I fried my first CPU. An AMD Duron. Which was a cut down version of the Athlon. like Intel’s Celeron, where its a cut down Pentium/i-x.
I bought a AMD comoatible combo kit from TigerDirect, which was mobo, power supply, heat sink, stuff like that. And I bought the CPU separate. The heat sink didn’t fit properly. Which is to say, it fit just tightly enough to not be hanging off. I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t realize it was a real problem.
It fried, with awful microchip smoke, in 30 seconds. That was like year 2002. Whenever Dungeon Siege was new.
I once managed to kill an Athlon64 such that it would hard lock while compiling a certain GCC source file. Since I was running gentoo at the time obviously that thing went in the trash.
Me neither, I’ve never had a hard disk fail (though had plenty of floppies and zipdisks fail back in the day, since those were garbage). That said I’ve never been a sysadmin so this is just the disks I’ve owned personally
I am tired of lugging my desktop everywhere. Is there a SFF “gaming” PC option? I’m talking NUC sized. Probably the new 2200g or 2400g "Apu"s. I just need something that’s as good as an HD6950 or even a 5850…
either one of those various Zotac or ASRock barebone kits with beefy GPUs (I know ASRock has a 1060 version of their latest), or do a 2200G/2400G build in this here In Win case:
80 bucks gets you a case under 4.5L and with a PSU powerful enough to drive either of those APUs at load. drop in an ITX board, the CPU, memory and storage and your golden.
one of these days I should also really figure out how to get this memory stable at 1600 instead of 1333, the UEFI is not helpful and I’m sick of having to clear cmos
yeah, I don’t really know how to do either of those things, I can get hwinfo to spit out a theoretically valid set of timings at 1600 but this motherboard seems insistent on making me do it all by hand and I can only make my main workstation unbootable so many times in a week. I really expected it to default to 1600 when I bought it!
it hardly matters, it’s just the knowledge that I could probably squeeze another 10% or so performance out of this (my 3570K only runs at 4.2 but it’s actually somewhat wattage constrained in here given the GPU has access to 275 of my 450w so I don’t want to fuck with it too much more)
If you don’t have the newest bios, it’s possible a bios update could improve RAM compatibility and auto detect.
XMP is usually only a thing for exceeding standard Intel/AMD spec and often does not auto-detect. I dunno how 1600mhz aligns with that. But if your mobo has an XMP setting which is selectable, that can make things easy. If it works. It doesn’t always work. Due to mysterious compatibility issues surrounding RAM.
As far as manual RAM tuning goes, I would look up the claimed timings on the manufacturer page for that RAM. (there are also tools out there which can read the timings straight off your ram).
Then I would look up timings for some basic 1600mhz ram. If your ram timings are tighter, I usually try the basic ones first. If it works, then tighten from there.
Don’t forget about possible voltage increase.
I seem to recall the UEFI says NOT SUPPORTED when I toggle to the XMP option even though hwinfo lists it. Then again, I haven’t actually tried booting with that yet; maybe that’s my secret.
Ivy Bridge does DDR3-1600 natively (i.e it’s officially supported, whereas it would be an overclock on Sandy Bridge)(this is totally ignoring JEDEC specs, by the by), so the issue is simply one of getting timings put in the BIOS. either copy the timing listed on the RAM or in the SPD info or, if the BIOS supports XMP profiles (it should; the Z68 board I have supports XMP, hell, the H61 board I recently got supports XMP), you tell the BIOS to load those and walk away.
now, if those timing aren’t stable, then you go to loosening them up until you’re stable (though clearly you wouldn’t go crazy since you’ll hit the point where a slower speed with a tighter CAS latency is better)
And sometimes ram and mobo combos just don’t like each other. But bios updates sometimes fix that. I recently experienced it on a Z170 board from Asus.
Felix, you should check the voltage spec for your RAM. It’s possible that 1666mhz might require more voltage than 1333. Sometimes boards will even default to a lower voltage when it also defaults to a lower RAM speed than what your RAM is rated for.