Sadly the opteron has peaked....

[NosBoost300]

Psht, how do you think I felt having to fight to get 2.7GHz stable and that freakin requires 1.504v for that AND I'm water cooling. So you can just go to 'heck' with that sadness!

Next step is to remove my IHS......I think I just may get crazy enough to do it...

hrmm if i may ask, what is IHS, this isnt the first time i've heard it

 

[magouster]

The IHS is the Integrated Heat Spreader, the little silver "cap" that covers the 2 cores.

 

[Nubius]

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40207&page=1&highlight=IHS+removal

dude made a video tutorial on it, buuuuut I mean....it's all kind of self explanitory. I downloaded it and checked it out for the heck of it just to see someone actually do it instead of just pictures and whatnot.

I just gotta spend time pulling out my CPU and attempting it and hoping everything goes ok, however I don't know if it'll be worth it.

Xtremesytems has a list of weeks and steppings and mine is on the AVOID list because it does 2.7-2.75GHz max with 1.55v and that's basically exactly where mine is at currently. Requires 1.504v for 2.7 currently and I doubt removing the IHS will get me above the 2.75.

Just like the venice man, missed the good CPU's by one week, freakin annoys the crap out of me.

 

[gaara]

meh wouldn't really complain considering my CPU is doing exactly the same thing as yours and it's on the "honourable mention" list...how did yours turn out? Mine is incredibly frustrating considering it'll do 280*9 at about 1.35vcore easily, then if I wanna get 290*9 I need to bump up vcore to about 1.48v and then I'm in the same boat as you at 300*9

you gotta consider 50% overclock is good enough for me though

Xtremesytems has a list of weeks and steppings and mine is on the AVOID list

apparently the 0551s have the better memory controllers though and are one of the few cores capable of maintaining 300HTT with 2-5-3-3-5

 

[john3]

what does removing the IHS do? what does it allow? where do you put the thermal paste then?

 

[gaara]

Well on most older CPUs you'd simply have the bare core...on most new CPUs you have an intergrated heatspreader over top of the core and so now rather than having direct thermal transfer from the core to the heatsink it moves from the core to the IHS and then the IHS makes contact with the heatsink

and of course in some cases the IHS won't make good contact with the core and your thermal conductivity goes down so some people choose to remove it and avoid that problem...this obviously creates problem as now you can get thermal paste on the transistors...plus the core is no longer protected and the heatsink hasn't been designed for that fit you there is a risk of crushing your core if you overtighten the heatsink

 

[gaara]

Mine is incredibly frustrating considering it'll do 280*9 at about 1.35vcore easily, then if I wanna get 290*9 I need to bump up vcore to about 1.48v and then I'm in the same boat as you at 300*9

Sorry I lied...you motivated me to try and tweak this thing some more

Went back into the bios and set vcore to 1.325 +113% which CPU-Z reads at 1.48v...prime fails right away on the core it always fails on but I really don't give a crap what prime has to say about it since I have running folding on the "weak" core for a few hours now while playing some source on the other core with no problems which is stable enough for me

was also able to tighten cas back to 2.5 so I'm almost back at my original 300HTT speeds with 2.5-3-3-7 1T, just gotta try and tighten ras to cas from 4 to 3 and I'm good

 

[Nubius]

this obviously creates problem as now you can get thermal paste on the transistors...

Psht, not like that problem wasn't there before.

A couple interesting things to consider about the supposed 'fragileness' of the cores. As one dude pointed out in another forum I saw, the old socket A mobos had that gap in the middle right below the core. That made it fairly easy to crush the core. This time it's a smaller CPU and it's completely backed by the socket so in theory it shouldn't be as hard to crush. Beyond that it wouldn't make sense for AMD to just all of a sudden make their cores more fragile simply because it has a heat spreader on it.

One thing that's true about the heatsinks though, is that you can only use the bolt through style heatsinks like how water blocks are. Any that use retention clips can't be used.

Gaara - Mine is doing 305x9 right now with 1.4 + 113% but I'm pretty sure it doesn't need that much. For me it's reading as 1.52 in CPU-Z and ITESmart Guardian, but it reads like 1.54 in the BIOS. For 301x9 (for whatever reason my computer HATES 300x9, but 301x9 is ok...I saw this happen to another dude as well)

Normally for 301x9 I'm using 1.375 + 113% which translates to about 1.504v in CPU-Z and that is 14 hours stable in prime95.

I want to remove that IHS and see if I can get 2.8GHz goin on. Might happen, but like you said, I just need to play a game like oblivion for a while and if that doesn't crash I assume I could consider it stable.

However, you will notice a difference in SuperPI times based on stability. For example I'd get like 31 seconds at 2.7GHz, but if it was unstable it'd show like 31.297 seconds and of course in this program that .297 seconds matters.

My RAM is always running at 2-3-3-6 though, I've told you about that BS thing with my RAM and not wanting to work correctly at CL2.5

But yeah......remove IHS, put some electrical tape over the transistors. That's what a lot of people seem to be doing to protect them from sparking against a heatsink. Should also protect from TIM spilling over.