Fresh Milk

I finally found a workaround to a problem which has been bothering me since I built my quiet gaming PC back in January. Despite the DFI nF4 SLI-DR Expert being touted as “THE overclocker’s motherboard,” suspend to RAM (also known as STR or S3) didn’t work properly while overclocking.

There were two major problems:

1. The temperature sensor readings were wildly inaccurate and the voltage applied to the CPU was increased significantly, beyond any selected overclocking voltage. Not safe.

2. The FSB (HTT) speed would revert to stock, while maintaining my adjusted multiplier. This meant the CPU was running at 1900MHz instead of 2900MHz, lower than the stock non-overclocked speed. The overclocked FSB speed should have been 290MHz in my case.

When I first encountered the problem back in January, I contacted DFI support. They confirmed that it was a known problem but didn’t have any fix. Users on the normally helpful DFI Street forums didn’t have any solution either. It was suggested I just use Suspend to Disk (a.k.a. hibernate, S1), but that wasn’t an option for me due to a bug in Windows.

The voltage and inaccurate temperature problems have been fixed by
BIOS update NF4ED406, released on April 6th 2006.

With the motherboard no longer in danger of frying itself, I found a workaround for the stock FSB problem that resulted in underclocking for me.

I use ClockGen for nForce4 (supposedly also on the motherboard utility CD) to change the FSB speed on the fly, to 290MHz in my case. Rather than manually setting the speed each time I resume from standby, I have it automatically done.

It involves three steps:

1. Create an ini file for CG-NVNF4.exe (ClockGen) with the changes you want it to make. In my case, I put the below in a file named 2900mhz.ini.

[CG-NVNF4]
FSB=290

2. Then download and edit fixspeed.vbs, a vbscript, changing the file paths to the correct ones for your CG-NVNF4.exe and ini files.

3. Put a shortcut to the vbscript in your Startup folder.

Your FSB should now be automatically corrected a few seconds after resuming from standby.

Let me know if that helped!