F3-8500CL7Q-16GBRL w/ Gigabyte MB

[rpopovich]

I have a pretty good working Gigabyte GA-EP43T-UD3L MB with the 16GB kit(F3-8500CL7Q-16GBRL) and a Q6700 Intel CPU on a new build. I ran Memetest initially for 8 hours + with FSB upped to 300 MHZ (RAM @ 1210, CPU @ 3 GHz) and got only 1 error in the upper memory range so I ran it again at stock 266MHZ for 13 hours and got no errors. I was using a 500 W PSU with an ATI 4000 series video card to start and even at stock speeds I would get a very random blue screen but only once in great while. I then went to a workstation GPU (ATI V4800) thinking the problem was the GPU but that hasn't totally solved the problem. After seeing the difference with the 300 MHz FSB I'd like to go back to that but not at the expense of stability. I'm using Win 7 HP x64 and running Virtual Box with 3 VMs, 2 x Linux and PC BSD. I'm most likely going to wipe my OS SSD and try starting over but would like some suggestions on how to maybe get to 300 MHz stable. I set the exact RAM timings and 1.5V and never had a boot problem but eveything else is AUTO and temps are totally normal. There's a HighPoint RAID card w/ 1 storage drive attached on a PCIe x1 slot and 1 SATA DVD drive, nothing else. I was considering a gold rated 620 W PSU and by reloading the OS maybe starting with a clean registry would also help. One other thing I found unusual was the OS came with SP1 and I was getting persistent WMI 10 errors which never happened on any previous Win 7 Pro builds. I also found the MS thread with the vbs solution but I'm not convinced it really fixes the problem. I would imagine that the voltage could be raised a little on the RAM and maybe the MCH but I've seen a number of unstable boards in the past 2 years and this one so far has run very good imo. I started with all the latest 64 bit drivers but may have affected something when I installed a 800 MB RAMDisk which I since removed. I've allocated 2 GB of ram to each VM and had no problem with the OS and all VMs running nicely together. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Tradesman]

Prob going to have to raise the NB voltage .07 or so and may have to add a bit with the vCore. May want to start w/ the NB and check that then up the DRAM voltage to 1.55 if needed, last would be to raise vCore a hair, what are you at now?

[rpopovich]

Thanks for the reply

OK read your reply and thanks for bearing with the long winded post. Right now on an out of town business trip so I'm away from the system but I left everything in AUTO except my FSB Mhz and the base DRAM timings + set the DRAM voltage manually to 1.5V. I will try bumping the NB 0.07V and set the DRAM up to 1.55V and will run Memtest again. If it holds at 300MHz FSB I'll let you know. If it doesn't I'll up the Vcore a small amount, try again and let you know the results. I don't presently know the Vcore but it's the Core 2 Quad Q6700 also set in AUTO. Thanks for your suggestions.

[Tradesman]

No problem, I'll be around and keep an eye out for your post

[rpopovich]

Back at it Tradesman

Well I'm back to the board and working the overclock and having good success. One thing I'll say, the RAM does not like even 1.55V and gets unstable no matter what any of the other settings are. So right now I'm at the 300 MHz FSB with Vcore set to 1.30V and I'm locking the MCH at 266MHz with a SPD 4.00 which gives me 1200 MHz RAM speed. I've bumped up the MCH voltage a couple of ticks in the menu and that seemed to be the magic formula because Memtest ran and ran for ever w/o errors. Now booting into Win7x64 HP was a different story. Until I ran the Vcore up to it's current 1.30 volts I could never get to the desktop from the login screen w/o it rebooting. So there were actually 2 problems originally running the 300 MHz FSB: the memory errors in Memtest and booting into Windows which I'll bet is solved with the Vcore adjustment. I'll post my MCH voltage when I'm done running Memtest and all other final values but things are looking quite stable. I am going to wipe the HD and install Windows 7 x64 PRO as I got a copy w/o the SP1 integrated and then we'll really see just how well things end up. More to follow!

[Tradesman]

Sounds good, with a bit more vCore and NB the 6700 should pick up and run 1333 with no problem, only thing would be to watch the temp, would suggest a decent aftermarket cooler for the CPU if you go much over 1333 (Freezer Pro 7 is a good reasonably priced one or one of the Zalman 9XXX series.

[rpopovich]

New info on the OC!

Well, I kind of expected that my inital results were too good to be true. Since my last post I've reloaded windows w/ W7 PRO x64 and seen an increase of very random blue screens even scaling back to the original stock timings. I still don't get any errors in Memtest no matter how long I run it but boot in to Windows 7 and things change. I did a lot of research on the internet and even downloaded and installed Driver Kit so I could read my memory dumps. In almost all cases I find memory corruption and an increased number of non-MS SW which I run on my other W7 machines but makes this one BSOD or unstable. I've since pulled the memory and tested the machine with 2 sticks (8GB), first one set and then the other and rotated them to the other set of sockets and everything runs beautiful. Then I went back up to 3GHz CPU and 1200MHz memory and everything still runs great. I then booted into windows and opened up all 3 VMs then did a big download via IE8 with resource monitor open and ran the available RAM all the way down to <600MB and still no problems. I really think at this point the NB and MCH just cannot handle all 16GB in Windows7. I'm sure with skew adj, voltages and somewhere in the vast possibilities of the board BIOS there could be a solution but it'll take a better man then me to find it! The heafty heatsink on the NB chip did get pretty warm over all this (48deg C) so I'm putting a 120mm side cover fan on the inside case right over the NB HS to see if that brings that temp back down some. I also went to the Seasonic Gold PS only to find out that the temperature controlled fan doesn't run unless it gets relatively hot and that has retarded air flow some. Well I'd appreciate any additional thoughts if you have any Tradesman but other than that I think I've tried every reasonable thing. I was wondering if buying up in memory (performance) would get me better quality chips that might run better at these lower FSB and just underclock them. Let me know what you think.