[Team.AU]Gigabyte X58-UD5, 3GB Corsair 1866MHz CAS8, Core i7 920 Testing thread

[dinos22]

G'day fellas

Time for some new exciting and fresh silicone torture sessions to begin.

What's getting tortured......

Test Configuration:

• Gigabyte X58-UD5 F2/F4E bios so far
• Intel Core i7 920 retail chip 3837A899
  (onlinecomputer.com.au have lots of stock for Aussies)
• 3GB 1866MHz CAS8 DDR3 Corsair Dominators (TR3X3G1866C8D)
• 1GB Gigabyte GTX280 Graphics Card
• 1000W HX1000 Corsair PSU
• TTBig Typhoon with custom plexi hold own
• (hold down sucks...weak pressure on CPU due to plexi bend)
• 1hp C-BuZz Single Stage (kayl evap) > later
• 160GB IDE Hard Drive
• Windows XP Pro 32bit SP3
• Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 for Vantage
  

WHAT I PLAN TO TEST?

Cooling
With that out of the way i'm planning to do some air testing at first then followed by SS to see how different cooling affects the CPU

RAM/board
got a nice tripple channel kit from Corsair.......planning to test CAS6/7/8/9 OCing and its performance with 32M SuperPi. Once i find the optimum performance efficiency settings i'll do 3D testing as well. It will be interesting to see how IMC responds to voltage and general settings changes. I'm hoping that FELIX will have a full version of Memset out soon for Nehalem which allows subtimings changes in windows

32M SuperPi category testing for 32M SPi Low Clock Challenge thread to set some groundwork for me to relate back to in future testing. What's that? You never been to that thread..... ...better go say hello in the thread and start tweaking that system of yours with SuperPi

Why SuperPi? What is this obsession with a single threaded application you may ask? There are a lot of angry ppl on forums saying that this application is useless and they wonder why ppl bother testing it at all. Even some well known industry ppl (probably politics related there hehe). The bottom line with superpi is that this application is a must for any serious overclocker. If you dont test a lot with superpi you do not know your system efficiency properly imo whether you only bench that app or 3D or whatever. This is a base application that helps tweak the system. if you want superpi stability on multiple cores you run hyperPi basically which will run multiple instances but i am not talking about stability but system tuning. Please keep that in mind

RAM cooling >> AIR vs TEC RAM Cooling with tripple channel DDR3




Forum Member Suggestions
if there is something interesting you want to see i'll do my best to incorporate it

Let's inject some colour here....almost fell asleep myself writing this

[dinos22]

STOCK TESTING ON AIR COOLING

with XMP Profile loaded to run RAM at stock
during load like superpi or hyperpi or prime the CPU was operating at 2833MHz

i will have to retest this 1M as the PP efficiency below 39K seems awefully good...it may be that 1M was actually still running at 22x multi

1M SuperPi


32M SuperPi


8xinstances of 1M SuperPi (via hyperpi)


8xinstances of 32M SuperPi (via hyperpi)


PiFast


Stock AM3 (single GTX280 no OC)





1 Hour Blend Prime before stopping
temps were measured with Speedfan but seeing how low they are compared to others here i will have to use coretemp next time


After stopping prime
idle temperature drops a lot (ambients were below 20C)



Overclocked to 4.2GHz.....let's see where we're at
btw RAM was running at 1000MHz 8-8-8-20-1T @1.68vdimm :up:

1M SuperPi 9.765s


32M SuperPi 8m 38.250s


Pifast 20.84s


I tested the new F4E bios and has some issues overclocking only to finally realise it was uncore related and bios fix is on F4F bios

i did test a lot of different runs as i did this 32M to improve on my last time

32M SuperPi 8m 29.750s on air is really something else
amazingly fast CPUs i have to say...this is equivalent to around 5.7GHz E8600 with similar kinds of tweaks

[dinos22]

Did some more testing last night
it keeps getting better and better

First of all some bios screenshots if you havent had a chance to look at them. I only took shots of interesting things for overclockers















That last screenshot is interesting. Since i was moving to new bios from F4E to F4F i decided to move my saves files to USB stick and reload them in new bios >>> yup it worked but you do get a warning that you are loading a bios setting from different bios etc so do be careful there ..... only issue i have is that the description for file is probably too short...i would like to see a much larger sizes description so i can put some detail in there to remind me what i did with the bios settings at that time


____________________________________________________________ __________________


Some setup screenshots

Top temp > Ambient ~22C
Bottom Temp > Water temp at idle after a bit of work


You like my new waterblock mount


Water setup pics
OMG Nehalem is HOT...i ran that realtemp software and during prime it was in 80C at 4GHz 1.41v
water temp kept rising and rising....i have to check the rad for dust


Vdroop mod




Phase Change setup




____________________________________________________________ _______



Some results from last nights testing

Max Water Screenshot 4485MHz
http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=453923



Some Phase Change results

I started off with looser settings first to get a feel for frequency









Surprisingly fast 3DMARK05.....looks like Nehalem FTW here




I started tightening timings here and also later bumped frequency a touch on CPU

[dinos22]

Bus Frequency testing (QPI/BCLK)


Here is the full update

I did some QPI/BCLK/bus frequency testing to see if i could break the 222Mhz "wall" I had in my previous tests. It was a bit of a tussle but in the end i managed to get some extra bus speed through few different settings outlined below. It seems as thought PCI Express frequency, uncore "sweetspot" volts and settings you boot at are the main driving factor from my initial testing in achieving higher/stable bus speeds or QPI or BCLK or whatever people call them. I was maxing out at 102.5MHz PCIe frequency in windows and while i also managed to find a sweet spot to let me OC a touch more (103 or so MHz) i was not able to make a run stick even though i did have a CAS6 run running at 228.3MHz bus only to crash on 16th loop...it looked like a 7m30s run ...

Here are my findings so far. Disregard the SuperPi efficiency.......i was just testing frequencies.

I'd love to hear from Gigabyte X58 board owners about their experience and whether these settings help anyone reach higher clocks.

I'm in touch with Gigabyte guys about this so hopefully they can figure out what it is exactly, whether it's the PLL chip or signaling/traces issue or whatever. All i care about is 250+Mhz bus speed stable on any GFX card

Test Configuration:

• Gigabyte X58-UD5 F4n bios (old bios for initial testing)
• Intel Core i7 920 retail chip 3849A910 D0 stepping
• 6GB 2000MHz CAS8 DDR3 Corsair Dominators
• Nvidia 8400 PCIe Graphics Card + Xfire ATI 4890
• 1000W HX1000 Corsair PSU
• 1hp C-BuZz Single Stage (kayl evap) > on CPU
• 160GB IDE Hard Drive
• Windows XP Pro 32bit SP3
• Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
  

BIOS SETTINGS:

• CPU PLL Voltage: Auto or 1.80v - same effect
• CPU VCORE: 1.35-1.36 - same effect
• IOH/ICH 1.1V Voltage: Auto or 1.20v - same effect
• IOH Voltage: 1.42v (i havent tried auto...dont think it matters)
• ICH PCI-E Voltage: Auto or 1.5v - same effect
• QPI/VTT: 1.433v or 1.455v = this chip's sweet spot (any higher or lower and i was unable to push past 101MHz PCIe frequency in windows)
• VDIMM: tried between 1.66v - 1.94v same effect
• BUS SPEED: booting from 200 or 210 same effect, lower or higher i had problems going past 101MHz PCIe frequency in windows
  for the record i could boot at 220 straight from bios to windows...sorry didnt try higher..will do next time
• PCIe FREQ.: Auto or 101MHz - same effect....102 would occasionally boot but every now and then throw an F6 error iirc...anything higher and no boot at all. In windows i did not see 101Mhz PCIe freq. in SetFSB even though i was selecting it in bios so not sure it was actually sticking at all.

222MHz Bus Frequency
101MHz PCI Express Frequency
32M SuperPi stable

recorded in the middle of the run (before i moved on to higher frequency)




223MHz Bus Frequency
101MHz PCI Express Frequency
32M SuperPi stable





225MHz Bus Frequency
101.8MHz PCI Express Frequency
32M SuperPi stable




226MHz Bus Frequency
101.9MHz PCI Express Frequency
32M SuperPi stable






227.5MHz Bus Frequency
102.50MHz PCI Express Frequency
32M SuperPi stable






http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=568106

[eva2000]

Awesome Dino... good to know the memory dividers above 4 are available! Have mem dividers >4 always been available on all bioses you tried so far ?

For temps download realtemp 2.88

[Benji Tshi]

With my 920, i think i have divider available on UD5 and P6T.

Dinos, is it the first mainboard X58 you test ? Because i'm deceived by this UD5. Clock to clock is not very good, and set the settings to standard, turbo or extreme doesn't change anything

Anywya, good job you've done with this.

[dinos22]

By eva2000

Awesome Dino... good to know the memory dividers above 4 are available! Have mem dividers >4 always been available on all bioses you tried so far ?

For temps download realtemp 2.88

yeah they are man
i will download that app

By Benji Tshi

With my 920, i think i have divider available on UD5 and P6T.

Dinos, is it the first mainboard X58 you test ? Because i'm deceived by this UD5. Clock to clock is not very good, and set the settings to standard, turbo or extreme doesn't change anything

Anywya, good job you've done with this.

it is man
but i am surprised you say its slow because i am yet to see anyone run faster 32M at similar clocks i've been testing without much effort put into it :S

it seems pretty fast to me but until i have a different brand board i dont know

[dinos22]

here is a run from dsjjang from OCX for example




here are my two initial runs

similar clocks and timings..........he is on Asus Rampage 2 extreme and i am on Gigabyte X58-UD5