DFuzion said to make sure BIOS is updated and I have the latest chipset drivers. AsRock still haven't responded. I've heard about those probs on the Gigabyte P965. I am still tempted to get one, though.

 

[13thmonkey]

As I said, I have it setup so the PCI-Express bus speed stays constant at 100Mhz. I could try reducing this by the same percentage that I increase the fsb by. I'll try that tonight as well.

Sorry was getting lazy, didn't see that bit. I'm out of ideas. Will look to see how you get on, I will be in the same boat eventually no doubt.

 

[darkstar782]

Had a similar problem on my ASrock board before I upgraded to my ASUS P5W DH. It seems that the power supply systems on the ASrock motherboard just are not up to crap, as a multimeter showed the CPU voltage dropping as soon as it was put under load. (the highly inaccurate Vcore the board shows indicated nothing).

Before you say it, that was with my current Thermaltake 680w PSU that powers my current rig fine

 

[madad2005]

Well, this board will have to last long enough for me to save up £100 for a DS3

 

[madad2005]

None of them worked. I guess I will be buying a new board sooner than I thought. Don't get me wrong, this is a solid board if you want a small overclock if you are using an AGP card. But if you go PCI-E, bang goes any CPU overclock. A bit of advice from me!

 

[davidlow]

I have this motherboard with an E6400 overclocked to 300fsb and two video cards installed.

XFX 6200 AGP, VGA to monitor - slow for games, good for high quality HDTV
PNY 6600 PCI-E at 100MHz, DVI to monitor - better for games, not enough bandwidth for high quality HDTV

1GB Corsair DDR400, flexibility on
WD SATA drive

The system seems stable up to about 300fsb as reported above. Both video cards are attached to the same monitor via different inputs. Switching between displays is a little awkward, XP gets confused.

I like the mobo, just wished the PCI-E were 16X

 

[madad2005]

I have this motherboard with an E6400 overclocked to 300fsb and two video cards installed.

XFX 6200 AGP, VGA to monitor - slow for games, good for high quality HDTV
PNY 6600 PCI-E at 100MHz, DVI to monitor - better for games, not enough bandwidth for high quality HDTV

1GB Corsair DDR400, flexibility on
WD SATA drive

The system seems stable up to about 300fsb as reported above. Both video cards are attached to the same monitor via different inputs. Switching between displays is a little awkward, XP gets confused.

I like the mobo, just wished the PCI-E were 16X

Can you give me more info about your setup? What bios revision are you using? What nvidia drivers are you using? Are you overclocking using asynchronous? Can you do a test for me? Could you remove your AGP card and then try and boot up with the overclock and the PCI-E card installed? Could you let me know if you Windoze is stable after that?

 

[davidlow]

What bios revision are you using? 1.70

What nvidia drivers are you using? 91.31

Are you overclocking using asynchronous? yes

Can you do a test for me? Could you remove your AGP card and then try and boot up with the overclock and the PCI-E card installed? Could you let me know if you Windoze is stable after that?


I did so, and battered the machine for 30 minutes with simultaneous 3d and processor/disk/network/etc. tests. Th 3d was a bit jerky, as expected, but everything is stable. The E6400 is running at 8x300fsb=2.4 GHz

 

[madad2005]

Cheers for that.

Well if you can boot with a PCI-Express card and have a the CPU overclocked, then there is definitely a compatibility problem with this board and gfx card. Guess I'll have to cope till I can afford a new one.