A64 "venice" unlocked! overclock??

[jbell255]

Athlon 64 3000+ "Venice"
Gigabyte K8NS Ultra-939
1GB (2x512) Mushkin Value in Dual Channel (2.5-3-3-6)


I've spent many long hours lately reading about overclocking this similar setup. However, in every case I read about, no one could change their CPU multiplier, and thus had to raise their HTT considerably... well, in my BIOS -> advanced menu, it allows me to change my CPU multiplier anywhere from 5x-20x in .5x incriments.

My RAM isn't that great, so I was thinkin of a goal of a 3200+ (2.0GHz) without having to push my HTT (fsb) too much.. Which route would be better: ?

CPU: 9x HTT: 222MHz = 1998MHz
CPU: 9.5x HTT: 210MHz = 1995MHz
CPU: 10x HTT: 200MHz = 2000MHz

[Bigjakkstaffa]

WHat you want to do is keep your ram settings as tight as possible and set your Command rate to 1T (for a big boost). Obviously this means your not goign to be able to push the memory frequency very high, but you dont need to. With the A64 you can push the HTT bus asynchronous to the FSB using dividers. As such you want to push your HTT bus as much as possible and use the dividers to keep yoru memory frequency as close to 200Mhz as possible, allowing you to run your ram timings as tightly as you can. Then use the multiplier to tweak your CPU clock speed.

--Jakk:t

[jbell255]

Tell me if this would work.

Take my RAM speed down to 166MHz, and get the HTT up to 240MHz with a 4x LDT multiplier. This would give a 5:6 RAM multiplier, so 240MHz x .83 = ~199.2MHz, which is pretty close to the 200MHz (DDR 400MHz) my RAM specifies as stock. It would also give my HTT a speed of 960MHz. If it was stable and all, I could try for 250MHz HTT (x4 = 1000MHz which is what I want) but would push my RAM to ~207.5MHz.. this shouldn't be too harsh for my generic ValueRam?


I'm not too informed about the RAM timings and all, but I will read up on that right now. If I do as you say and try to keep my settings as tight as possible, would the 7Mhz RAM overclock (@250MHz CPU HTT) be OK?

[Bigjakkstaffa]

I woudl think you should be alright, especialyl if its Mushkin stuff, even if it is the Value range, Mushkin is decent gear.

As for HTT, a lot of hardcore overclockers are managing to take that to 300Mhz and upover, so youve still got plenty of headroom left i'd have thought.

As for the ram timings, you want them as low as possibly stable. The biggie here though is the Command Rate setting in the BIOS, at default its set to 2T, but Athlon 64's recieve a huge boost from having it set to 1T, here smore on that courtesy of CV:

http://apages.i989.net/systems_area/a641t/a641t.htm

--Jakk:t