i7 920 @ 3.5, but...

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spock

Gawd
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I'm using an Asus P6T Deluxe, 6GB of Corsair DDR3-1333, and an i7-920. In the BIOS, I set BCLK to 166MHz, left SpeedStep and Turbo mode ON, set Vcore to fixed 1.25V, and left everything else at minimum (stock) voltage. Memtest runs fine for hours, I can boot into Vista and run 12 hours of OCCT multiple times without any issues. Temps stay below 70C thanks to the TRUE 120 and a good fan. Multiple hour gaming sessions are also without issue.

Sounds good so far, but I'm having problems with other peripherals. For example, the NIC says it's connected at 1Gbps but my max transfer rate if I copy a file is exactly 100Mbps (10% in task manager). At stock speeds I do get the full 1Gbps. Also, all of my SATA drives are visible when the system boots, but at some point the computer locks up for half a second or so and a SATA drive disappears as if it were unplugged (always the same one). Other SATA drives are unaffected, or at least it would seem that way. At stock, I don't have any problems with SATA.

Any ideas? I don't want to set the voltages to "Auto" because I know that the Asus BIOS tends to overvolt things when they really don't need it. But maybe I need to increase one of them manually? I bumped the Vuncore up to 1.25V and Vdimm to 1.60V with no effect. I've only got a 550W PSU but it's a good one and the stability during gaming (when the video card is also pulling mucho wattage) makes me think that I'm not experiencing a power shortage. I don't think I've hit the CPU limit because it actually runs OCCT stable at 3.8GHz, at the same Vcore. What could be running out of spec?
 
I didn't think anyone would have any comments :)

It was a truly weird problem. If anyone is still puzzling over it, you can stop now. In frustration I put everything back to stock speeds and the problem still occurred. So I knew it was actually a hardware fault and I traced it down to a random PCIe x1 card that I had installed but wasn't using. Removing that card seems to have solved the problem, at least as far as an overnight test can prove.

I did learn one thing though -- CPU and RAM testing aren't enough to prove that your overclock is stable. One must also consider the peripherals -- less so now that the PCI and PCIe busses can be locked to stock frequencies (anyone remember trying to find NICs that work at 40+MHz PCI?). I've added a sha1sum loop and a massive network transfer to my testing tools, and I just run them alongside prime 95 or whatever. Also I find the spinning cube in ATITool stresses out the video card as well, so I leave that running too.

Thanks to anyone who read my post.
 
Sorry, it was so stupid I didn't mention it. I work for a company that develops PCIe hardware, and I left one of our prototype/development boards installed in the system while I was overclocking. Obviously there are some problems with our prototypes!! Anyway it's not production hardware so nobody else would ever have the same problem.
 
Also I should mention that the i7 (920) has been running 4 threads of prime95 torture (with checking on) since I posted that message several days ago. Only 3.5GHz I know but I'm not aiming for the stars here. I'm pleased with the performance and I probably won't push it any harder.

The i7 is a truly amazing CPU. I really like having hyperthreading back again. I've been gaming, without lowering the priority of the prime95 threads, and without any loss of frame rate. On my Q9300, 4 threads was a "hard" limit, and things got very slow if you started up a 5th. Now the limit is so much softer. Incidentally, my fps might not have increased much (gaming at 2560x1600 makes things very GPU limited), but the load times in games seem to have nearly halved since switching to i7. Someone should benchmark that and post a mini-review. After all, load times are a big part of the overall "gaming experience."
 
spock said:
The i7 is a truly amazing CPU. I really like having hyperthreading back again. I've been gaming, without lowering the priority of the prime95 threads, and without any loss of frame rate. On my Q9300, 4 threads was a "hard" limit, and things got very slow if you started up a 5th. Now the limit is so much softer. Incidentally, my fps might not have increased much (gaming at 2560x1600 makes things very GPU limited), but the load times in games seem to have nearly halved since switching to i7. Someone should benchmark that and post a mini-review. After all, load times are a big part of the overall "gaming experience."
Click to expand...
Agreed. Ive been running between 3-3.5Ghz (depending on how heat tolerant I am at the moment) and it was so nice when I lost nothing when running P95 and crysis simultaneously.

Load times are almost always HDD limited, not CPU. Get a faster drive, games will load faster.

And I really like your sig quote. :)
 
The two LAN ports on my Gigabyte X58-UD5 have just suddenly stopped working. Windows is constantly connecting, then disconnecting again less than a second later and so the loop continues.

Similar to the OP, I just upped BLK to 166MHz, but I didn't need to adjust anything else at all. I've reverted everything else back to stock now and still the LAN ports don't work. Windows Update installed a new driver and now they're even dead on the device manager.

For the time being, I've stuck in a WLAN dongle, but expansions cards will be the next thing to test.
 
I purchased the i7 920 with the P6T and hope to perform a slight overclock, perhaps to 3.0GHz. What settings are recommended? I have never overclocked :(

Can things be left on auto, or does this danger the system?
 
svelte- change clocking to manual. adjust bclock to 150. save and reboot. can probably turn down the voltage at 3Ghz, too. Its that easy.
 
GLSauron said:
Agreed. Ive been running between 3-3.5Ghz (depending on how heat tolerant I am at the moment) and it was so nice when I lost nothing when running P95 and crysis simultaneously.

Load times are almost always HDD limited, not CPU. Get a faster drive, games will load faster.

And I really like your sig quote. :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm running an Intel X25-M SSD, so no bottleneck with the HDD. Maybe people who still use rotational magnetic drives might not see the 2x improvement in load times that I got.

To anyone with the money: the Intel SSD has been the biggest single upgrade I have ever performed. I switched from RAID-0 WD Raptors to a single SSD and the improvement was staggering. With that and the i7-920, Fallout 3 doesn't really have "loading screens" anymore. It's pretty seamless :)
 
GLSauron said:
svelte- change clocking to manual. adjust bclock to 150. save and reboot. can probably turn down the voltage at 3Ghz, too. Its that easy.
Click to expand...

Thanks! That is simple! :D

P.S. When you say voltage, are you referring to vcore?
 
svelte said:
1.1v is well below the 1.225v Intel specification, promising. :D
Click to expand...
too promising, apparently. It was fine for a couple minutes of superpi but BSODed at longer runtimes. Thus Im feeding it a little more than 1.1v now. Still, damn good. Stable at lower than stock voltage at higher than stock clock speeds.
 
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