Hiya all,

Recently I reinstalled a copy of XP on my rig and updated my BIOS. Then I tried to OC it. Problem is, after succesfully booting into Windows the actual performance in-game is lower than when not OC'd at all. Games tested: Oblivion and Medieval II, thus the only games I have available. Oblivion drops from 120 to 70 indoors and 35 to 25 outdoors, Medieval II has even lower OC'd performance with a glitched up main-menu (Horizontal lines with textures that don't quite match with the rest(something else caused by the OC?)), and 5 FPS in-game. Thing is, it used to work fine before.

The rig:
E4300
GA-965P-DS3 Mobo with F12 BIOS
Antec Truepower Trio 550 Watt
WD SE16 Caviar 250GB
Nvidia 8800 320MB
Kingston PC6400 2x1024 MB (800Mhz.)

What I did was, from standard BIOS settings, disable CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E) and CPU EIST Function, set the FSB to 270 which is 9x270 ~2,40Ghz with an E4300, System Memory Multiplier to 2.66 and set the timings to 4-4-4-12. Then I added a 0.1 volt to the RAM and let it boot. Later I tried disabling the CPU Thermal Monitor 2(TM2) which resulted in a BSOD, which I'm not sure has to do with each other. Temps, as I mentioned used to be fine.

Any input would be greatly appreciated as I'm certainly stuck here. .
Greets,
Tim

PS. Not sure which section this belongs so I just put it in General Discussions.

The best way to find out if your system is really slower OCed is by using 3dmark06. Grab that and set to stock speed. Run it 5 times, then OC your system. Then run it 5 times again. Take the avg of both and compare.

If there is a performance increase that's notable enough, it's probably drivers of some sort. Perhaps before you were using older drivers that were faster. Or perhaps it's a image quality setting you set in the Nvidia control panel. It could have been on Performance before and now it's on High Quality.

Make sure your PCIe frequency is manually set to 100Mhz.

Thanks for your replies so far.

I'm absolutely sure the settings haven't changed, I tested multiple times with only adjusting the specified BIOS settings. Unless that changes something I'm unaware of. Drivers don't change either.

PCI freq. is set to 100Mhz, thanks for confirming.

It is fixed, setting the PCI freq to 102, as a specific Gigabyte 965P-XXX guide on hardforums said, worked. No more graphic anomalies and higher performance.

That's totally crazy, but whatever works.

Crazy as in dangerous? I'm just following that guide here and strangely the problem went as fast as it came.

OK... I had the same problem with the same mobo a few months back. Had top resort to stock speeds... as much as it hurt. Anyway, while i just replace the mobo, cpu and RAM... it's good to know.

Well done tim0

No, there is absolutely no possibility of damage. Crazy in that you need specifically 102 for it to work properly.

Hmm...Didn't the 7900GTX automatically tune the PCI-E frequency to 125MHz to perform up to speed?

I Don't know about that. How is the graphics card going to change the BIOS? AFAIK, 125Mhz is the absolute max. stable speed and not stable on all setups. Do you have a link? I would be interested to see what that's all about.