Overclocking on a budget board - question

I built a budget gaming computer in an HTPC case on a M-ATX motherboard.

Athlon II X3 (Rana core) @3.0 Ghz
4 GB Kingston Hyper-X DDR2 RAM @800 mhz
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Radeon 5670 (1GB of GDDR5)

It was cheap as hell to build.

I'm in the process of overclocking the processor. I can't adjust voltage on my board but I can adjust the CPU multiplier, FSB, and HT speed.

Stock is 15 x 200 mhz FSB = 3.0 ghz. My processor supports something like 2400 mhz HT speed but the board can only handle 1000 mhz.

I'm able to reach 3.49 Ghz perfectly stable at 50 degrees under full load. I have to throttle down my Memory with a divider to 775 Mhz. Also since the HT overclocks with the FSB, I have to throttle that down to the next lowest setting which is 800 mhz - though the OC'd FSB clocks it back up to 930 mhz. If I keep the HT at 1000, it OCs to something like 1100 and is unstable.

My question is, is the benefit gained by the extra 490 mhz in the CPU worth more than the loss of 25 mhz in memory and 70 mhz HT frequencies???

Most likely it is worth it, but you will have to run benchmarks or just play some games to verify that ----- be careful overclocking anything in HTPC case - they are not made to handle the heat.

You will gain some benefit from unlocking the 4th core on that Rana to make it an AthlonII X4, but be aware, you may not be able to if you cannot adjust the voltage (which I find strange)

You won't even notice the loss of 25mhz on the memory clock outside of synthetic memory bandwidth benchmarks. So don't worry about that.

As for the HT clock... Eh, you're mostly likely losing more from running it on a 1ghz HT board, rather than the 2ghz that it's rated at, than you will from the 70mhz drop from 1000. So you'd most likely be better off with the near 500mhz oc imo.

If their board is of an old enough chipset that it's limited to a 1ghz HT clock, i'd be doubtful that it'd support unlocking of additional cores.

In the BIOS cell menu there are lines for CPU voltage, CPU-NB voltage, and DRAM voltage. I can move the selector down to their lines, but they're grayed out. There's a key on the right that says "Gray: Default voltage". I can't hit enter and change the field.

I do have the latest BIOS update, which is like the 4th version of it.

I don't see an option to unlock the 4th core...

It's a M-ATX small form factor board... AM2+... It's not that it's too old, just kind of minimalistic...

Note that, although it's possible that the 4th core may actually work, it's also possible that it is buggered up in some manner. That could lead to all sorts of strangeness.

As a general rule tri-core processors are really quad cores that couldn't stabilize one of the cores at the stock frequency. Generally if you enable that 4th core you will either need a heavy duty cooling situation and over-voltage on it (which will probably burn it up faster if it works at all), or to underclock the other 3 cores to the stable clock on the 4th.

I'm having a hard time OCing this thing. I can clock it to 3.49 ghz and run it through 7 hours of Prime 95 without errors. (unstable at 3.52)

But whenever I tick the FSB up even one mhz, it fails to POST about 50% of the time. It's the same 50% fail rate whether it's 3.015 ghz or 3.49 ghz.

Running the memory at a lower frequency ans looser timing doesnt change anything, niether does dropping the HT.

Advice?

that mobo is not designed for overclocking, so don't expect great results ---- if you want better tweakability than you need a fancier (and more expensive) mobo I'm afraid - 3.5 on air and stock voltage is plenty respectable, I'd be happy with that result with your current setup myself.

Yeah but that's with 50% POST failure rate.

Default settings = 100% POST rate. Change anything at all, even a teeny tiny bit = 50% POST rate. Seems like something is wrong.... It can't be that the board is so lame that it can't tick the FSB up one point.

Here's a link to the board: http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=pr...1&prod_no=1863

As you can see the manual for it shows that it's actually got a number of overclocking settings (range of RAM overclocking options, FSB, multiplier, NB, HT, etc, all are overclockable on this board). Seems strange that it wouldn't be able to overclock even the slightest bit without failing.