Anyone who knows me knows that I generally won’t make my computer unstable for any reason. This doesn’t mean I won’t help another person do it. The following is our little adventure with an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ (Stock 2.0 GHz) on an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe. As usual, try any of this at your own risk and so forth.
Well, a while ago, I dropped a lot of money to get my own AMD Athlon X2 3800+ and an Asus A8N-SLI Premium with a eVGA 7800 GT for graphics. For Christmas, my friend bought his own similar machine (except he hasn’t received his 2gb of OCZ ram yet) with a better motherboard but same graphics card. Well, we’re cheap so we thought we would try SLI out in his machine (he also has a much nicer Seasonic PSU than my Antec). Considering we can install XP in 7 minutes with SATA RAID 0, we just installed XP again (x86. Driver support in x64 is terrible). After installing the drivers off the cd and the latest WHQL Nvidia Display Drivers (81.97 i think), we ran a benchmark to see stability and check performance. In Aquamark, we were in the 80k range (i think it was like 86k or 87k). We wanted to break 100k points.
Off to the bios. We first incremented to 2.2 ghz (by modifying the FSB and limiting the memory) and checked stability again. All was good. Incremented to 2.3 and something went wacky. It seems that Asus automatically reduced the multiplyer for us. How kind. So we overrode that back to 10 and all was happy. Again, stable but not to 100k. We changed heatsink and fan at this point to make sure that we didn’t have heating problems. Without a really good heatsink around, we used his extra thermaltake (i think? no idea what that was) and a Vantec Tornado 92mm fan (which can levitate itself at full power). This took a bit to get the fan controller hooked up as well, but eventually we were back online.
We chose to increment the FSB by 50 and boot to Windows and make sure it would run CPU-Z and at least one quick test for stability. It worked every time (though it was giving us insanely long boot times. The reason later). At 2.5 ghz, the glorious event occured. We actually topped 101k points (i’ll have to get the screenshot from him). Since we were targetting 2.6 from the beginning as our max, we just upped the fsb the rest of the way and tested again. Again, long boot and then fine. We tested again and got over 102k, but not a good improvement. Now that we were satisfied, I got my graphics card back in my computer and started debugging the problem.
OK, I know it’s driver related. In safe mode, everything seemed nice. So we started installing each driver one at a time and rebooting until one gave us trouble. That happened at the NVidia IDE driver. The problem seemed to go away when we left the NV SW, IDE, and Ethernet drivers off (all of which didn’t seem terribly neccisary when using the Marvel Yukon nic and SATA RAID since Windows had generic ones being used). Later my friend told me that it still does occasionally happen, it’s probably some other driver. Ah well.
Conclusion: the Asus A8N32-SLI overclocks decently; it merely has some driver issues right now.