Another reboot, another higher OC, again, I raised the bclk. This time from 158 to 163. Multiplier still the same at 21x. CPU-Z now reporting a speed of 3420.6MHz, which is a rise of 102MHz since last time and a 753MHz rise overall. That equates to a 28.2% OC on the original clock, and a $284 i7 920 achieving 220MHz higher than a $999 i7 975XE!
That was my original goal.

Everything appears stable, 8 logical cores running S@H, temps hovering between 58C-67C with 12 peaks of 68C over the past 10 minutes.
Outside temperature is currently 16c, alot warmer inside though.

EDIT: Temps are now varying between 55c-70c

Now Yer approaching the QX6700 in speed.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Just a suggestion.
As system disk, use a 64 GB SSD.
For example Kingston SSDnow V-Series 64 GB. Here the price is 180 USD.
SSD is about 50 times speader than normal HD and you will see it in:
1) installing SO (17 min, instead of 37)
2) Installing pgms
3) programs startup and execution

Leave Western Digital Caviar as second HD, for data

I have done it and I have seen the difference among two systems (same CPU and Clock) but one with SSD. Very impressive.

Bye,
Franz

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Well, my 3420MHz OC appears to be stable.
I've only changed 2 figures so far, the baseclock (currently at 163) and the DRAM bus voltage, currently at 1.62v (max recommendation: 1.65v).

Temperatures are between 56c-68c with 5 peaks at 69c within the past 13 minutes.

Anyone got some good tips for a higher OC?

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- Luke.

Well, my 3420MHz OC appears to be stable.
I've only changed 2 figures so far, the baseclock (currently at 163) and the DRAM bus voltage, currently at 1.62v (max recommendation: 1.65v).

Temperatures are between 56c-68c with 5 peaks at 69c within the past 13 minutes.

Anyone got some good tips for a higher OC?

Most reviews I've read get about 200 baseclock from their 1600MHz ram depending on the motherboard, So offhand more ram speed.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Well, my 3420MHz OC appears to be stable.
I've only changed 2 figures so far, the baseclock (currently at 163) and the DRAM bus voltage, currently at 1.62v (max recommendation: 1.65v).

Temperatures are between 56c-68c with 5 peaks at 69c within the past 13 minutes.

Anyone got some good tips for a higher OC?

Most reviews I've read get about 200 baseclock from their 1600MHz ram depending on the motherboard, So offhand more ram speed.

RAM speed can be set independent from bclk. The two are not tied together.

The bclk is, however, tied to the cpu multi.......which on a 920 is maxed at 21.
So, you can only set bclk as high as the cpu is willing to clock. You can lower the multi and set bclk higher, but benefits are minimal, at best.
Sometimes it can get you a better RAM multi however.

Since Luke's cpu temps are approaching the limits of what I think a heavily OC'd i7 can do......aprox. 70c.....I think he is reaching his upper OC limit.

My 920 is topped out at 175 x 21, and is also running at about 69c...but my ambient room temp right now is only 75f....Luke may be dealing with ambient temps above that. And I run side-off....he is dealing with getting the heat out of a closed case.
And I have the rear case fan facing IN....blowing cool outside air directly into the Ultra120 cooler fan, which is on the left side of my cooler, about 1 inch away from it....so it is not sucking up any of the heat from the GTX295 below it. Luke's pic shows his fan on the right side of his cooler, taking in case air. This might be a major factor here. You have to get the coolest air possible to that Ultra120 for it to do it's job.

Probe II shows my vcore at 1.44v. If Luke's bios is pushing vcore above that, he may be able to manually back down the vcore to get a little more headroom.
Otherwise....this is where he is at.

Once the basic bclk/cpu ratio is locked in, THEN he can look at what his RAM is doing....CPUZ will tell you what speed and timings the RAM is currently running at.....
If it is not close to what it's rated speed is, one can go into the bios and try to manually force it to a higher clock. But don't be surprised if the rig won't boot when you do. Just power down for about 5 seconds and power back up, and the Asus bios will start up at default settings to let you back into the bios setup so you can try again.

I also recommend HT off for Cuda rigs.......this will get you a little more OCing headroom for maximum CPU clock. In fact, I run my Cuda rigs with preferences set to 75% CPU usage...to maximize Cuda tending.

And once that is all locked down.....

Run the EVGA Precision tool to see what luck you have with GPU OCing...
My GTX260 is a freakin' demon....
Stock clock for it is 675/1151/1453....GPU/RAM/Shaders
Right now, GPUZ shows it clocking in at 780/1188/1692...meowza!

Now you got a crunchin' mo-chine!!

Go, Luke!!!

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

WinXP is faster than WinVista or Win7.. :-P

If that's pure apples to apples (chip, mem, paging, etc), then my gut says even though it's XP, something is wrong (or perhaps using ancient hardware). Win7, especially with the revisions to handle multiproc & hyperthreading, rocks perf wise.

[Edit]: I'd be curious to see S@H compared on Win7 vs a streamlined Linux on an i7. Albeit, the codepath is so much shorter, I think Linux has the edge despite Windows chip savvyness.

WinXP is faster than WinVista or Win7.. :-P

If that's pure apples to apples (chip, mem, paging, etc), then you're doing something very wrong (or perhaps using ancient hardware). Win7, especially with the revisions to handle multiproc & hyperthreading, rocks perf wise.

XP pro rocks.......not as much BS.

Don't have many reports about stability for 7 yet.......but I can tell ya for sure......

XP is about as stable as NT4.0 was........and THAT is the gold standard.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I don't much about Win7, Outside of what I've read and what the scalpers did to the Family 3 Pack personal Upgrades price, Once their gone the Win7 personal upgrade disks will do just fine as I could upgrade one PC at a time and still cost about the same as the scalped 3 pack.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Hmmm... little question. Is it okay to suspend tasks and then apply a another OC, then again resume them?
Currently, I've just been letting them run through to the end before OCing.

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- Luke.

Exit BOINC, tweak OC, restart.
Can't see any reason for allowing something to finish other than the possibility of something being almost finished, then errorring out due to too much of an OC.

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Grant
Darwin NT

WinXP is faster than WinVista or Win7.. :-P

The evidence is the opposite, not only in synthetic benchmarks, but actual application performance.
Vista is faster than XP. Win7 is similar or slightly faster than Vista for most tasks. The only point where Win7 is much faster than Vista is Shutting down & sleep/hibernation & resuming from those states & for network transfers.
Win7 is significantly faster than Vista for network performance, and when using Solid State Storage, Win7 is significanty faster than XP for storage transfer performance. With Mechanical storage, Win7 is still faster than XP, but only by a small margin.
Reference- XP v Vista v Win7

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Grant
Darwin NT

Luke how long is it taking your GPU to crunch MB's ?
By the way John G informed me that the nVidia Edition case is still available.
In Canada

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Okay... so far, so good. Stable at 3507MHz. Temperatures however, are not. Crunching between 63c-75c. Peaking at 76c with 8 threads on S@H. Voltage currently at 1.376.

Say this was your computer, would you be aye or nay to this overclock?

Or, could I try adjusting the voltage to a figure like 1.32v, and see if that makes any difference?

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- Luke.

For a CPU 70°c is as high as i'd be confortable with. If it's varying between x°c & 75° & the system is stable & not resulting in computation errors i wouldn't worry about it myself. If it was pegged at 75° all the time i'd be a lttle uneasy IMHO.
Of course your milage may vary.

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Grant
Darwin NT

My Guess is for an RAC of 16k.
8k for CPU crunching and 8k for the GPU.
Just into the top 80 Hosts.

Dave

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My Guess is for an RAC of 16k.
8k for CPU crunching and 8k for the GPU.
Just into the top 80 Hosts.

Dave

My Q9450 rig with a GTX260 does just over 19k.........
Luke's i7 with a 260 should do just a bit better than that.
I would guess 20k once stabilized with the GPU OC'd,

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Well, after successively adjusting the vcore down from 1.40v to 1.37v to 1.34v and now to 1.33v, and leaving the bclk at 167 (3504MHz), I've been able to lower the temperatures about 4-5c.

Temps now between 59c-70c with 8 peaks at 71c over the past 10 minutes, and 1 peak at 73c before lower back to normal.

I'm going to try lower the vcore to 1.31v, and raise the bclk to 168...

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- Luke.

Thank you all for the suggestions with the CPU OCing. I've raised the bclk to 170 (170x21=3570MHz), and lowered the vcore to 1.304v.
Temps are good compared to an hour ago. Since I've lowered the vcore a total of 0.10v, I've been able to raise the total clock 168MHz without any immediate temperature increse. Actually so far, this profile I have right now appears to be the most stable since I started.

So, to reach the fabled 3667MHz CPU clock (1GHz OC), I need to achieve a bclk of 175. With brings me to the question, how low can the vcore go???

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- Luke.

With brings me to the question, how low can the vcore go???

How long is a piece of string??

It differs from chip to chip. All you can do is take it down until it fails then up a couple of notches. Then increase the o/c until it fails again and up another couple of notches. Rinse and repeat until you have reached your desired o/c (or you get to your desired voltage limit - or the increased voltage won't give you an improved o/c).

I usually start my o/c'ing experiments by finding the min voltage for stock speed and then work from there. I gives max headroom for temps.

F.

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Thank you all for the suggestions with the CPU OCing. I've raised the bclk to 170 (170x21=3570MHz), and lowered the vcore to 1.304v.
Temps are good compared to an hour ago. Since I've lowered the vcore a total of 0.10v, I've been able to raise the total clock 168MHz without any immediate temperature increse. Actually so far, this profile I have right now appears to be the most stable since I started.

So, to reach the fabled 3667MHz CPU clock (1GHz OC), I need to achieve a bclk of 175. With brings me to the question, how low can the vcore go???

Until the core crashes...........

It all depends on the chippy....some will do more with less.......some will not.

My 920 is now at 3.675Ghz with 1.44 worth of vcore, and the Ultra120 is holding it at 70c.

Just for kicks, I'm gonna lower the vcore to 1.2 and see what shakes out.


OMG........
It's running 3.675Ghz at 1.2v and 54c.......LOL....ya gotta be kidding me....

EDIT...
Still running.......which tells me something is brickwalling me at 3.675Ghz, and it's NOT the CPU....if it will run at this speed with only 1.2v of vcore, something else is mucking up the works. Might be the RAM or the QPI bus or IOH buss.

The chippy obviously wants to run.......
The kitties have work to do.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster