Kentsfield overclocking on nVidia reference 680i motherboard

all earlier boards top out around that speed. The new ones should be good well over 333 (1333) FSB.

[Babrbarossa]

I didn't scan through many posts in ths thread, but people are getting at least 450X8, 400X9 - Ignore the griping about lack of cross shipment to europe/canada- they are doing it.

http://www.evga.com/community/messag...69&whichpage=1

[ElMoIsEviL]

Originally Posted by Misoprostol

I haven't yet tried flashing to the latest BIOS, but Kentsfield FSB overclocking on this board appears to be absolutely horrible, I had an ES Bad Axe 2 in my system before, and besides the spacing of the PCIe slots, and the non-functionality of my sound card (oh yeah and no SLI support...) it was a MUCH better overclocking board.

I can't even get much over 300FSB on this board with a Kentsfield, and from what I've seen around the net, that's about par for the course... I'm very disappointed.

That's a given.

Intel and ATi(now AMD) chipsets are the better overclockers. nVIDIA's Intel nForce series and the newer 680i just seem to have always been lackluster when it came to overclocking.

[Babrbarossa]

So you have heard that the new revision doesn't overclock as well as the original? You mean just for C2D's, right?

mine sucks. Unstable at 350

[Babrbarossa]

You're cursed!

[Babrbarossa]

Just got my new revision today- I was hoping to get my water cooling setup at around the same time to do some comparisons with that, but it doesn't looks like the WC will be here within the next week. I'm going to try this e4300 I have here on each board.

[tomb18]

Well, I got my new eVGA rev A1 motherboard this week along with a brand spanking new Qx6700, 4G OCZ PC6400 Platinum XTC (4-4-4-15), Tuniq Tower, eVGA 8800GTX (to compliment my MSI 8800GTX) and Silverstone 1000W power supply.

So, here is a little log of what I did:
First Installed XP64 at stock settings. No problems.

Second, everything stock I upped the multiplier a few notches to see how far it would boot into Windows (XP64) with everything stock. I got the multiplier to X13 giving 266X13=3458. Here I was able to boot and use windows no problem. At 266*14 it would boot but freeze at some point. This was all with auto voltages and the stock Intel cooler.

Next I installed my Tuniq Tower and started fooling around with the FSB.

Several people were saying that they can get to 400Mhz or even 450 MHz with 8x multi's. Well the highest FSB I got was 350 with a 10x multi. This is stable for most things but if I run prime 95 on all 4 cores, two cores give errors after a few hours. This is with default auto volts.
I then tried upping the voiltage on the CPU to 1.47. This resulted in an actual voltage of 1.4 at idle but 1.39 at load. I could game with this no problem. However the 2 cores still died after a few hours with prime 95 but the heat was tremendous. I hit 90C on 2 cores! So I am sure that given I had water cooling I could go much higher. I have even booted into WIndows at 4Ghz.

I have finally settled on 3.4GHz (340FSBx10) which is 12 hours prime95 stable hitting a maximum temperature of 83C (meaured with Coretemp).
Don't be too concerned with the temperatures...Ok 90 is excessive, but 80C is OK since you are still below the temperature at which the CPU throttles and most of the time for gaming you would hit around 55-60C.

So, I've done ome benchmarks and SuperPi 1M for example gives about 0.3 seconds longer than the guys with the 400 MHz FSb, hardly something to concern myself with.

3DMark06, 17400

All in all, it was a good buy.!

[Babrbarossa]

Holy Bajeezuz! what a system!! That's a really great rundown on your OC too! That kind of description really helps people out when they're trying to find their own limits.

[tomb18]

Hi, if you wish I can give more details and a few pics.