I think I just downgraded...

R

Roman79

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2000
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For the past year I've been running a Phenom II 555 with all cores unlocked (at stock vcore) with a cheap Asus 785td-v EVO motherboard.

I recently picked up an Asus Sabertooth 990FX, and while it's a very nice board my system locks hard after about 2mins if I unlock the 2 extra cores. I've spent hours fiddling with voltages with zero success; no amount of vcore seems to have any effect. This only happens if I run it as a quad core; it's 100% fine as a dual core.

Also temps seem fine; I have a fairly hefty Coolermaster HSF on there (forget the model), and it's currently not overclocked.

I'm kind of at a loss here...any advice?

Thanks!
 
Different boards = different results. You can probably overclock that chip alot higher and more stable on the crosshair than the old vanilla board.
 
did you buy the 990FX for bulldozer? If its not working how you like and your Asus was fine... return it and keep the original 785td-v.
 
It's quite possible your P2 555 was never 100% stable under your old board....but if you don't like the 990fx, I'd be happy to take it off your hands :)
 
Sometimes the mobo is the problem. My 550BE doesn't unlock on Asus M4a78t-e but works fine with gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H
 
990FX is a mess right now. I'd hold off on using it until after Bulldozer / Zambezi drop and the BIOS ROMs for all the boards get updated. And as I understand it, the 990FX boards work better with 6 core Phenom II's than anything else. I do not know if that's true, but the best results seem to come from Phenom II X6 users vs. anything else.The 990FX doesn't seem to be as good an overclocker for the older chips. Again I'd wait for Bulldozer. If you aren't going to go with Bulldozer, then I'd advise going with an 890FX board instead.
 
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I guess us early adopters get to help get em straightened out ;)

Anyhow, OP - Ya its probably a BIOS issue, or the board wont unlock it....are you sure you were 100% stable before ?

Dan_D said:
990FX is a mess right now. I'd hold off on using it until after Bulldozer / Zambezi drop and the BIOS ROMs for all the boards get updated. And as I understand it, the 990FX boards work better with 6 core Phenom II's than anything else. I do not know if that's true, but the best results seem to come from Phenom II X6 users vs. anything else.
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I'd agree with Dan on this one. If you're buying it for hardware that's not out yet, I would just put the money aside somewhere and wait for BD to be released. Then see which boards perform well and go from there.

Budgeting for the board seems to make more sense to me than spending for it now. The only reason I can think of why you would buy a 990FX board now would be if you didn't already have an AM3(+) processor. And if you don't, wouldn't you need to buy an AM3 processor (and in effect, throw money away on a processor you'll use for 3-4 months?)

Bottom line - if you're buying for BD, wait for BD to be released first.
 
As much as it can be really nice for consumers, I sometimes wonder if all this mobo/cpu compatibility AMD tries to maintain is good for them.
 
soulsavior said:
As much as it can be really nice for consumers, I sometimes wonder if all this mobo/cpu compatibility AMD tries to maintain is good for them.
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I don't think it is and I've said that many times. The platform has a number of flaws which might be addressable if they'd move past legacy compatibility. The big one being the shitty layout with respect to DIMM slot proximity to the CPU socket area. Also maintaining such vast CPU compatibility has to be challenging from a voltage hardware standpoint and from a BIOS / Microcode standpoint.
 
Dan_D said:
990FX is a mess right now. I'd hold off on using it until after Bulldozer / Zambezi drop and the BIOS ROMs for all the boards get updated. And as I understand it, the 990FX boards work better with 6 core Phenom II's than anything else. I do not know if that's true, but the best results seem to come from Phenom II X6 users vs. anything else.The 990FX doesn't seem to be as good an overclocker for the older chips. Again I'd wait for Bulldozer. If you aren't going to go with Bulldozer, then I'd advise going with an 890FX board instead.
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considering that the 990X hardware is pretty much identical to the 890 chipset (in my understanding), this must pretty much be a bios issue, right? if so at least its fixable
 
Shouldn't we congratulate them for achievment ?

It probably took a lot of work to mess rebranded 890 chipsets into whole 990 mess ;)
 
Activate: AMD said:
considering that the 990X hardware is pretty much identical to the 890 chipset (in my understanding), this must pretty much be a bios issue, right? if so at least its fixable
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The design of the voltage hardware has changed significantly. The 9xx series also supports an additional C-state the 8xx series doesn't. Finally, the BIOS is of course quite a bit different in terms of what CPUs they'll support. The motherboard vendors should have held back the release of the 9xx series boards until Bulldozer's actual release. I'm not sure why they did it this way. I've never seen motherboard and CPU launches this far apart before.
 
Dan_D said:
The design of the voltage hardware has changed significantly. The 9xx series also supports an additional C-state the 8xx series doesn't. Finally, the BIOS is of course quite a bit different in terms of what CPUs they'll support. The motherboard vendors should have held back the release of the 9xx series boards until Bulldozer's actual release. I'm not sure why they did it this way. I've never seen motherboard and CPU launches this far apart before.
Click to expand...

Its possible AMD pushed them to have them ready by now but then AMD delayed bulldozer release so the MB manufacturers were sitting on the boards and since they support AM3 cpus it was logical for them to release them and eat up any early sales.

So these early 990X boards were prob just rush jobs id expect newer ones to be a little more refined in the coming month or 2. Asus Crosshair V or the Asrock Fatal1ty will be what i get assuming i dont go SB which i still havnt decided on, both boards fit my color theme and which ever one turns out better will get my money
 
There's a thread going on at XS about this too. 9xx series black socket boards have an issue with previously unlockable CPUs.
 
We will have a new EFI out that improves unlocking abilities on the older Phenom II dual cores. It will be based on the latest CVF code that matches previous 8xx series capabilities. AMD made some major changes in the last AGESA code that more or less reduced your chances of unlocking those cores and we have had to code around it to maintain prior capabilities.

One has to understand that the current AGESA codes are being optimized for Bulldozer now and as these optimizations increase the code area for Thuban, Deneb and others will shrink. So while base functionality will remain for those CPUs, optimizations for older processors might be curtailed somewhat. This is what happens when you keep a single socket for several different families of processors instead of new socket for each new processor family, in the end you are going to pay for it one way or the other. ;)
 
Wow, nice to see some big wigs in my thread. :D

I'll try and reply in no particular order:

- Yes I did buy the board for BD, but the more immediate reason I bought it was so I could run CF with a pair of 6970s. There's no going back now!

- I am 99% sure the chip was stable with the old board; or to put it another way, I'm 99% sure the unlocked chip was not the cause of my previous stability issues (which were resolved). I was getting memory errors during a memtest86, but since I have two of basically everything I was able to eliminate the cpu; turned out to be the mobo so I just swapped it with a spare.

- Thanks for the heads up Gary, I actually went looking to see if there was an updated EFI before I posted here. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Incidentally it's taking a lot of self control not to go out of buy a x4 or x6 right now. I've been playing Sanctum recently and it seems to choke for me once I get a lot of structures built. I haven't measured it, but it feels like the fps is dropping into the high teens or low 20's. For the 2 mins that I can play with 4 cores (before it locks up hard) I can tell you that 4 cores make a huge difference; very CPU intensive game.
 
Gary Key said:
We will have a new EFI out that improves unlocking abilities on the older Phenom II dual cores. It will be based on the latest CVF code that matches previous 8xx series capabilities. AMD made some major changes in the last AGESA code that more or less reduced your chances of unlocking those cores and we have had to code around it to maintain prior capabilities.

One has to understand that the current AGESA codes are being optimized for Bulldozer now and as these optimizations increase the code area for Thuban, Deneb and others will shrink. So while base functionality will remain for those CPUs, optimizations for older processors might be curtailed somewhat. This is what happens when you keep a single socket for several different families of processors instead of new socket for each new processor family, in the end you are going to pay for it one way or the other. ;)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification on that. I knew there was something up with the CPU support on those boards. And as I recall we briefly talked about that at the event this weekend.
 
I'd wait for the bulldozer as well. Just out of curiosity, have you ever stress tested all the cores on your old board?
 
rhone89 said:
I'd wait for the bulldozer as well. Just out of curiosity, have you ever stress tested all the cores on your old board?
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I stress tested overnight and it seemed fine, plus I used to fold with it.
 
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