Is this X58A-OC a dud?

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

Hey guys,

 

Long story short, ObscureParadox and I had a benching session at my house last year and we decided to give this board a blast with a 920 D0. In the end, we gave up with it as no amount of voltage could get it to stabilise at anything over 220 BCLK. 221 would cause hanging and blue screens if the system caught it quick enough.

 

I boot at 210 - 215 BCLK and use the buttons to raise the BCLK 1MHz at a time. Lowering the multi doesn't help, nor does changing the gearing (so it only goes up by 0.3MHz a time).

 

We thought it was down to a duff chip, which is possible, but now it is happening again. I've got another 920 D0 here, which is rock solid at 220 BCLK with 1.4 volts (probably less), but as soon as I set it to 221 BCLK, it doesn't take long for it to lock up. I can't even get it to POST if I try to boot at 221, it hangs on a C1 error.

 

Is there something we are missing here or is this just an unlucky board? It does seem to be a board issue as it can't be two chips that stop at the exact, literally identical frequency.

 

Other important bits:

 

The BIOS it's running is F5e.

The RAM is Corsair Dominator GT 3x2GB 2000MHz 8-9-8 (PSC) @1:8

 

We absolutely blasted the other CPU with volts to see if it would play ball but sadly, not even close to being any better.

 

Please, if anyone has any ideas what could be wrong here, let us know!

 

Cheers.

[der8auer]

You need high PCIe clocks to run a high bclk. Also did you run on cold?

 

From my experience most chips should do 240-250 bclk at least on cold.

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

Hey Roman,

 

How high a PCIe frequency are we talking? I tried 105MHz but it didn't improve the BCLK ability whatsoever. Perhaps 110+ would do the trick?

 

The first chip was on dry ice @ -70 and this one is under phase @ -40 (ish).

[der8auer]

You need as much as possible. Talking about 120+

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

Oh God damn! I've never played with PCIE frequency before so it's a new area for me.

 

I'll have a play again later on.

 

Will I need to raise the PCIE voltages as well or should they be okay at stock? I'm guessing they need a boosting.

[TerraRaptor]

I have quite small experience with 1366 but remember high bclk required bclk slow mode enabled. Can't this be an issue?

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

I tried enabling that but it didn't help. I think the PCIE frequency may be at fault here. I'll have a play later and let you know the results.

[zzolio]

105pcie is enough for 220blck

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

Yeah. It can do that on 100. I need more than 220.

[suzuki]

Be carefull with pci-e frequency especially if you are using ssd,over 115 you can kill it.

High pci-e ,over 115 is used with IDE drives.

if you are planing to use over 115 disable all usb and soundcard ,i mean the onboard things, because they may be broken afterwards.

[zzolio]

I've never seen something died because of high PCIe and I bench with 135Mhz PCIe

[der8auer]

Same here. Just got unstable at a certrain point.

[suzuki]

i was talking about ambient cooling,dunno where is the limit on subzero.

On classified i saw this problem a lot,hence many of them were without functional sound,or lan or even sata ports.

It was just a hint to be careful with that thing,it's better to be safe than sorry.

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

Thanks for the heads up suzuki. Killing stuff isn't first on the list of things to do but it's a part of the game.

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

I have good news!

 

Thanks to all that have given me a hand in this thread. Honestly, I couldn't have done it without you. I've got the board benching at 235 - 240 now with a few tweaks. Time to try some more tweaks and get this thing flying.

[der8auer]

So what was the issue in the end?

[zzolio]

let me know when you get close http://hwbot.org/submission/2544176_zzolio_cpu_frequency_core_i7_920_5701_mhz

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

I haven't got a cascade so that's me out of that one already. Haha. I've almost touched 5GHz, but it still needs more voltage fine tuning.

 

Honestly, I have no idea what the problem was. I upped the PCIE to 115MHz and upped voltages by 0.2v across the board, and it just worked. LOL. I tried lowering the PCIE frequency but it was giving the same problems as before. I guess there's the answer.

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

Any hints as to what the PCIE voltage and QPI/Vtt/IOH/ICH should be at?

 

EDIT: I did squeeze this from it.

 

EDIT2: I found out that the copy of wPrime had corrupted and caused the system to crash every time it tried to go higher than 22% completed. It's now chugging along at 225 BCLK and is almost done as I type... I feel like such a NEWB.

Edited September 25, 2014 by TheMadDutchDude

[Guest TheMadDutchDude]

Just to prove that it was rookie mistakes that were holding me back... I had another go but on LN2 this time.

 

http://hwbot.org/submission/2667952_themaddutchdude_cpu_frequency_core_i7_920_5459.63_mhz

 

The board got too wet to carry on, so I will try for more tomorrow with HT disabled and cores turned off too.