This board is a piece of shit.
Specs:
asus p5n-d
Intel C2Q Q8300
2x 1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 5-5-5-12-2T 1.9v
2x 2GB Corsair XMS DDR2-800 5-5-5-18-2T 1.85v
2x EVGA GTX260 in SLI
1x Corsair TX750 PSU
2x 500GB 7200RPM Seagate drives in raid0
I'm overclocking my Q8300 to stress my SLI setup. I noticed in Grand Theft Auto 4 if I reduce CPU intensive options my GPU Utilization goes up about 15%-20% more, *currently 65%* on both cards. My thinking is my CPU is the bottleneck.
Well I can't get past 2.8 from 2.5, and it will post at 3ghz but hang. I read online that Q8300 is a crappy OC'er but should be able to do 3ghz on stock voltage on a decent board.
I messed with all the voltages trying to hit 3ghz and this is what I found out about my board. It's a piece of shit.
This board has so many quirks and issues, it's not even funny.
First off I was not able to run dual channel under normal stock operation when I first got this board. The northbridge would overheat and crash or lock up the system. I fixed this issue by adding a high performance delta 60mm fan to the northbridge.
Now the other issues I've had these past 5 days.
It will not post if I raise the voltage to certain values.
For example:
At 2.8ghz the northbridge will run stable at 1.24 but if I raise it to 1.28 the system will not post. If I raise the voltage again to 1.32-6 it boots fine, after 1.36 then no post til 1.4 and so on.
Same with HT voltage and SB voltage, atleast SB voltage works fine til 1.58 then the computer reboots and screams ram problem.
At 3ghz, I raised NB/HT voltages to 1.34 which made the computer post then hang at cpu-id/memcheck. I raised it a little higher, no post until I hit 1.56 and it still does the same thing.
anyways
I tried Vcore from 1.3 to 1.55 didn't make a difference.
I even went past 1600FSB to 1633, and it post but hang.
Another issue I'm having is if I set the FSB to like 1400, 1500, 1600 it will not post, but if I do 1399, 1499, 1599 or 1401, 1501, 1601 it will post.
Well I gave up and accepted the 2.8 and it runs stable *as in I ran prime95 26 hours straight and it passed memtest* if I have my memory in single channel mode. Then I started thinking about running dual channel and even overclocking that. Well the board didn't like that and kept throwing errors in memtest.
I removed the 2x1GB sticks and ran the 4GB sticks which worked fine. Played with the timings, got it down to 4-4-4-12-1T but kept throwing errors in prime95, raise the voltage from 1.85 to 2.2v that didn't make a difference. Meanwhile the system will randomly not post if reset, and give mobo errors that "Bios boot block not found attempting to boot from cd."
I said "fuck it!" and change the timings and fsb of ram back to stock while keeping FSB of cpu to 2.8ghz. It still throws errors in prime95 but yet no errors in memtest, yet Firefox and other applications crashing like a mofo.
Now I'm just like fuck it! I returned everything to stock except for the 4-4-4-12-1T and the computer runs fine and ran prime95 the past hour fine where as before it would throw an error in 2 minutes.
Incase of anyone wondering I did reduce the LDT multiplier during all this from 5x to 2x which seem to help some what.
During all this I managed to boot into windows and run GTA4 a few times and it did confirm my suspicions that my CPU was the bottleneck but also my ram not running in dual channel. I managed to hit 90% GPU utilization on both cards before the game crashed.
I don't know what to blame the 750i chipset or asus for a broken bios?
Specs:
asus p5n-d
Intel C2Q Q8300
2x 1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 5-5-5-12-2T 1.9v
2x 2GB Corsair XMS DDR2-800 5-5-5-18-2T 1.85v
2x EVGA GTX260 in SLI
1x Corsair TX750 PSU
2x 500GB 7200RPM Seagate drives in raid0
I'm overclocking my Q8300 to stress my SLI setup. I noticed in Grand Theft Auto 4 if I reduce CPU intensive options my GPU Utilization goes up about 15%-20% more, *currently 65%* on both cards. My thinking is my CPU is the bottleneck.
Well I can't get past 2.8 from 2.5, and it will post at 3ghz but hang. I read online that Q8300 is a crappy OC'er but should be able to do 3ghz on stock voltage on a decent board.
I messed with all the voltages trying to hit 3ghz and this is what I found out about my board. It's a piece of shit.
This board has so many quirks and issues, it's not even funny.
First off I was not able to run dual channel under normal stock operation when I first got this board. The northbridge would overheat and crash or lock up the system. I fixed this issue by adding a high performance delta 60mm fan to the northbridge.
Now the other issues I've had these past 5 days.
It will not post if I raise the voltage to certain values.
For example:
At 2.8ghz the northbridge will run stable at 1.24 but if I raise it to 1.28 the system will not post. If I raise the voltage again to 1.32-6 it boots fine, after 1.36 then no post til 1.4 and so on.
Same with HT voltage and SB voltage, atleast SB voltage works fine til 1.58 then the computer reboots and screams ram problem.
At 3ghz, I raised NB/HT voltages to 1.34 which made the computer post then hang at cpu-id/memcheck. I raised it a little higher, no post until I hit 1.56 and it still does the same thing.
anyways
I tried Vcore from 1.3 to 1.55 didn't make a difference.
I even went past 1600FSB to 1633, and it post but hang.
Another issue I'm having is if I set the FSB to like 1400, 1500, 1600 it will not post, but if I do 1399, 1499, 1599 or 1401, 1501, 1601 it will post.
Well I gave up and accepted the 2.8 and it runs stable *as in I ran prime95 26 hours straight and it passed memtest* if I have my memory in single channel mode. Then I started thinking about running dual channel and even overclocking that. Well the board didn't like that and kept throwing errors in memtest.
I removed the 2x1GB sticks and ran the 4GB sticks which worked fine. Played with the timings, got it down to 4-4-4-12-1T but kept throwing errors in prime95, raise the voltage from 1.85 to 2.2v that didn't make a difference. Meanwhile the system will randomly not post if reset, and give mobo errors that "Bios boot block not found attempting to boot from cd."
I said "fuck it!" and change the timings and fsb of ram back to stock while keeping FSB of cpu to 2.8ghz. It still throws errors in prime95 but yet no errors in memtest, yet Firefox and other applications crashing like a mofo.
Now I'm just like fuck it! I returned everything to stock except for the 4-4-4-12-1T and the computer runs fine and ran prime95 the past hour fine where as before it would throw an error in 2 minutes.
Incase of anyone wondering I did reduce the LDT multiplier during all this from 5x to 2x which seem to help some what.
During all this I managed to boot into windows and run GTA4 a few times and it did confirm my suspicions that my CPU was the bottleneck but also my ram not running in dual channel. I managed to hit 90% GPU utilization on both cards before the game crashed.
I don't know what to blame the 750i chipset or asus for a broken bios?
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