Weak link in my 3500+ Venice for overclocking?

[stockclocker]

Hi everyone

 

Have been readings heaps on here and finally decided to give the overclocking guide a go. Spent my whole weekend rebooting and testing, but didn't have too much luck.

 

Only managed to overclock my CPU from 2.2ghz to about 2.4 ghz (220 x 11)... when i started playing with the ram, it still wasn't very stable. I was getting SuperPi rounding errors, BSOD before windows login screen and failed Prime95 tests.

 

My CPU temp was always very good, under 40c even with 1.6 volts. NF4 chipset was around 52-54 most of the time, even when at standard clock speed. I kept the ram timings stock (2.5-4-4-8)... I didn't want to take the voltage over 3v. Even at 220 FSB with 1:1 divider, it caused a fair few crashes. An LDT ratio of 3x seemed to make it more stable than 4x @ 220 FSB, but this is probably not ideal.

 

My question is.... is there a weak link in my system causing the instability? The PSU perhaps or the memory?

 

510-2fix BIOS

3500+ Venice

DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D

OCZ PC3200 Value VX Winbond UTT (2x512)

Gigabyte X800 PCIx video card

Thermaltake Shark VA7000 case

Thermaltake Beetle CPU cooler

Antec TrueBlue 2.0 480w PSU*

Barracuda 7200.7 SATA NCQ and SATA 80GB NCQ 7200.8

 

Thanks in advance

[CPDMF]

By running your UTT at 2.5 4 4 8 you are way out of what it likes to be at. If you are going to throw 3.0 volts to it you may as well take advantage of what UTT likes to do. Throw your mem timings to 2 2 2 5. This may require a slot change but try it in the orange and see how it goes.

 

Take a look through the oc database. Tons of entries have been made with utt and bh-5

[stockclocker]

thanks for your advice so what you're saying is by tightening my timings, it should actually run better? Cos i did try running it at 2-2-2-6 and it actually seemed to at least let windows boot... i thought it might have just been a fluke.

 

1. Do you think my CPU might be capable to be upped more than just 220x11 FSB and it's my ram settings that are holding me back?

 

2. When I'm concentrating on finding the max CPU mhz, in that case, what do I keep my ram timings at? Because I've kept them at stock timings when upping CPU, but ran a 1/2 divider.

 

Thankyou!