My 790FX Spider setup. and my problems..

[Spooksy]

MSI K9A2 Platinum AMI BIOS VERSION 1.6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130136
AMD 9850 BE 2.5 GHz quad core
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103249
G.Skill 4 gig 1066 set
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231166
Visiontek ATI Radeon HD 4850
I got it from bestbuy a while back.

I have a great case, and cpu fan i bought. I was able to effectively overclock the cpu to 2.8 before having any problems, i figure once i get everything set up in the bios, i can have it sit at 3.0

Win Vista Ultimate 64 bit

That is the main components with my setup, along with a 550w powersupply that should be more than enough to deal with that load.

My main problem is that the AMI bios does not detect the AM2+ processor and auto adjust everything. My ram was set at ddr2 800, i had to force it to 1066. The FSB on my bios i believe is set at 200 and unchangeable without consequence. There are a few other problems involving stock bios settings. There for i have a horrible experience with my gaming and whatnot. If anyone can help me out with some advice please do so.

What i'm mainly looking for is advice on how to make this work the way it should. If there is no auto set for am2+ then what should i set everything to?

Thanks a bunch

 

[stoner133]

The original BIOS for the board doesn't support your 9850, there have been several updated BIOS files for the board which give it greater CPU support and your board must be running version 1.4 or later for support for the 9850. Your motherboard manual should give instructions on how to see which BIOS version the board has. You would need your BIOS updated for it to detect the 9850.

Edit: Sorry I didn't notice you were already using BIOS 1.6 on the board. Have no idea why its not regestering the 9850 then.
On memory the ATi 790FX/600SB and even the newer ATi based boards will only auto detect the memory at 1066 speeds if you use two DIMM's of memory in the slots listed in the motherboard manual. If you put in four it auto sets it for 800, its a chipset limitation and should be listed in the manual. You have to do as you did and manually set it for 1066 if you use four DIMM's. So that is absolutly normal for your board.

 

[Spooksy]

i have the 2 chips set in the two slots closest to the CPU. from my understanding, these are the correct ones for dual channel. other than that, the bios tells me exactly what CPU i have in there, but none of the features for the full potential of the board are being set. if i have to manually set everything, i need to know which options i need to change overall. sorry i have bad use of caps here. Its very early, and i am about to head off to bed. i would really appreciate any assistance with this matter. thanks once again.

 

[keithlm]

MOST of the motherboards will NOT automatically detect anything but DDR2-800 if you use everything at the bios default.

The motherboard will use the default setting of DDR2-800 since it is the highest "acceptable" setting according to standards (JDEC?).

If you want to use anything higher you must look for the setting in the bios that tells it to use the optimized or "EPP" memory setting. This is NEVER set by default and must always be set manually.

For that reason many sites benchmarked the Phenom CPU at DDR2-800 instead of using the optimal DDR2-1066 speed. This created much anxiety because this does create a difference in the results for many benchmarks. And when a benchmark is done for "enthusiast" sites most people generally want the best results obtainable.

(So it is a mystery as to why that was acceptable; some claim that that the CPU "lost" the benchmarks so badly that it didn't matter whether or not they actually knew the truth. But then you have to wonder why since many of the benchmarks happened to be within a few percent of the competition. But don't bother to mention that on this forum or people will ridicule you for some strange reason. But that was the past. Apparently with newer chips the results will be different enough that people can't just ignore reality if they don't like it.)

 

[jj463rd]

You might want to rethink that your 550 watt power supply can handle an Overclocked Phenom X4 9850 BE CPU with a Radeon 4850 graphics card.

Here is the power consumption of the CPU itself at stock speeds under load.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/682/14/
It says 256 watts
Look at the 9850 at peak power under Cinebench rendering
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14424/15
It says 302 watts Peak
Now look at your GPU under a test load.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4850,1957-20.html
251 watts
If you overclock and put your CPU under load the consumption would most likely be higher.You are really pushing it with that power supply.
I would say that to be safe I personally would get at least at the minimum a solid highly rated tier 650 watt power supply for what you are building.700 watts or more would be better.

 

[Spooksy]

well, thank you for that info.

 

[keithlm]

Actually I should mention that on one of my 790FX motherboards setting the EPP option in the bios is all that is needed. On the other motherboard... for some reason it locks up if I set that so I have to leave it alone and change the memory speed and timing settings to 1066 (533 Mhz) and 5-5-5-15 manually. This is not a big deal but it would be nice if they fixed that in the bios someday; but I don't lose sleep over it.

 

[Spooksy]

if i can get everything going smothly, i want to upgrade my psu to this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817159072
and add another hd 4850
but im still missing some proformance..

 

[Spooksy]

so, AMD overdrive pushed my setting to 3.65 ghz, i think its a bit high and its causing crashes. i went to restore it back to default and i pushed one core down to 1.2 ghz, and the other 3 are at 3.65. what can i do?

 

[waffle911]

jj463rd, I think the wattages you list are total system consumption, not component consumption. A 9850 BE is rated at 125W TDP, so actual consumption shouldn't stray far from that, if it even gets up to that point. Same goes for the cards as well. Spooksy, your power supply should be fine. But I wouldn't recommend underclocking one core so much. If anything, it should be two and two, but even then its not such a good idea to go forcing such a drastic speed difference. It could very well be that none of the cores are capable of running at those speeds and would fail no matter what. I would recommend clocking all four cores at the same speed for testing, and go step by step manually from stock to as high as it can go stably in 100MHz increments.