I'm not so sure everyone should jump on the venice bandwagon just yet. I've been testing one for the past week or so overclocked from 2.2 (3500) to 2.6-2.9. I ran into a pretty significant problem that i havent been able to overcome yet.
So when i got the venice i was like, oh sweet 2.9 oc..
I get home with my new venice. But first i try to overclock my winchester past the 2.7 mark again to no prevail. So i slap in the venice core, boots up just fine with my 2.7 settings from my winchester core. When i went to boot windows i noticed it took longer to get into windows.. no big deal, maybe windows was updating registry or something from the new processor. I go and grab the new bios for my board (vF7, adds venice and dualcore support).. Installed it, rebooted and it still took 30-45seconds to get to windows. Also installed newest video/mb drivers from nvidia. Previously my load time was roughly 10-15 seconds from power to windows (i dont have any sata drives or anything to slow down the boot). I started overclocking it a bit more to 2898mhz system still had a 30second boot time.. When i got to windows it took another 10 seconds to get to the login screen.. AND another 10 seconds after that to get to the start menu. I don't have anything loaded at startup except my m-audio driver
(no anti-virus or any crap of that nature, does anyone really need AV anymore? just dont open attachments or go to sites of questionable nature.)
I do some benchmarks, everything looks great. Start playing some games and i notice a HUGE difference in performance. SWG used to load up in about 30 seconds with my winchester OC. Now, it takes roughly 10 minutes to get into the game from the double click to the first character movements. My maudio driver was using a TON of system resources so i started thinking that maybe my audio driver freaked out because of the new hardware. Removed devices/drivers and reinstalled them. Still had issues, only this time not only did it take forever to do anything but now i was getting pops and clicks on my audio. I start tinkering with the driver settings and nothing seems to be working.
So my next step in logical progression was that maybe the chip was overheating and freaking out? I went out to the bios and it was running at 50c (after a 10s reboot).. Which considering what intel processors run at, shouldnt be a big deal.
While im in the bios i get the bright idea to downclock the fsb taking the chip down to roughly 2.5-2.6. I rebooted and windows seemed to load a *little* faster but not much. When windows loaded up, the pesky 20 second delay between login prompt and start menu wasnt there. I loaded up 4 or 5 divx stargate-sg1 eps (sg1 rocks.) and everything played back flawlessly. However, swg still takes 10 minutes to load, and there is still a considerable delay in windows boot up.
Firefox and email stuff worked just fine the entire time.
Maybe i got a defective chip? Bad first batch?
Possible configuration error? I think i've pretty much tried everything.
I was wondering if anyone else had this problem?
It seems to me that the more i push the chip the slower it goes.. That doesn't make much sense to me.