Asus P6T / Core i7 920 bios assistance (w/ screenshots)

Greetings! I am sitting at a 3.6Ghz stable overclock of my i7 920. I have not been able to achieve stability in Windows above BLK of 175. I wanted to share my BIOS settings to see if anyone had additional feedback or advice on how I might squeeze any additional performance out of this baby. I will say I am not looking to do anything crazy with regards to voltage, etc.













Thanks in advance!

I have an EVGA X 58 but I think the principles will be the same.

I pushed my i7 920 to 3.85 with a simple adjustment in VCore.
I upped my VCore to 1.35V and left everything else alone (as you have it currently) and I was amazed how easy it was to reach 3.85.

I would also enable "Turbo" which will raise the multiplier to 21 without doing anything else extra.

To reach 4.1GHz I had to adjust some additional voltages and crank up my VCore a bit more.

It seems, in my BIOS, that the "Turbo" setting goes away if you disable one of the other settings (C1E support I think). Should I just enable this?

QPI/DRAM Core Voltage is still at 1.20v? Try 1.35v, then 1.40v -- I am running at the latter. This was my my particular source of instability that finally solved my crashes. (This is really QPI uncore voltage, not the greatest bios naming.)

Try 1.68v on DRAM Bus voltage -- I measured (by hand) a 0.02v drop under load. Try 9-9-9-28 timing to knock ram instability out of the equation.

I turned my multiplier way down, and tried max bclk. Somewhere around 205 mine gives up. Doesn't matter since there is a super steep voltage climb from 3.8 -> 4.0 on my chip (which is why I run at the easy 3.66)

Also, I don't use the AI OC Tuner, just "manual".

This review pretty well hit the nail right on the head when it comes to overclocking an i7 920, with an ASUS board.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2335839,00.asp

I only use the manual Ai and leave everything on default settings, except BCLK, which I set to 190. Only real problem with this is that it's just way too easy to do

BTW, I double checked these setting and the ratio between the dram bus voltage and qpi/dram voltage is well within the max .5 spread.

said it before I will say it again - turn off hyperthreading.


also I don't see where you have load line enabled - if you don't enable it to combat voltage drops

I run a p6t/920/corsair 1600 ddr3 19x200 1.35 volts rock solid

I said it before and say it again: don't disable HT unless it's absolutely necessary lol

On a more serious note: try not to leave voltages on auto, at least not those which are important (vcore, vtt, qpi etc) since the board might be OVERvolting them if left on auto which is not good. Similarly, load line might be dangerous as it may spike and fry the cpu, I'd use it only as the last resort