Investigations into Socket 939 Athlon 64 Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on October 3, 2005 4:35 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
DFI nF4 Infinity
We wanted to spend a few minutes looking at the motherboard options before continuing - a mini review if you will, as we haven't officially reviewed this board and we want to compare it to the LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D. We're using the DFI NF4 INFINITY, but it is actually just the new name for the DFI NF4-DAGF. There are multiple models of the INFINITY/DAGF, using everything from the base nForce4 4X chipset to the top nForce4 Ultra and SLI. We're using the "middle" model, the nForce4 Standard. The main difference is that all the networking features of the chipset are enabled and official support for 1000 MHz HyperTransport is also present. The only extra that the Ultra offers is SATA-II (3 Gbps) hard drive support, while the 4X limits the HT bus to 800 MHz. SLI adds dual PEG slots to the mix, of course. We heard directly from DFI that the DAGF was being renamed to "INFINITY", but if you still think that there's a difference, we offer these two shots obtained from Newegg and TigerDirect.
TigerDirect lists the board as the INFINITY while Newegg uses the older DAGF moniker. We've resized the images for comparison, with TigerDirect on the left and Newegg on the right. Other than a slight difference in contrast levels and viewing angle, we can't spot any changes. Besides, we're inclined to take DFI at their word. Here's a better shot of our particular board.
Unlike the LanParty series, the Infinity is pretty boring in terms of looks. A standard brownish PCB with no UV reactive parts isn't the best fit for a windowed case, but if you're like me and don't care for case windows, it doesn't really matter. Also missing relative to the LanParty are the rounded cables and onboard power and reset buttons. Those buttons can be handy for testing outside of a case. (Of course, if you're adventurous, you can always just use a small metal item to short the required pins to accomplish the same result - don't blame us if you fry your system that way, though!) One complaint that we did have was with the X16 PEG retention mechanism. Many boards have a clip that locks the rear of the graphics card into place, but the Infinity has a sort of "hook" design. It works okay for holding the GPU in the slot, but removing the GPU can be a bit more difficult than what we'd like. We'd also prefer a larger heat sink on the Northbridge, perhaps with passive cooling. The NB did get quite warm at the highest overclocks, and there looks to be plenty of room to move it up closer to the CPU socket. The small fan did make a bit of noise, though "silent" and "overclocking" rarely go together.
The feature list of the board is very similar to the LanParty boards. The BIOS offers very good tweaking options, but voltages are slightly more limited than the higher-end boards. 3.2V maximum on the RAM is plenty for most people, but it did prove limiting on some OCZ VX Gold that we tried, reaching a maximum of 2-3-3-8-1T timings at DDR500. (That RAM was not used during testing for this particular article, so we mention it merely as a point of interest.) The CPU voltage topped out a 1.85V, which is a lot higher than the default voltage of most 90nm AMD chips. We're a little uncomfortable pushing our CPUs even to that level, though with water cooling or something more exotic, a higher voltage level might prove useful.
Overall, we're very impressed with this value offering from DFI. They basically stripped away the flash and the frills and knocked around $20 off the price of the LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. The question is: do you really want to save the $20? Modders can try turning the Ultra-D board into an SLI model, and the rounded cables and UT reactive design may appeal to some. On the other hand, the Infinity SLI guarantees SLI capability and costs about the same amount as the Ultra-D. If you want to push overclocking a little further, the LanParty boards (and competitors) might be a bit better. If you're trying to stick to a budget without cutting necessary features, the Infinity line keeps you covered.
Having selected the processor and motherboard, we're still only half way through our critical component choices. Hard drives, floppy drives, optical drives, and even graphics cards have little to no impact on overclocking, so you can get whatever you want in those areas. We'd question the purchase of a low end graphics card with such a system, unless there's a specific desire to have a fast processor for video/audio encoding. That sort of work is often for a real job, though, and we're hesitant to suggest that anyone overclock a system that is being used for important work. If a gaming PC crashes and somehow corrupts your entire hard drive, you reformat and reinstall. A work PC going through the same problems would be a lot more painful. We've already given our warnings about overclocking, however, so do what you will. What remains, then, are the last three components that will generally have an impact on your overclocking endeavors.
We wanted to spend a few minutes looking at the motherboard options before continuing - a mini review if you will, as we haven't officially reviewed this board and we want to compare it to the LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D. We're using the DFI NF4 INFINITY, but it is actually just the new name for the DFI NF4-DAGF. There are multiple models of the INFINITY/DAGF, using everything from the base nForce4 4X chipset to the top nForce4 Ultra and SLI. We're using the "middle" model, the nForce4 Standard. The main difference is that all the networking features of the chipset are enabled and official support for 1000 MHz HyperTransport is also present. The only extra that the Ultra offers is SATA-II (3 Gbps) hard drive support, while the 4X limits the HT bus to 800 MHz. SLI adds dual PEG slots to the mix, of course. We heard directly from DFI that the DAGF was being renamed to "INFINITY", but if you still think that there's a difference, we offer these two shots obtained from Newegg and TigerDirect.
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TigerDirect lists the board as the INFINITY while Newegg uses the older DAGF moniker. We've resized the images for comparison, with TigerDirect on the left and Newegg on the right. Other than a slight difference in contrast levels and viewing angle, we can't spot any changes. Besides, we're inclined to take DFI at their word. Here's a better shot of our particular board.
Click to enlarge.
Unlike the LanParty series, the Infinity is pretty boring in terms of looks. A standard brownish PCB with no UV reactive parts isn't the best fit for a windowed case, but if you're like me and don't care for case windows, it doesn't really matter. Also missing relative to the LanParty are the rounded cables and onboard power and reset buttons. Those buttons can be handy for testing outside of a case. (Of course, if you're adventurous, you can always just use a small metal item to short the required pins to accomplish the same result - don't blame us if you fry your system that way, though!) One complaint that we did have was with the X16 PEG retention mechanism. Many boards have a clip that locks the rear of the graphics card into place, but the Infinity has a sort of "hook" design. It works okay for holding the GPU in the slot, but removing the GPU can be a bit more difficult than what we'd like. We'd also prefer a larger heat sink on the Northbridge, perhaps with passive cooling. The NB did get quite warm at the highest overclocks, and there looks to be plenty of room to move it up closer to the CPU socket. The small fan did make a bit of noise, though "silent" and "overclocking" rarely go together.
| DFI nF4 Infinity Specifications | |
| CPU Interface | Socket 939 Athlon 64 |
| Chipset | nForce4 Standard (single chip) |
| BUS Speeds | 200MHz to 450MHz (in 1MHz increments) |
| PCI/AGP Speeds | Asynchronous (Fixed) |
| PCI Express | 100MHz to 145MHz in 1MHz increments |
| CPU Voltage | Auto, 0.800V to 1.850V in 0.025V increments |
| DRAM Voltage | 2.5V to 3.2V in 0.1V increments |
| Chipset Voltage | 1.5V, 1.6V, 1.7V |
| Hyper Transport Ratios | Auto, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 |
| LDT Bus Transfer | 16/16, 16/8, 8/16, 8/8 |
| CPU Ratios | Auto, 4x to 25x in .5x increments |
| DRAM Speeds | Auto, 100, 133, 150, 166, 200 |
| Memory Command Rate | Auto, 1T, 2T |
| Memory Slots | Four 184-pin DDR Dual-Channel Slots Unbuffered ECC or non-ECC Memory to 4GB Total |
| Expansion Slots | 1 X16 PCIe Slots 2 X1 PCIe 3 PCI Slots |
| Onboard SATA | 4-Drive SATA by nF4 |
| Onboard IDE | Two Standard NVIDIA ATA133/100/66 (4 drives) |
| SATA/IDE RAID | 4-Drive SATA plus 4-Drive IDE (8 total) Can be combined in RAID 0, 1 |
| Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 | 10 USB 2.0 ports supported nF4 2 1394A FireWire ports by VIA VT6307 |
| Onboard LAN | Gigabit Ethernet PCIe by Vitesse VSC8201 PHY |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC655 6-Channel codec 3 UAJ audio jacks CD-in, front audio, and coaxial SPDIF In and Out |
| BIOS | Award 8/11/2005 Release, CK84D811 |
The feature list of the board is very similar to the LanParty boards. The BIOS offers very good tweaking options, but voltages are slightly more limited than the higher-end boards. 3.2V maximum on the RAM is plenty for most people, but it did prove limiting on some OCZ VX Gold that we tried, reaching a maximum of 2-3-3-8-1T timings at DDR500. (That RAM was not used during testing for this particular article, so we mention it merely as a point of interest.) The CPU voltage topped out a 1.85V, which is a lot higher than the default voltage of most 90nm AMD chips. We're a little uncomfortable pushing our CPUs even to that level, though with water cooling or something more exotic, a higher voltage level might prove useful.
Overall, we're very impressed with this value offering from DFI. They basically stripped away the flash and the frills and knocked around $20 off the price of the LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. The question is: do you really want to save the $20? Modders can try turning the Ultra-D board into an SLI model, and the rounded cables and UT reactive design may appeal to some. On the other hand, the Infinity SLI guarantees SLI capability and costs about the same amount as the Ultra-D. If you want to push overclocking a little further, the LanParty boards (and competitors) might be a bit better. If you're trying to stick to a budget without cutting necessary features, the Infinity line keeps you covered.
Having selected the processor and motherboard, we're still only half way through our critical component choices. Hard drives, floppy drives, optical drives, and even graphics cards have little to no impact on overclocking, so you can get whatever you want in those areas. We'd question the purchase of a low end graphics card with such a system, unless there's a specific desire to have a fast processor for video/audio encoding. That sort of work is often for a real job, though, and we're hesitant to suggest that anyone overclock a system that is being used for important work. If a gaming PC crashes and somehow corrupts your entire hard drive, you reformat and reinstall. A work PC going through the same problems would be a lot more painful. We've already given our warnings about overclocking, however, so do what you will. What remains, then, are the last three components that will generally have an impact on your overclocking endeavors.
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Crassus - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
First of all, thank you for such a long article. I appreciate the work you put into this. What I'd really like to see in one of the planned articles would be an in-depth coverage of the options an enthusiast-grade mainboard BIOS offers nowadays for the RAM timings (and maybe PCIe) - beyond the standard timings covered in this article.PrinceGaz - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
The finer memory-timings offered by enthusiast mobos are generally vendor specific so your best bet is to check a forum or other site dedicated to your motherboard. For DFI mobos for instance, you can find a thread which gives detailed coverage of memory settings on DFI-Street forums http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2...">hereCheesePoofs - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
Why stability test with 3dmark (an app that tries to stress teh CPU as little as possible) and pcmark (an ok pc-stressing app) instead of the combo of memtest86+, superpi, and prime95? Seems to me that if you want to find out whether yoru CPU really is stable, you'd want to stress it as hard as possible (which those three will do).Also, from what I've read from Zebo's thread in the CPU forums, 2T really doesn't have a significant impact on performance. Could you clarify this?
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
I've seen systems that run Prime95 and SuperPi 100% stable crash under 3DMark looping, as well as under PCMark. I imagine 2.80 GHz will crash under those if I run them all concurrently. My personal experience is that SuperPi and Prime95 only stress a few paths of the CPU, hence the inclusion of benchmarks with 11 different applications that can all fail with an unstable overclock. 3DMark GPU tests are not as demanding of the CPU, but the CPU tests are very demanding IMO. (That's part of why the top scores on the 3DMark ORB never include the CPU tests.)2T command rate, as you can see in quite a few instances, really killed performance. Perhaps tweaking other special timings beyond CL, tRCD, tRP, and tRAS might make the impact less, but you could likely tweak the same things with 1T at a lower memory speed. Command rate comes into play on every single memory access, so doubling that delay will certainly have an impact on performance.
fitten - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
Good answer. Most have no clue as to how a CPU actually works. Ideally, a synchronous circuit is rated at a clock speed that the longest path will function properly (give correct results). There may be 1000s of pathways that can run at higher frequencies but that one can hold it back. Running the clock rate up may cause that one pathway not to be able to meet something like a data setup and hold time on one line (of the 32 or 64) in the data path and now you have an unstable setup that you may not detect. As always with overclocking, a crash is the best result you can get because you know you've pushed too far. Unless you are testing pretty much every instruction with every possible data against a control to compare against (some pathways can take longer depending on the data that it is being operated on), there are many errors that you may not detect... and all it takes is one, out of the possible billions, to make your machine not stable. Sure, it may be a rarely seen case of instruction+data but it exists.Programs like the Pi calculators and such do make your CPU work a lot, but the calculations are fairly repetitive and hardly a broad sample of the ISA.
I'm all for doing whatever you want with your own machine. Heck, I used to overclock all the time, too. I just find all of the lack of knowledge in synchronous circuits... interesting... when people talk about overclocking.
Saist - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
for those who read this portion here :****
Because of the GPU limitation, we're going to be testing at 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. We'll also test many of the titles with 4xAA enabled, which should serve as a reality check. Even with a super fast CPU, many games are going to be completely GPU limited with the X800 Pro when we run 4xAA, especially at resolutions 1024x768 and above. Frankly, we wouldn't bother enabling 4xAA unless you can at least reach 1024x768 anyway.
****
Did anyone else think... okay.. lets stick a Radeon 9600, GeforceFX, or XGI Volari in there so that we actually will be limited? I mean... please. X800 alone goes above what most users have in their systems today. If we are buying "new" components, then yeah, the X800 is on my short list, but how about doing some reviews over hardware people actually have in their hands.
OvErHeAtInG - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
If you're overclocking a new A64 Venice... somehow I think you're not still running your XGI Volari for games. Remember bench numbers are really only useful if they reflect framerates you would actually want to play with.JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
The reason I used an X800 Pro is because I feel it's a good match for the chip, RAM, and motherboard. I can toss in a 7800GTX to show what the CPU on its own is capable of, but you can get cards that pretty much equal the X800 Pro for under $200. X800 GTO and GTO2 can match and even beat the X800 Pro.I view overclocking (and computer building in general) from a bang-for-the-buck perspective. It doesn't make sense to me to spend $100 upgrading from the 3000+ to the 3500+ if I'm going to be completely GPU limited. $200 on a graphics card is not that much money, when you really get down to it. 180 million transistor chip with 256MB of 980MHz RAM, all mounted on a large PCB? At least I can feel I'm getting a lot of stuff for $200. A CPU is far cheaper to produce (though more expensive to design). Profit margins on CPUs are notoriously high.... Personally, the X800 Pro is a decent card, but I really want something faster these days. Same goes for the 6800GT. But then, not everyone feels that way.
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Thought #2 (for Saist): If X800 is above what most people have, other than those buying new computers... well, what about the motherboard and processor? Socket 939 with nForce4 is a more recent configuration than X800/6800 cards. Not to mention Venice has only been out for something like 8 months.
If you're looking to spend $120+ on a new Venice chip and you've only got a 9600 Pro (or even a 9800 Pro), you're wasting your money on the wrong part (at least from a gaming perspective). A socket 754 Sempron with an X800 Pro would be far better for gaming than a Venice core with anything less than an X800/6800. Outside of gaming... well, graphics don't matter outside of gaming much, which is why Winstones, PCMark, and AutoGK are included.
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure if you were complaining about the use of a GPU that was too fast, or that it wasn't fast enough. For frequent gaming, I wouldn't recommend anyone go lower than about the X800 GTO these days. 6600GT is (IMO) now relegated to the budget/moderate-gaming setup, as many games are simply unplayable above 1024x768. I really don't like to drop below 1280x1024/1280x960 if I can avoid it. If I've misunderstood your complaint, let me know; if we simply have a difference of opinion... well, there's not much to do about that. :)
yanman - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
any chance you can add in benches for 7800GT/GTX? after all, in your discussion you correctly asset that money is much better spent on high spec'd GPU to match the cpu speed that you've managed to overclock to - having used bargain rate ram and venice.i have a venice 3000+ clocked at 2686mhz, 7800gt and 2x1gb sticks of average ram (legend/hynix). until i upgraded the ram a few weeks ago i had it running for prehaps a month and a half totally solid with 2x512mb sticks of same type, at 2696mhz (337x8, ram at 225mhz (2:3) 2.5-3-4-7-1T)
the reason i ask for 7800GT and GTX is 2 fold, so we can see it from an nvidia side too (different cpu scaling maybe?), and also to show the scaling for a top-end card even if only as a reference point. It just seems a bit one-dimensional only using 1 card.
One last thing, well done to Zebo who made the excellent "Quick and dirty A64 overclocking guide" (used to be sticky in the forums) which I and many people I know used to overclock their venices with.. i'd be stuck without it!
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
I'm planning on doing 7800GTX testing with an X2 3800+ OC article. For gaming, it will perform identically to the 3200+ Venice. Hopefully, I'll be done in the next ~week or so.