Kicked away the Gigabyte, got a real mobo (ASUS P4P800) and OCed the infernal beast to 3.7GHz @ 1.525 volts.

Temps are now 35C idle / 43C torturing @ 21C ambient.

Congrants on the monster OC. Your voltage is a bit high but perhaps cause your chip is a C0. But still, real good OC and excellent temps!

Man, this makes me really nostalgic. Here's my 3.0E e0 @ 4ghz.

Had to raise voltage because I'm having a lot of Vdroop at full 'burner. Not sure if the culprit is the mobo, the PSU, or both.

Amazed you reached 4.0GHz with just 1.344~1.36V 😲 .

TELVM wrote:

Had to raise voltage because I'm having a lot of Vdroop at full 'burner. Not sure if the culprit is the mobo, the PSU, or both.

Amazed you reached 4.0GHz with just 1.344~1.36V 😲 .

its the motherboard. The Asus motherboards at the time were NOTORIOUS for this. But if you could solder in a precision resistor, this was virtually eliminated. I did the "droop mod" for my p4c800e-dlx back in the day.

Very interesting. If I get it right we should put a ~28K VR across ADP3180 pins 17 & 18, on or close to the SMD cap, correct?

I can attest to teh quality of the Cooler Master EVO 212 as I have one cooling my 8-Core AMD FX 8350.

My only mod is to add a rear 120mm fan to help draw more air over the cooling fins before exausting outside the rear of the case.

@telvm

Yes. Follow the directions exactly for your motherboard. The droop on vcore should be reduced by 75%.

I too have a ASUS P4P800, i've volt modded mine, i have noticed it noted good air flow and VRM heatsinks, which it does not have, also the voltage controller could use a heat sink too. I think i'm gonna replace my side window with moder's mesh and some fans, or a typhoon and of course mobo heat sinks.

Those P4 OCs are just astonishing. Back then I was running an Opteron based 939 setup with a modest OC from 1.6 to 2.0 GHz.

I skipped the whole 478 generation because I was foolish enough to bite the Willamette 423 bait and switch to a four figures rig with Rambus and one of those rushed and poorly designed Pentium 4 1.7 GHz.

Considering my at best average soldering skills and big paws I concluded that trying to solder on small & fragile SMD components would be recipe for disaster. So I looked for unconventional warfare alternatives.

... as the resistance needed to be added is very low, graphite can be substituted in place of a variable or fixed resistor(s).
Simply use a pacer (mechanical pencil with a thin tip) and 2H - 2B graphite, and lightly shade between legs 17 and 18 of the ADP 3180 chip. Check vdroop, add more graphite if droop still unsatisfactory, or if vcore rises under load, remove some graphite with a paintbrush or cotton tip ...

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthrea … ncil-Vdroop-mod

This is as ghetto as they come but works like a charm, after some penciling the max Vdroop I see now is ~0.02 V .

Then replaced the C0 stepping 3.0E with a D0 stepping 3.4E, lapped till it smiled, and began tormenting. For some reason (from what I've read it could be some P4P800 protection feature) the 3.4E gets a x14 multiplier, instead of x17:

@ 4GHz the infernal beast gnaws 5.4 GFlops, but at 4:6 divider memory performance drops below 3000 MB/s reading:

So I think 3.8GHz at 4:5 divider is a better compromise for now:

@ 3.8GHz & 21C ambient temps are 35C idling (Δ14C) and 45C burning (Δ24C):

Now I'd like to feed more RAM to the beast. Theoretically this P4P800 has four slots for 4GB max, but the mobo manual warns of this ...

"When all four sockets are populated with 1GB DIMMs (total 4GB), the system may detect only 3+GB (a little less than 4GB) due to ICH5R resource allocation."

... and I've read about people getting in trouble after populating with 4x1GB sticks. And 3x1GB would waste the double channel. So I think 2x1GB it will be.

I appeal now to the vast wisdom of Vogons forumers for advice on fast memory. Is DDR400 (800 MT/s) the max RAM speed available for these P4P800 and Preshott 478? Or there is perhaps something exotic & faster?

Oh yes. But it is now impossibly rare. There was ram that could do 533 mhz easy. But those modules were cherry picked 400 mhz ones. I believe the holy grail of ddr ram was BH5.

Also "serious" overclockrs only ever ueed 2 512mb modules.

On my DFI 865PE, which is really very similar to your P4P800, I used all 4 ram slots. 2x1gb plus 2x512gb, all Kingston DD400, run at over 400mhz - like 433 or something like that with more relaxed timings 3-4-4-10, I think. My memory is a little hazy on such exact details.

But yeah, on 865PE chipsets, having all four populated slots shouldn't affect overclocking. Not to 4ghz anyway- maybe if you're trying to break the world speed record under LN2, then maybe.

BTW The fastest DDR ram I believe were DDR500 modules. You can try looking for 433 and 466 speeds also, but they're all rare and pricey. I wouldn't bother frankly.

550mhz available at your leisure: 😁
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/151023592187

or, perhaps a 'smaller' slightly slower version?:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/151012901675
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/181115022334
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/271121328340

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Corsair-TWINX20484400-Pro/
http://www.anandtech.com/print/1580/

luckybob wrote:

... "serious" overclockers only ever need 2 512mb modules.

I'm far from being a 'serious' overclocker 😀 , didn't see the pencil 😁 ?

Thanks for the info on fast DDRs gentlemen, I'll see if I can scrounge some of that.

Solved the 3.4E multiplier problem with a BIOS update, now is this son of a beast beggining to roar decently 😈 .

The ~300W PSU is now the weak link in the chain, lots of +12V droop at full 'burner 😵 .

What's the deal with all these dinosaurs I keep seeing in those screenshots? Is there a Jurassic Park XP edition I'm not aware of? As if good ole XP wasn't prehistoric enough in itself 😁

It's the new Windoze Blew, you touch, it bites 😁 .

TELVM wrote:

The ~300W PSU is now the weak link in the chain, lots of +12V droop at full 'burner 😵 .

300w!!?? You need moar power- a good 450w unit would do it. Might be able to crack 4ghz stable then.

That dinosaur is cracking me up xD

sgt76 wrote:

300w!!?? You need moar power- a good 450w unit would do it ...

Yep, the Kill-A-Watt shows this gorging dragon is now drawing from the wall 172W at idle & 311W full burner, I better upgrade PSU before something goes up in smoke.

TELVM wrote:

sgt76 wrote:

300w!!?? You need moar power- a good 450w unit would do it ...

Yep, the Kill-A-Watt shows this gorging dragon is now drawing from the wall 172W at idle & 311W full burner, I better upgrade PSU before something goes up in smoke.

if you want a "period correct" power supply, pc power and cooling was THE brand to have.

Entry level users had the 510W unit, power users *rimshot* got the 1000W unit. you can get a used one here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-KW-PC-Power-and-Coo … =item3f23d208c6