Poor overclock with Core 2 Duo E4300 and Msi 945gm3-f motherboard

[Herbssat]

I was wondering if any of you out there have any experience with this motherboard and processor combination. I cannot get my overclock beyond 220 mhz without it being unstable. I am using bios revision 5.3, an Orion HP 400D power supply, Kingston DDR-2 667 memory with CL 5,Lite On DVD burner, Wd 2500KS hard drive and an A-open cd-dvd drive.

 

[MetalX]

That chipset is not one of the better ones for overclocking. 965P, 680i, 650i, and to a lesser extent 975X are the best Intel chipsets for overclocking. One suggestion though. Try increasing the voltage a tiny bit and see if that lets you go further.

 

[Herbssat]

Thanks for the response. I e-mailed the msi tech dept and their direct reply was: Dear customer: Because this is a M-atx board it is not overclockable but you can try-yada,yada,yada. Furthermore, I figured they would say they do not support overclocking and the user is doing it at their own risk. It is funny how some other m-atx boards will overclock and theirs will not.As far as the voltage parameters; how much would you up the voltage? However; this is the last time I will buy an Msi board for overclocking at all. The only reason I buy them anyway is because they are readily available at my distributor and if one is doa;I can take it back quickly.

 

[vnf4ultra]

Well, you could "pin mod" your cpu, like I did. It gets you to 2.4ghz anyway.
https://www.techspot.com/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/1887/cat/500/ppuser/25139

My board is matx too, that's why I pin modded, few options, no pci locks...

 

[Herbssat]

I have a conductive pen that I use to do circuit repair work; I wonder if I can get that to work effectively. By the way, how did you know which pins had to be modded to achieve 2.4 ghz?

 

[vnf4ultra]

I saw a few forum threads on the topic. There are basically three pins that control how the processor is detected by the motherboard. It identifies by whether the signal is high or low on each of the three pins.
Intel's design guide is helpful.
ftp://download.intel.com/design/processor/datashts/31327803.pdf
Especially pages 30, 43, and 46

So, as it says on page 30, since the cpu is 200mhz(800fsb), the signal is LHL, and to get 266(1066fsb) we want LLL. So connecting the bsel1 pin(the high one) to vss makes it low.

 

[GnatGoSplat]

Herbssat, I am considering this motherboard for my build. The MSI 965-based motherboards have an anti-overclocking feature in the BIOS based on CPU model detection that prevents BSEL pin mods from working. I was just wondering if you tried the pin mod and whether the 945GM3-F has the same anti-overclocking in BIOS.
Thanks.