DFI DK P35-T2R/S OCing

[Thrax]

And alls well that ends well:

500 * 7 w/ 4GB of DRAM, and only had to adjust NB/SB up one notch, and cpu back to its old standard of 1.475v.

[Thelemech]

Congratulations on the delivery/birth of your new motherboard :)
3.5GHz ...nice, going to keep it there?

[Thrax]

It's been running at that speed since July. I may push it higher, but this is as low as I go.

[Thrax]

I thought I'd split my post off from this (http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=68463) thread and start a new one just in case people were in the market for a cheap, powerful overclocker. As some of you know, I run my chip at 7*500 with ~1.475v (With VDROOP considered). The age of the P965 chipset showed when I recently upgraded to 4GB of RAM, in that I had to drop back to ~375*8. Therefore, I did what any sane person would do: I <s>returned the 4GB and called it a loss</s> spent more money to make it work, dammit!

So, here we are a month after my motherboard dramarama, and I'm pleased to report back some overclocking results.

On the 965, the motherboard was <i>mostly</i> ORTHOS stable. I say this because some days it would pass 24 hours, and some days it would not. The P5B-DLX's lack of strap control made it hard to get the board to cooperate on occasion, but all the same it was a pleasant roller coaster ride in earnest. The board lovingly cooperated in its last eight months of life, and I have a new respect for Asus as a result. Good on them.

But now comes BearLake, and the mighty P35! Here's what I had to do to get 500x7:

Set the VCORE. Yep. That's it.

The thorough BIOS (Pictures coming forthwith) has a vast array of voltage options, but I needed none of them in the end. When I first got the RMAed board, I decided I want no hassle and increased both the GTL Reference Voltage (http://icrontic.com/articles/core2_fsb_explained) and the northbridge voltage. I was, however, possessed today by the notion that this board may not need it; I reset that page of the BIOS, reset the vCore and booted straight away.

Since that time, about twelve hours ago, it's been happily running ORTHOS at 500*7 (5/5/5/2T @ 2.1 VDIMM). This board was worth every boring day.

[muddocktor]

Glad to hear the board is working out well for you, Thrax. I know that my P35 Gigabyte boards have also been great for overclocking the DC Conroes too. Like your DFI, my P35-DS3L was an easy overclock to 500 fsb at stock voltages on the board. All I had to do to get 500 X 7 stable was set vcore up a little on my E6750. Of course, the main difference is that I am still only running 2 gigs of ram instead of 4. I guess I could try that out when I get back in from the rig as I have another kit of Ballistix that matches the set in use on that rig and see how it does with the added strain of running 4 sticks or ram at that speed.

On a side note, this cheap DDR2-667 Ballistix is some excellent stuff. I've been able to get it to around 540 MHz at 5-5-5-15 2T timings with 2.1v. The highest I've had it was 560 MHz at 5-5-5, but had to bump the volts to 2.2 to do that.