BIOS Crap?

[atholon]

So a little while ago I got a CORE2DUO and a gigabyte board but their manual sucks and I have not been able to figure out how to get the board set up correctly. The CPU is a Core 2 Duo (Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 Wolfdale 2.8GHz LGA 775) and the motherboard a gigabyte (GIGABYTE GA-EP43-UD3L LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard). I am not sure how to optimize it in the bios though and I don't want to fry anything. Can you help me figure out what to set the settings to? I have attached a screenshot that shows the screen I am talking about. I have also put 4 gigs of OCZ 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Ram.

[Steve]

not really sure what you want to do dood. i mean it's all default, so it's at stock/good/working settings. memory and cpu and perfectly matched at stock speed.

if you want a bit more speed, change the CPU Host Clock Control to [Enabled], go to host frequency and type in a higher number. at 300 it probably wont even blink and just accept it, voltage and ram timings etc will just be adjusted automatically.

you wont break it or fry it, if you ask too much it will just fail to POST, or crash when you load windows. this would be unlikely until you get to maybe 3.4GHz (just a rough estimate). usually round that mark you would need to take a look at setting manual voltages.

10.5 is a decent multiplier, you so need don't need a high FSB as i do to get a good overclock on the CPU.


if you want to tinker about then grab hold of http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php to monitor all frequencies and voltages.

also grab http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/ it will show you the exact revision of your cpu, it's VID - this tells you what voltage the chip needs to reach it's default speed, with some revisions you can reach stock speed with a lower voltage than what intel says, you can look at it 2 ways... #1 run it undervolted - cooler and saves power #2 the overclocking potential is great

uh and expected it also tells you the temperature of each core.

[atholon]

Well I was concerned because I have a 2.5 ghz core2duo in my laptop and it seems to smoke this PC. I am using an IDE HDD on this one so I thought maybe that would be the bottleneck.

The ram speed also seemst to be lower than it should. The ram is 1066 ram not 800. The only way I can seem to get it to 1066 is if I change the system memory muliplier to 4.0A

Would it be better to lower the CPU clock ratio and then increase the CPU host frequency?

[Steve]

arg missed the ram freq.

it will be running on a ratio setting. it might be the System Memory Multiplier setting but without looking at it myself it's hard for me to be 100%

you should have it at 1:1 ratio if you want it to be 1066.

i think if you set that option to Manual, then you will give you a list of numbers you can choose instead of 800.


IDE is likely to be a bottleneck

[atholon]

I'll post screens of the options when I get back from work

Thanks for the help steve.