a78 vs a88x, 106 bclk wall?

Nobu

[H]F Junkie
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Jun 7, 2007
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I have a Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI board, which can't go above 106 bclk without losing ahci (and I think my wifi disappears at about 111), so I was thinking about getting another motherboard. IDE isn't an option, because switching to IDE doesn't help for whatever reason, and I've got a SSD so regardless I'd rather not.

So I was wondering, does the A78 chipset have the same limitation?

It's not a big deal, I guess, since I have an a10-6800k, but squeezing the last bit of MHz out of both my CPU and RAM is a rather tempting prospect. ;)

These are the boards I was looking at getting: Gigabyte GA-F2A78M-D3H, MSI A78M-E45, ASUS A78M-A.
 
bro you need a proper overclocking board. my a88x pro will do 130 just fine. take a looks at one of these, i picked my a88x pro off ebay for like $80

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a88x-socket-fm2-motherboard,3764.html
 
Thanks, I had looked around, and I kind of gathered that the a88x-pro (and maybe others) could go above 106, but nobody ever said outright so I wasn't sure. That's using AHCI, right?
 
yes, btw, I'd recommend ~4.6ghz for the cpu, I can't seem to keep it from throttling any higher than that.

let me know if you can get it higher without it throttling

also, the BLCK is a little tricky, I noticed that it seems to be tied with the NB clock, I believe the BLCK had to divide evenly into the NB clock or something. But yea, just because it won't boot at a higher BLCK doesn't mean it can't do it, change the NB clock.
 
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On my current board, I could get it up to 111 without touching the NB clock (maybe higher, but I haven't tried in a while), only issue I had was loss of sata and wifi. Maybe a quirk of this board? Don't think I was able to get it above about 4.4Ghz stable (reduced multi, increased bclk. With just multi, I think I maxed at around 4.6), though, which may have had something to do with the NB.

I'm leaning towards getting the GA-F2A88X-UP4, since it has more or less comparable features and I already have a gigabyte board. Whether I get that or the ASUS, I'll let you know how it goes. ;)
 
Ended up going with the Gigabyte, since it was only $84.66 (So, about the same as Newegg's price after mail-in rebate, but used rather than new) from Amazon's "Warehouse Deals", free 2-day shipping. I'll be putting in two 8GB HyperX Predator 2666MHz kits (16GB total) that I got for $85 each and the CPU will be cooled by the H80i I'm currently using.

Can't wait for it all to arrive so I can throw it together. :D
 
Not sure if this motherboard (A88XN-wifi) is ridiculous, or lies. lol

Currently have the iGPU clocked at 2000Mhz and there's no graphical corruption, at stock voltage (vcore=~1.3v, vram=1.4v, I think nb is about the same as vcore). NB is set to 2400Mhz, and CPU is clocked at 4.1Ghz (bclk at 111, set automatically by XMP). RAM is running at 2664 effective, with timings at 11-12-10-32 (had last one at 8, but loosened it for stability), T1.

This is with two of the four HyperX sticks that arrived today. Haven't run any stress tests yet (other than Memtest86, seems stable there); recovering from a little filesystem corruption that happened when I rebooted the machine while it was in the middle of booting the OS (real smart...).
 
lmao @ gpu clocked at 2000mhz...no way

still jealous of your low voltage.
I'm at core 1.45v 4.59GHZ, 112 BLCK, 1.1v 960mhz GPU <-just started OCing the gpu so its low

what's your voltage for the gpu? (APU1.2?)
 
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As far as I can remember (not at my computer right now) there are only three voltage controls: nb, core, and ram. Don't think there's anywhere in the bios to read it either. :/

I'll see what I can figure out tonight, but I have a dorm inspection tomorrow so I can't guarantee I'll get back to you tonight.

Edit: yeah, no setting for the iGPU voltage. Finally got around to stress testing it, though. stress (a Linux stress testing tool) ran for a few hours with no issues. Ran Prime95 in wine and got a rounding error after a few minutes (blend test). Running the small FTT test now, seems to be doing alright so far. RAM is undervolted (1.65 is the rated voltage), so that may be why. CPU is clocked at 4.91Ghz (was 5.1, but lowered to see if that helped prime), 111 bclk. CPUs running at 40c under load, assuming the sensors are accurate and are being read correctly. My fan controller's sensor (which I placed in the radiator fins) says 37c, so it can't be far off. Chokes around the APU are just under 60c under load...assuming the tape holding the sensor isn't peeling back. :/

New motherboard should get here tomorrow...err, today. Need to sleep, lol.

Prime95 Small FTT test went 10.5 hours without error/warning.
 
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The new mb is being a bit more stubborn, but I am able to at least boot at 118bclk (vcore at ~1.4v). Had to reduce the ram multi to 16 and loosen the timings a lot to do it, though. Haven't messed with it too much, stayed up way too late last night swapping the boards, but I was able to bring them back down to about 12-13-13-40, iirc.

With the ram multi at 24, it wouldn't budge past 111 bclk--just refused to boot, even with 1.65v going to the ram. Haven't overvolted the ram yet, want to see what I can get with stock voltages first.

Edit: hmm, just noticed only half my ram is enabled (though all is visible in bios). Time to do some digging...
 
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Cleared CMOS, ram is back in action. Ran one memtest pass and came up with no errors, running prime95 now. See ram/CPU settings in photos:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6HZjBTsAO7ERW9PVWpKNEp2VDg/edit?usp=docslist_api
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6HZjBTsAO7EbzhmQ0RHVDFkbEE/edit?usp=docslist_api

A bit disappointed, though. Had to set sata to ide mode (which actually worked this time), and the built in Ethernet controller isn't working (probably because of the high bclk). On the other hand, Gigabyte released a new bios with "Enhanced PCIe compatibility"--maybe that'll help. About an hour in, and still no errors in prime95.
 
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Prime95 ran for 14hrs no problem.

Updated bios to F6. Also read a post in the gigabyte oc forum about someone being able to boot at bclk above 133, so I gave it a shot (since I was having issues figuring out what vcore I was at before and the bios wouldn't load the config that I saved to hdd from the old bios version). Working well so far, 134 bclk and 4.7Ghz (had to drop a bit to retain stability), vcore at 1.375, ram running at 2500-ish, 11-12-11-38.

Memtest86 says throughput is about 1/3rd my L2 Cache, and 1/4th my L1 Cache, but it's a little less than when bclk was at 117 because I had to drop my cpu multi a good bit.

Still have to boot with sata set to ide mode, but at least my on-board lan is back. Oh, if you're having issues with throttling, try reducing the cpu multi by one, rebooting, then increasing it again. I noticed that it usually goes away after that (can tell because memtest shows really low RAM throughput when it's throttled). These gigabyte FM2 boards are prickly, but they do OC well. lol
 
Ah, mixing things up here. I was at 140 bclk with about 4.46Ghz cpu freq. At 134 I can get to 4.65Ghz, or darn near 4.7. Would have to increase vcore to get higher at either bclk. Did you mean cinebench? Isn't cinemax a theatre?
 
Just a quick/final update: running 4.9GHz at 136 bclk (1.39v), RAM at 2177 CAS 9-10-10-34, NBCLK 1800MHz, iGPU 900MHz core.

Had to increase the NB and APU VDD quite a bit to get it stable. It was rough, because increasing the NBCLK would make the system and the gpu unstable at the same time, so I had to figure out which one was causing issues by fiddling with voltages. APU VDD is just under 1.4v (which is max on this board), I think the NB voltage is a little over 1.4v, but I'd have to check again. If I increase NBCLK more, I start having to drop the iGPU's core clock to maintain stability, to a point where it's not worth it. Same the other way, except I have less voltage to play with.

My iGPU can now run cinebench at about 52fps avg (about 8-10 more fps than my HD7770), with the open source radeon driver. Portal runs well with all settings max and msaa x2, sometimes struggles (drops below 40fps) with msaa x4, but not really noticable to me.

igpu reports ~10 degrees c under load (well under limits, normally around 0 when not overclocked/overvolted), CPU reports ~55-60c under load (about 10 under "high", and 20 under "crit").
 
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