Still overclocking my Opty 165...

[whisper]

Well, I'm still determined to get some more life from my Opteron 165 rig. I just upgraded my RAM to some OCZ platinum PC3200 sticks (2x1GB) and these things are blowing my old Corsair RAM out of the water. I've been disappointed with the overclock potential of my rig for a while, and now I'm pretty convinced my RAM was holding me back all along. So long story short, I've now found at least two workable overclock scenarios with this new RAM of mine:

1. If I set the memory divider to 200 I can do 300x9 for a respectable 2.7 ghz processor speed. The only downside here is that my new RAM is running a mere DDR 300. But this is totally stable and seems like a nice processor overclock.

2. If I bump the divider up to 266 I can do 275x9 to obtain a decent 2.47 ghz proc speed. This is not quite as nice as 2.7 ghz, but on the upside my RAM is cruising at 450 DDR. My old sticks would have crapped out well below this.

I've tried other things but these seem to be the most stable options. So my question is, which of the above two options would you guys go for? I'm leaning toward the second one. Although the processor overclock is a little less, it seems to be the better all-around overclock making use of both the proc and RAM. Btw, this is all on stock cooling and stock voltage for the cpu (1.35v). RAM is at 2.8v.

Sorry if I'm boring everyone with questions about my ancient rig. But for me this is a significant advancement. Opinions appreciated, thanks

 

[Riccochet]

My only recommendation would have been to go with DDR-500. Mushkin Redline XP4000 or Crucial Ballistix .... but, since you didn't do that.......

Why not shoot for 2.7 300x9 with a memory divider at 266, just relax the timings till it's stable w/ a 1T command rate. Bump up the memory voltage a little as well.

I always saw more real world performance gains out of a higher cpu clock rate than higher memory rate on my 165. Both together was sweet tho.

 

[Xenozx]

Yea, i recently overclocked my second which is an opty 165. I have it at 300x9 @ 1.45v. 2.7ghz. I have some crappy ram, and DDR ram is too expensive for me to get a 2GB kit, so Ill stick w/ my 1 stick od DDR400. But its running at 500mhz, what ever divider that would be.

So 2.7ghz/500mhz ram w/ 1t timing/and a HD2600 @ 500/1000.

Plays call of duty 4 creat at regular resoltutions. it also has about 8 harddirves in it and doubles as a server. If only I could figure this wake on lan thing out.

Anyway, whats really interesting is, this processor is like 95nm or something high. My core 2 is 45nm. This this is at the same volts as my quad, but my Opty idles at like 25c w/ a crappy cooler. My core 2 idles higher then that

 

[whisper]

Well, I also tried 300x9 on the 133 divider and it wouldn't post. Using clockgen and p95 I found that it topped off around 280. Basically, if I went any higher I'd either get a system freeze or blue screen and reboot. I assume this is related to a limitation of my cpu/imc being picky about the 133 divider, because the RAM isn't even doing 200 at those settings).

I can play with the 166 divider a little more. See how high I can push and maybe reach 300x9. These OCZ sticks are decent but from all I've read on various user reviews, people seem to max them out around 240 (which would be 294x9). But we'll see...