Factorio and overclocking

[Gnorok]

After my factory was starting to run really slow on my old 3770k I upgraded to a 7700k with faster Ram and decided to overclock it a little bit.

I got it stable with prolonged Realbench and X264 stress tests. Prime stable seemed a bit of an overkill for normal daily use.

Fool that I am. It survived not 5 minutes running factorio. Should have tested with it from the beginning

You guys are just awesome!

[Xeanoa]

That probably means your RAM timings are too tight.

[Gnorok]

HI Xeanoa,

thanks for the tip. Raising VCore doesn´t improve stability.

I´m running a 3200MHz kit at 3333 MHz. A memtest overnight run resulted in no errors, so I hope my timings are ok.

But to get it stable with AIDA64 I already had to raise the dram voltage. Factorio seems to stress the memory/IMC even more. I raised the dram voltage another notch. Until now 2 hours in game without a crash...

[mrvn]

Memtests are mostly useless unless your ram is totally blown. It's when you apply real word access patterns that overclocking errors show up.

[OdinYggd]

You have to have a pretty big factory to hit this issue, but it has been said repeatedly by rseding that most of the time Factorio isn't CPU bottlenecked.

On a typical modern capablility system, large factories will bottleneck by ram latency- the amount of data to update on each tick exceeds what you can get in and out of the ram.

Larger CPU caches help, but the dataset is far larger than the CPU cache can store.

I'm still not convinced that dual-channel and quad-channel ram won't help with the issue, but the details of why that would be have to do with how they are implemented and how Factorio achieves atomicity on its calculations.

[Gnorok]

After 8 hours without a crash I think it´s a safe bet that the dram voltage caused the trouble and I would call the build "factorio stable"

Now I´m ready for 0.15 and waiting