The Official OC (OverClocking) Thread!

Hehe, I like to think my PC performs pretty well in the games arena, but consider that the CPU is only worth about £70 and the GPU only about £100, it just ridicules the high end gear, considering I can play most games that come out at high resolutions on max. To date I can only name three games that don't run fine at 1920x1200 max, which are Crysis, Rainbow Six Vegas and Stalker. Even call of duty 4 runs fine at those settings.

 

sammorris,

Why? Is it cast in stone somewhere? If you could buy a car with a V6 capable of blowing the doors off of any V8, you would buy it without caring whether it's a V8 or not! so why should core count have to mean anything? AMD has a pretty good thing going in the performance per dollar category as it's so much cheaper than the Intel Quads.

So it doesn't beat the Intel Quads! Like I said, so what! It seems to be the equal or better than everything but the 4 Quads. That's more than AMD could do before! We'll have to wait and see how well they overclock!

Clockin On at the Speed of Light,
theone :>)

 

Yeah but it's Competing against the QUADS. The thing is that the AMD dual cores don't beat the Intel dual cores and the AMD quad cores don't beat the Intel Quad cores. So Intel seems to still have the lead. Now if they would stop releasing a new chipset every six months.

 

Russ: I disagree with your last statement. if it were at the same price point as the Duos, then it wouldn't matter that it's not as fast as the Core 2 Quads. However, it's not, it's more expensive than the Q6600 by a whole 25% over here, and it underperforms by that much too. Pound per flop, the Q6600 is a better deal by some 60%, and that hurts. As for how well they overclock, I'd say the Q6600 still beats previous AMD offerings in that regard, so the Phenom will have to surprise everybody in that department for it to be a worthwhile investment.

 

sammorris,
Granted the price is a little higher but the difference is not that much here for the two chips. About $15 USD! Then again what will the Phenom do when both are overclocked. The Q6600 is not a great overclocker. Also remember that AMD didn't allow a voltage increase when Tom's overclocked them and hit 3.0GHz. Who knows, a small adjustment to the core voltage and it might even pass the Q6600 in performance. I would certainly consider one to play around with. It's only about 6000 or so MIPS slower than the Q6600 and at 34,000+ MIPS at stock speeds, which is also a range that the Core2Duo's can only hit when overclocked, I would say that AMD has found a market! Can't wait to see how well the production ones overclock! Could be very interesting! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Not a great overclocker? Hmm, not compared to the duos maybe, but that's what we've become used to. The Athlons by comparison aren't exactly any better.
Feel free to play around with them, but I think I'll pass.

 

sammorris,

Try Overclocking an Athlon 64x2 that's 2.3GHz up to 3.0GHz sometime at stock voltages and you'll get the idea. You won't be doing that with an Athlon 64x2! Even if that OC was achieved on the 9700, it's still a 600MHz speed increase without upping the voltage from 1.225V. To me, that bodes well for getting beyond 3.0GHz with all three CPUs!!

Best Regards,
Russ :>)

 

Which they'll need to, given how slow they are to start with! Lol you can see where I'm going with this. Nonetheless, it's in keeping with the overclocking enthusiasts, and reminds me of when the D805 came out and you could pull high overclocks with it. Despite how slow they were, everybody wanted one!

 

Good point on them D-805, and let's not forget the P4 506 to the same 4.1GHz on air. I ran both.

Too much focus on braggin' points for my taste. I go with what suites my needs, and for the past 20yrs, it's been Intel w an AMD here and there for fun. Not to say AMD wasn't good or fast in gaming, but for all round stability as daily OC'd user, back to my Intel.

My X2 4400+ on both 939 and recent AM2 did fine to 3GHz on decent vcore, the 939 (89w) was cooler believe it or not. on the ASUS A8N-SLI. Now maybe it was the CROSSHAIR mobo, but keeping these cores and nVidia chipsets to high overclocks as daily users w/ the family and friends wanting to all play their games required periodic maintainance.

My OC'd D-950 (C1) on air w/ ASUS P5W-DH is still going at 4.25GHz with good reliable daily user performance for the whole household as a file server, and multiple user log ins w/ S2K3 R2 Ent. I couldn't really depend on many of my AMD overclocks like that except for a still in use dual Opteon server (s940) on Tyan server mobo. Furthermore, that same Intel D-950 (2 years ago) as a workstation on P5WDG2-WS along side X2 4400+ felt every bit as smooth (real world use) in the apps I needed them for, especially media & high end workstation work. It just had that overall user smoothness and was hard to crash. Every AMD high OC had occassional slug downs and lock ups requiring hard resets during extreme gaming or stress or just took much longer to come out of a snag.

Just my personal experience with the two. Not to be mistaken as an Intel fan boi, I just work w/ what is reliable for me, my workplace and home. And I will continue to use an AMD along side to compare cause their fun to play with. The family loves then too. If you crash, just restart and go at it again. It was just a game, no like the security media server went down too. Lol!

My Two Cents!

 

My 4200+ was great, but then I never overclocked it much. It ran fine at 2.4Ghz (from original 2.2) but that's as far as it would go with value memory...

 

I still gotta' get to playin' w/ my recent X2 6400+ Black Edition on the CROSSHAIR. It's the only AM2 mobo I have left in the hoese.

I welcome you AMD bois to come forward with input on this soon to come OC test run. I think maybe if I get more familiar w/ AMD and the inner workings of the nVidia platform, I should get better satisfying results. I'm open if you guys wann' share nVidia Tweaking know how.

Let's se what this baby can do!

Clock It To Me!

 

sammorris,

True, but it had a very high multiplier. The big difference is the D-805 didn't come out of the box doing 35,000+ MIPS at a stock 2.4GHz at stock voltage! The 9700 is slower than the Q6600, but still a fast CPU. Nothing but the Intel Quads do better at stock speeds. Next down the ladder for Intel is the E6850 and it's 5,500+ MIPS slower. We'll have to wait until someone actually buys a production one and does a build to find out how well they overclock. Still it puts AMD in a position they never occupied before, right in the gap between the E6850 and the Q6600, and that's a pretty wide gap! Once Intel runs out of Q6600s, the gap will be even bigger.

Time will tell!

Best Regards,
theone :>)

 

Why would they run out of 6600s? Have they stopped being produced?

 

Can anyone point me in the direction of a site or something that tells you the basics on overclocking? I can't seem to find any, and the lingo here is way beyond me at this point.

 

Erm, I'd point you to a URL but chances are, you're already on it
[/pedantism] Seriously, have a read through the earlier pages of this thread.

 

alright. will do.

 

sammorris,

It's older tech, so I can't see them building them for too long. The new 45nm chips cost less to manufacture. I'm sure Intel would rather make more 45nm CPUs, as there's more profit in them! I'm pretty sure that Intel will switch over as fast as possible! If they do stop production, that would leave a large gap that only AMD will have covered without overclocking! AMD's prices will force the price down on the 45nm CPU's from Intel, or people will buy the 9700 for less money and still be ahead of everything but the Intel Quads by a fair margin!

Tom's didn't give any meaningful figures on the overclocks so we'll have to wait for those results an see what Phenom can do! I'm rooting for AMD on this one. We'll all benefit from their success!

Clockin On at the Speed of Light,
theone :>)

 

Update: My daily 4GHz on aire is timing in little by little in the past few days. Recent BIOS for the MAXIMUS FORMULA SE are helping in the area of getting my 5:6 ratio for DDR1200 but now I got to fine tune the RAM again. Vcore is now stabling at 1.54v idle and a 1.56v under Prime95 load. No vdroop anymore, I actually get a boost instead so I can keep idle a notch lower now.

Renduring Xvid to VOB right now as we type, and temps are as follows; CPU:48~49, cores 1+2:60/59c (93~95% in high priorty NeroVision 5), MB:27, NB:44c, SB:40c inclosed in SilverStone TJ-06 on it's back cause of heatpipes and inverted BTX mounting.

Don't touch that keyboard.
After these messages, we'll be right back.

 

Russ,I was going to post something along those lines but you saved me the trouble!!!

Let's remember, no one knows the overclockability of the phenoms atm!!

Also keep in mind that newer steppings will evolve,as will higher frequencies.It's still early days yet!!

Regards,Crowy.

 

Crowy,

I would find it hard to believe that AMD rigged the tests with limiting the voltage to 1.225, and it would be even harder to believe that AMD had it maxed out at that voltage and couldn't go higher. The 9700 hit 3.0 on air at that setting and during the tests, not one of them had any problems or exhibited any glitches. Given the number of computers that were provided by AMD for testing, that's pretty remarkable considering that all the overclocking was done with a utility called "AMD OverDrive", not in the setup!!

It's not a software utility, it's a direct connection to the CPU! All this means is that you can set it and when the computer is booted again, the settings are what you set through AMD OverDrive to begin with. no software that has to run to bring up a profile! I can't wait to see what one of these "Mother-Froggers" can do! LOL!!

Clockin On at the Speed of Light,
Russ :>)