"Dark Helmet" wrote in message
news
Hi all. I've been away from the pc hardcore hardware scene for a
few years and have lost quite a bit of knowledge in the process.
So, after just plopping in a Opty 185 into my socket 939 board to
eke a bit more out of my set-up, I was hoping to get some good
advice. Current set-up:

Opty 185
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo
2 gigs (A Data - Tawian kind of generic brand, but with heatsinks))
DDR 400
BFG Tech 8800 GTS 640mb
etc...

Here's my questions:
1. Under the heaviest load, I'm getting 30-33 C temp, which seems
to indicate I may have some headroom to up the clock, but I
understand the temps of these newest processors aren't safe at as
high of temps of old. What's fairly safe for this processor?

2. I installed the stock AMD heatsink, which seemed surprisingly
very well designed, but I "missed" the first few attempts to get the
bugger to latch. Should I be worried that my thermal paste might be
uneven?

3. What's just a good general guide on how to do this nowadays,
particlarly for this processor and/or mobo? Now I haven't even
looked into my bios yet so I'm asking a little prematurely, but I
believe it's still the old how high can the ram go along with the
processor? If not, are there more options to tweak the innards of
the processor without stressing the other paths like memory, PCI-E,
etc?

4. The Nvidia chip on the mobo, (Nforce 4 I believe - it's next to
the PCI Express slots as my 8800 GTS is sitting right on top of it)
has a fan but gets extremely hot to the touch. Like really hot. Is
this going to be a problem in OC'ing my processor?

Well, thanks in advance for any help on this process. For some
reason, I feel the need to get back into being a pc tweaker again,
and I'm looking forward to it!



Heaviest load - Is that 2 instances of Prime95 running a torture test.
It seems
too cool to me. I wouldn't want to get above 60 C on full load.

If you're talking about first use of a stock heatsink/fan than it will
be OK. If it is
second use and you've cleaned the heatsink and reapplied paste, then
there
is no ham having a second go.

If there was a problem with the thermal conductivity I would expect
CPU full
load temperatures above 33 C.

You can slow down the memory to attempt to compensate for the FSB
increase. Setting the memory to 333 really means 5/3 of the FSB. So a
FSB
of 240 would have your memory back at DDR400. Set the HT to *4.

I used clockGen to adjust the FSB with 2 instances of Prime95 running.
I
measured the temperatures with SpeedFan. I found the highest FSB I
could
get 12 hours of successful 2 * Prime95 below 60 C and then wound down
FSB by 5. Having determined my "optimum" settings I transferred them
to
the bios.

Eric

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