2.1 is the most commonly used voltage for overclocking modules. Phenom II will work just fine.

Isn't that too much for the memory controller (which is integrated into the CPU)?
I mean, those were supposed to run with DDR3, which runs at a much lower voltage.
So is it really an urban myth, that it will damage the CPU? Some people on the net claim this.

If 2.1V is fine, I could even get 1066MHz@CL4.
But those are unobtanium as well. 😁

RAM-to-CPU overvoltage wasn't really a thing until Intel Nehalem CPUs were released. Athlon64 happily accepted ludicrous DDR voltages (3.3v-5v) with legendary Winbond memory and Phenom CPUs aren't that different.

AMD themselves said you can go up to 2.0V but not above it. If you want to know how far you can go before you fry something I guess you'd have to find someone who fried something 😀

I tried running at 2.05V and it didn't damage my CPU, but then I never could get it to run stable at 1066 and gave up. IMO, AMD screwed up by making that the spec, they should have gone with 933 and then maybe we could have had a decent supply of DIMMs that supported it.

Mhhh, after BIOS-Update the board has a 5.33:1 divider for DDR2-1066.
If I overclock the FSB to 225MHz, it should be able to run DDR2-1200, or am I wrong? 😁

Yes, with the right memory modules you can clock them towards 700MHz (1400 effective) with the Phenom IIs.

DrSwizz wrote on 2022-02-19, 12:23:

Yes, with the right memory modules you can clock them towards 700MHz (1400 effective) with the Phenom IIs.

😮 😮 😮
And which is the "right"?

1Gb Micron based memory sticks (In particular Crucial Ballistix).

Micron D9 chips require voltages over 2.4v for 1300+ mhz, which is not sustainable, because they are prone to die very easily on high voltage. Not to mention that it's 1 Gb modules and overclocking four of them is a bit tricky, so you're pretty much stuck with only 2 Gb. And all 2 Gb DDR2 modules are considered "trash", because best of them can achieve only ~1200 on 6-6-6 timings.

You don't necessarily need to use quite that high voltage provided you have good memory sticks and you make proper use of the "clock skew" setting (provided your motherboard has one). Years ago I did a lot of testing how high I could get a stable memory overclock using reasonable voltages and I was able reach 650MHz with 5-5-5-15 timings around 2.2V.

The Phenom's datasheet should obtain all the relevant voltage specs for the memory interface. They are also designed to work with DDR2 and DDR3, so common DDR2 voltage levels should be just fine.

@RaiderOfLostVoodoo:
Have you ever thought about fitting the board with 4x 4GB modules? Unfortunately these are a bit hard to obtain and most (all?) are just plain DDR2-800.

ChrisK wrote on 2022-02-19, 21:41:

Have you ever thought about fitting the board with 4x 4GB modules? Unfortunately these are a bit hard to obtain and most (all?) are just plain DDR2-800.

Why should I?
Win98SE and WinXP 32bit both can only handle up to 3.5GB. So it's a bit pointless to go above 4GB.

Seen from that perspective, you are right.
But anything newer than WinXP x86 can use it and the board supports 16 GB.

Here's a spec I found regarding the DDR2 voltage for AM3 CPUs (only transient values):

Steady state voltage is 1.8V +-0.1V.
Unfortunately no absolute max values found.

ChrisK wrote on 2022-02-21, 13:24:

Seen from that perspective, you are right.
But anything newer than WinXP x86 can use it and the board supports 16 GB.

There is no need to install anything newer than WinXP.
If I need a secondary surf machine, I can use my late XP build (Z68 board, binned i5-2500K which can do >5GHz).