Overclocking

Anyone here experienced with overclocking their rigs? I have never tried it. However, yesterday I did a bit of reading up and OC'ed my AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ to 4800+ spec.

Specifically, I set the FSB clock to 240 MHz and multiplier to 10, and the voltage to 1.4V. I didn't mess with the memory timings. (I have vanilla Kingston ValueRAM so I'm pretty sure I can't get away with pushing the timings much.)

The results? My Vista performance index for the CPU went up from 4.2 to 4.9, and NWN2 is noticeably less stuttery. No stability problems so far. I have an air-cooled box, but it should be up to some overclocking. (Antec P180 case, pretty hefty Zalman AlCu heatsink+fan for the CPU if you're interested.)

In other words, it appears to have been a success. I'm sure it's sub-optimal in many ways and possibly I did something completely wrong, so I'd be very grateful for any pointers from people more experienced with this sort of thing.

I also only have limited oc'ing experience but the most important thing in my opinion is definitely stability and to be able to tell how stable your system really is, you should run Prime95. The torture test to be precise. It will put 100% load on the CPU and RAM during the course of the testing. The pleasant thing is that you can still use your PC for non-gaming tasks during the test. Prime95 handles the CPU load pretty intelligently so your system will never slow down to a crawl (as long as you don't play any games but just surf the net and stuff like that). You should let Prime run for at least 8 hours to be sure that your system is really stable. Prime will exit the testing with an error message if the system is not 100% stable. You can tell that an error has occurred when the taskbar icon turns from red to yellow. There will be an error message like "Error. Test halted. Calculated result was xxx. Expected result was xxx.".
You can also mix Prime with other stuff that puts a good amount of load on the system. When I oc'ed my AMD Barton 2500+ to 3200+ specs a couple of years ago, I ran Prime95, 3DMark (in a loop) and Winamp in parallel over night for a total of ~12 hours to make sure that my system was 100% on the safe side.

Obviously when your system quits the test with an error message is when you should either try again at a lower clock/FSB/multiplier setting or up the voltage. I'd advise to be extremely careful with the latter. Even very small voltage increases can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's also having a huge effect on the CPU temps so make sure to monitor your CPU temp very closely after a voltage increase and shut down the system immediately if anything seems fishy.

What's nice is that you can apparently play around with the multiplier. If Prime turns out to crash, I would recommend to lower the bus speed some from that 240MHz and try again with a 0.5x higher multiplier at the same "raw" clock (so, for example, instead of 10 x 240MHz, try 10.5 x 228MHz or 11 x 218MHz). It's often just the high bus speed that causes issues and not the raw end result frequency.

Hope that helps at least a little .

Last I tried Prime95, it immediately locked up my system -- and that was without any overclocking. I concluded that it wasn't Vista x64 compatible and forgot about it. (I had successfully run it on the same hardware under WinXP 32-bit previously.)

Perhaps a newer version has fixed that… although the x64 version listed on the page doesn't appear to have been updated since 2005. Gotta try again.

Thanks for the tips; I'll see what happens.

I would avoid it at all costs unless you have some money saved up to replace ruined hardware. Just a bad idea IMO.

I once overclocked my powersource (vCore settings) and suddenly my machine crashed a lot less than it did before. It was at the times of Gothic 1 which locked up my machine rather frequently before I did the powersource trick. Never thought it would help, but it did. The parts in question had a normal life expectancy, no sudden explosions . But I never tried to overclock my processor before, so good luck .

I avoid it. However, that leaves me out of the loop.

Heat seems to be the biggest issue I've heard of. Extra heatsyncs, extra fans I would think are a must.

I recall when Morrowind was released how many complaints there were that it was crashing due to "bugs" A little research finds that most of these people were overclocking there 500mhz AMD's to 800mhz to meet minimum specs. At the time I don't think Intel was allowing it. That was the first time I seen a game of any type do that.

I often see nVidia cards that sell $50 more than the nearest model and upon closer inspection they are in fact the nearest model that's been overclocked. The weird thing is you can save the $50 and overclock it yourself with an unsupported patch from nVidia. Come to think of it .. I did that with my card before my MB fried (I discovered I wasn't grounded).

You'll notice you can get fans specifically for the video card now. They take up a slot.

For inexperienced OCers (like myself and you) I think it is important not to want too much. 10% OC is usually safe, but keep an eye on the temperature and stability for a while. Hopefully you have some tools to track the core temperature. I usually OC only after a rig is already a few years old, and I want to buy "extra time" for it. If I break it then, its no big loss. But I have never ruined a rig yet. Just increase in small increments, and test thoroughly until increasing again. As soon as you get glitches, go back to the last safe setting.

Well, my rig is about two years old by now. I kinda doubt I'll physically fry it with the relatively modest voltage increase I did -- and it'll certainly start crashing before the magic smoke comes out, in which case I'll de-clock it. I am monitoring the temperature, and it seems well under control.

I tend to go for enormous overkill with cooling capacity; again, thus far it seems to be keeping everything under control -- the CPU cooler fan is running a bit faster than before, but that's the only change I've noticed. (It's hooked to the temperature sensor on the mobo.)

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
I often see nVidia cards that sell $50 more than the nearest model and upon closer inspection they are in fact the nearest model that's been overclocked. The weird thing is you can save the $50 and overclock it yourself…

Some companies have a pretty customer-friendly warranty policy (like XFX as far as I know) but you will usually void your warranty if you overclock your GPU.

…with an unsupported patch from nVidia. Come to think of it .. I did that with my card before my MB fried (I discovered I wasn't grounded).

I've never heard of any "unsupported patch from nVidia" that would allow overclocking. There are plenty of 3rd party tools like the excellent Riva Tuner that you can use to overclock your graphics card though so any unsupported nVidia stuff is not really needed anyway.
Maybe you meant the "CoolBits" hack which is actually nothing but a simple registry tweak/entry(?). It no longer works with the latest drivers, unfortunately, so Riva Tuner is pretty much the way to go if you want to overclock your (nVidia) gfx card in case you are using the latest official drivers (163.71).

If you are an AMD fan you can't go wrong with a X2 5000+ black edition. Easily overclocks up to about the performance of a 6400+ without even increasing the fsb (i.e. only multiplier) so you don't need a new heatsink/fan etc. I plan on getting one when they are available here. Costs about $145 I think, good upgrade for my x2-4200 which can't be overclocked by more than 5% or so.

Unfortunately I'm stuck in Socket 939 land, so upgrading my rig would mean changing the mobo, RAM, and CPU which really isn't worth it. I figure I'll go with my current rig for at least another year, and then build a new one.

Weird if the X2-4200 only overclocks that little; that would mean that the X2 3800 was actually a better buy since I bumped it up to 2.4 GHz and it's running great. If so, that was sheer luck -- I wanted the 4200 when I was building my box, but they were completely out of stock, so I went with the 3800 instead.

Overclocking some Processors is a must. Look at Intel Core 2 Duo's for example. Put them on a good motherboard and put some very good cooling on it and you can overclock them 30+%. For example my 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo is currently running at 3.25 Ghz. Just read some guides and forums, its not THAT hard. For example guys at http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/ forums had a giant list of people's specs and max stable overclocks for Core 2 Duo's when that proccessor came out. So I just used that list to figure out which cooling solution and motherboards were good.

I dont OC until I need it. Thats when games dont run anymore and the computer parts have lost much of their worth. New top class hardware is way too expensive to play around with atleast for me. I take no chances.

Also I usually build my pc around silence not cooling efficiency so I dont get that much from OC anyways, because the temps go to the ceiling way too easily.