So after all the guff I had to go through getting the Gigabyte board to post with my memory I ended up going to my tried and true brand – Asus. After dealing with the awfulness that is VIA way back in 1998 I have been using Asus boards almost exclusively. Frankly an extra two percent performance or a headache by going elsewhere is not worth it for me. Maybe I have just been lucky or maybe there is a reason Asus is the largest mainboard distributor in the world. Setting all that aside, let’s get to the point of this article. Once I had my shiny new board and processor I wanted to jump straight into overclocking… but oh how things have changed!

As features are brought directly onto the CPU (PCI-Express, memory controller, graphics in some cases) a whole new world of settings must be handled. Of course I don’t give a whit about any of that. I want to find a max cpu speed pronto. Please don’t make me read ten pages of techno jargon just to figure out if I can hit 4ghz. Before we get started make sure you install CPU-Z, Prime95 and ASUS PC Probe so that you can monitor everything. Let’s get to the meat of it.

Finding your max CPU speed w/o HT

1. Enter BIOS and disable Full Screen Logo from “Boot -> Boot Settings Configuration -> Full Screen Logo” so that you can see what is going on when you boot
2. Under the AI Tweaker tab set “AI Overclock Tuner” to manual
3. Extreme Phase Full Power Mode to “Enable”
4. Your BCLK defaults to 133. Raise this to raise your processor speed. Start out at something moderate like 166 for a 25% overclock. Stability deteriorates around 205 on most boards.
5. DRAM Frequency – set this to the lowest non auto setting. Now you don’t have to worry about the memory introducing stability issues. For the record you should already be running high end memory for O’Cing. I would recommend DDR3-1600 at a minimum. You want this to prevent your memory from bottle necking your system stability.
6. QPI frequency you don’t have much control over, but set it to the lower of the two values. You do not want this value over 7500 or so.
7. VCORE over voltage to .2. This is the max safe voltage for Lynnfield – the default 1.2V + .2V = 1.4V
8. DRAM voltage to 1.6
9. Disable HyperThreading from “Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> Intel HT Technology”
10. These manual adjustments should automatically disable Intel Turboboost, but if you see the options available then turn off SpeedStep and TurboBoost.
11. Boot into Windows and open up PC Probe and CPU-Z to verify your settings. Run Prime95 and check your voltages and temps for safety.

For the records sake I was able to hit a stable 4ghz using this method. I could probably have gone further, but I was interested in a Hyperthreading O’C because I do a lot of work with digital video. Those extra four threads should make quite the media encoding difference!

Finding your HT CPU speed

1. Downclock yourself to something reasonable like 165 BCLK again and reenable HT.  The computer does a kind of full shut down and restart when you toggle HT which was at first scary, but no worries.
2. Go back to AI Tweaker and set your voltage offset to .1 (will have been at .2 from previous test). I found that with my processor HyperThreading did not like the extra voltage used for non-HT oc’ing at all. By doing this I was able to stably overclock to 3.8ghz instead of 3.5ghz.

Finding your max memory speed

1. Set your BCLK back down to 133 and choose the fastest memory speed you would like to test. You can inch the speed up or down by raising/lowering the BLCK. I was able to find a stable value of DDR3-1700mhz for my DDR3-1600 memory. I kept all other memory settings at their defaults. There is a lot you can do here, but a little bit of memory bandwidth just doesn’t make that much of a difference for the majority of apps.

So now that you have all your information you can combine your max memory O’C with your max CPU O’C and scream along. I hope somebody finds this article useful!

While setting up my new rig I ran into an unfortunate problem with the Gigabyte P55M-UD2 motherboard. All my attempts to boot were greeted by a rapid fire beeping sound from the motherboard (short beeps). There were four motherboard lights that lit up green green orange red. After some googling I found that the lights have nothing to do with boot error codes and everything to do with reporting how much power the mobo is currently drawing. I know for a fact that Dell uses a four light system and some other motherboard manufacturers also use it to report boot errors. Gigabyte gets some demerits for implementing a “nice thought” feature that is a red herring.

So how do you fix the rapid fire beeping problem? I tried the usual stuff first. No case, one stick of memory in first slot, video card and processor. Next up came the manual and continuous short beeps indicate a video card error. Three video cards later I determined that was not the case. So I start systematically eliminating problems. Swap memory sticks, swap psu’s, swap cpu coolers, swap video cards…. ack. Back to my friend Google and I finally determine that memory errors cause the problem. That’s funny because there is a beep code for memory errors and it sure isn’t rapid fire beeping! I was using certified memory and it was erroring. No problem, swap sticks. No dice. It turns out you have to boot with the single stick of memory in the second slot. Ai yai yai. Seriously? This motherboard wasted a good two hours of my time as I systematically pulled every component of my system apart trying to identify the error.

For those interested I was running the 1.0 version of the board and it had the F3 BIOS installed.

Update 02/15/10 – It appears that people are hitting this article fairly frequently while searching for beep codes. So hear is the full list.