The Official OC (OverClocking) Thread!

Will the Core i7 965 overclock better then the Core i7 920?

How much of a performance gain will I see between the Core 2 Quad Q6700 @ 3.2GHz vs. a STOCK Core i7 965(3.2GHz)?

If I want to overclock the i7 965 to 4.5GHz 24/7, will I need water cooling? Or will a good heatsink suffice?

What kind of voltages do these Nehalems like? What's their absolute top limit?

-im1992

 

The way I see things, the reason Intels overclock so well is because they've got their manufacturing process well sorted now, and therefore can churn them out at minimal expense.
I'm happy to admit that competition is the only reason we can remotely afford the sort of CPUs we buy, but I do have the feeling that the next big thing from AMD isn't going to be the only next big thing, if you see what I mean. I think the i5, if ever produced, will prove interesting.

As for Haskins post, it is rather harshly worded, but most of it is accurate. The only line that isn't accurate is

It's a bit closer than that, but only with the Phenom II or Kuma architecture. That's perfectly valid with any of the original Phenoms or latter X2s like the 6000+. In any case, it's a case of some win, most lose, not the reverse, even if the margins are small.

For the record, I would be very interested to see what an E5200 could do in an equivalently priced EP45 board such as the DS3P, and with a similar cooler (i.e. Freezer 7)
I have to say, I wouldn't mind betting it'd knock at least 20% off your encode times.


im1992:
Question 1: Yes, but not by a huge amount. Even the 920 can make 4Ghz, just abouty.
Question 2: Loads. Mhz for Mhz, the i7 is at worst 15% faster than Kentsfield, and at best, 45% faster.
Question 3: Watercooling will be absolutely necessary to surpass 4.2-4.3Ghz, you can get away with air up to that point.
Question 4: Not sure, read some people's specimen overclocks to get a good judge of that.

 

thanks Sam!

 

simply put I put Intels best[i7-965] against AMD's best and AMD lost
granted the Intel cost more
so try this either a Qx 9770 or a QX 9650 against AMD's best both are in the AHHH............. same weight class right?
and again AMD loses
so what's your point ? if we level the field enough any cpu could win
I'm not saying AMD is a bad CPU I'm saying that Intel at this point and time Rules the roost it's that simple
true AMD may just pull a rabbit out their asses later this year and change the game , but then again so should/ might Intel [I've heard rumors of 8+ core cpu's ]
but again that's all just wishing at this point just like saying AMD is as good or better than Intel again just a wishfull dream at this point and time
see that's what got me you kept pareing AMD's best against less than best Intel and calling it a fair Race

and well your first part "AMD 4x-940 is on par with q9400"
well go figure AMD 3.0Ghz ver. 2.66Ghz Intel and you call it fair!!!!!!! run your 3.0 Ghz against a 3.0Ghz and then call it fair or as good

 

Sam,
I don't think the E5200 could beat the E6750, let alone the Kuma at encoding. The E5200 is not the poorest C2D chip when it comes to encoding, but it's darn close to it. I think there is only one C2D that's worse, the E2140! It's mainly the lack of on chip cache. The first real difference I noticed moving from the E4300 to the the E6750, was the encode times were shorter for the E6750. At 3.2GHz, the Kuma marginally beats the 3.55GHz E6750 at encoding by about 3-7 minutes, depending on the movie. That gap should widen when I am able to OC it to 3.7-3.8GHz again. While there have been reports of the E5200 reaching 4.2GHz, the voltage it took to get it there was well past the point of damaging the chip! 3.6 to 3.8GHz is about the best to expect out of it for everyday use on air.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I may have been off on that one point I'll admit that but the point still is if your gonna compare , then compare a 3.0Ghz to a 3.0 Ghz or what ever speed you choose just make it even and Intel wins and ruling out the i7's isn't fair either because they are intels best and AMD doesn't have anything close at this point
and if you been watching the news post AMD bought ATI and intel has said they will be offering a video card them selves then not only will the CPU race change alot in the next year but the GPU race will cause some ripples in this pond and if say intel win's both races [CPU , GPU ] then AMD may just be history after all the whole point of compition is to put your competitor out of buisness and a AMD CPU failing to win the CPU race and a ATI video card failer would basicly sign AMD's death warrant

 

not only that...intel will be offering CPUs with GPUs integrated into the CPU core form what I understand

 

well If that's the hat trick then I'd say AMD better get on the ball before they don't have a ball to get on
because if Intel pop's out with a 8-core /cpu with GPU intergrated it's going to be all over but the crying for AMD

 

Haskins69,

haskins69,
First thing is, you can't call pitting the 3.0GHz Phenom-II against the i7 fair! You can't say AMD's best vs Intel's best either, as the i7 is far superior, but it also targets a different market and is much more expensive. The platform alone (CPU, MB and DDR3), is at least twice as expensive. Yes I can compare AMD's best against less than Intel's best, because that's AMD's target market. The x4 940 is designed to compete with the Q9400, and it does quite well at that. You can't even compare them by CPU speeds because of the differences in each chip's architecture and internal timings.

Core i7, in spite of being so good, is the wrong chip at the wrong time and place. It's way out of touch with the economy as the average person can't afford it. i7 is a technological "Tour de Force", but it's also not affordable for the average person! Even the wealthy aren't buying them! I know a lot of Doctors and Dentists because I spent 40 years repairing Medical and Dental equipment, and not one of them has bought an i7 platform. I also know a group of Doctors that bought a house that they all share and use it for their "computer Get-away". It's where they go to play around with their computers without being bothered. Lots of very High Tech stuff, but no i7's at all. Why? because they don't want to be stuck with an Orphan Platform, and they know Intel has had a history of doing just that!

i7 is going to be shelved before the year is out! Whether we ever see it again depends on a lot of different things. Right now it can't support itself because it suffers from severe "Buyer Drought"! Intel has poured so much money into i7, that they may never make a profit on it at all. It was late coming out because of technical problems in trying to get to 45nm. Intel has poured so much money into it that without mainstream support, it's just not a viable product, no matter how good it is.

For the moment, Intel has decided to bury their heads in the sand

 

Hello everyone, I have a question i hope you can answer. My Q9400 Temps are very low compared to my E8400. Right now my room is at a smoldering 78F yet my quads temps are 36c,32c,33c,41c At 3.4ghz 1.30v. Now when i had my E8400 overclocked at 3.825ghz 1.25v it was at 41c-42c at a room temp of 70F. Even when i pushed the quad higher the temps never got to 40c they stayed pretty much the same even with the higher voltage. Do you think there might be something wrong with one of these chips. I would think the quad would be hotter. But even with a mild oc on the e8400 i could not get it to drop below 40c.

 

Haskins: Not truly fair, AMD and Intel compete reasonably closely on-price. Intel CPUs just go higher up in price than AMD. Since the majority of the market spend less than £190 on CPUs AMD do alright, but really they should go at least to £300, as that would cover far more bases. The Q9550, Q9650 and i7 920 sell relatively well in systems nowadays on the basis there is no AMD chip to rival them.


Russ: Perhaps the cache affects encodes, but the E5200 is a better chip than the E6750 overall, despite the slower clock speed. Remember, the E6750 is old generation Core 2 now, the Wolfdale architecture is much faster per mhz. The E5200 is the 7750's direct rival, and like the Q9400 vs X4 940, it usually wins except in certain video tests. Notably, the higher end Intel CPUs have much more cache than the cheap ones that rival the AMDs. Spend what is a reasonably small amount above the AMDs (£191 for the Phenom II 940, £187 for the Q9400, only £228 for the Q9550) for a full fat Core 2 Quad, and the extra cache sees the Core 2s leaps and bounds ahead of the AMDs. £37 extra isn't a huge extra spend for a vast increase in performance overall, not to mention the 2.8Ghz Q9550s can reach the same clock speeds with overclocks the Phenom IIs can with overclocks. In fact, by average overclock achieved, the Q9550s actually do better than the AMDs, 3.9-4.1Ghz is typical of most P45 enthusiasts using boards no more expensive than your 790GP.

I see though once again Russ, you're still quoting i7 as being double the expense of a 775 or AM2 platform, even though price plummets in DDR3 and cheaper i7 boards mean it is now by maths only 25% more expensive to start in, mainstream PCs with i7s are regular sales, and more enthusiasts are picking up on the technology. DDR3 was i7's Achilles' Heel to early sales, much as BluRay was with the PS3. A price drop in that tech meant a price drop in the product and people finally started buying things. High end systems go to i7 now for me in my system recommendations. The only time I don't recommend i7 is when the CPU required is less in value than the cost of it. You may as well add the extra cost of the infrastructure onto the CPU price directly to compare the value of the systems, and in light of that, given i7's extra grunt, the i7 is now good enough value to be worth buying. Call i7 extinct if you like, and while I don't know Intel's long term plans, things are finally looking up for the technology. The relatively close proximity of the cost of an i7 build to a Phenom II is even putting the AMDs at risk now. I can get an i7 system with 6GB of RAM for £461 now, only £449 if I choose to go OEM and forgo the stock cooler. Use a Phenom II 940, your board and (only) 4GB of RAM and you're looking at £365. The i7 setup is 26% more expensive for more RAM, and a CPU that is by rough arithmetic more than 30% faster than the AMD. Bad value for money? I don't think so. The i7 doesn't even use any more power than the AMD either, so no worries about running costs. If I had chosen an even better spec'ed DDR3 board for the AMD to be exactly fair I'd be looking at an even closer gap.
chop: The core temps are often wrong on Intel chips. Go by the main temperature sensor, that's almost always correct. Keep that below 60ºC.

 

how do i change my "nick name"?

 

In what?

 

on here
i want something other then "im1992"

 

Tbh, The mods don't seem to be very forgiving about that here. You can ask, but I seem to remember Russ asking years back about changing from 'theonejrs' to just 'theone' without success. I could be wrong though, that was some time ago.

 

ok thx!

 

core i7 920 $288.00 on newegg so why is it over priced and it's a 2.66Ghz you can run your AMD 3.0Ghz against since you want to bitch about same leguge and price
again the truth is Intel is better and they won't shelve the i7 that's just plain stupid like there going to put the best out now on the shelve because you and I can't buy it
there are many little rich kids whose mommy and daddy can
so it will sell and the price will go down and the next new thing will come along and every one will want one but bitch about the cost and what not
but tecnology will move forward and people will always end up keeping the best[ at this point Intel ] and dicarding number 2[ at this pont AMD] and after AMD fails enough It will go out of buisness it's the nature of buisness

 

haskins69,

haskins69,
First thing is, you can't call pitting the 3.0GHz Phenom-II against the i7 fair! You can't say AMD's best vs Intel's best either, as the i7 is far superior, but it also targets a much different market and is much more expensive. The platform alone (CPU, MB and DDR3), is at least twice as expensive. Yes, I can compare AMD's best against Intel's less than best, because that's AMD's target market for the Phenom II 940. The CPU frequency has little or nothing to do with it. The x4 940 is designed to compete with the Q9400, and it does pretty well at it. It's also competitive enough in both price and performance. You can't even compare them by CPU speeds because of the differences in each chip's architecture and internal timings.

i7, in spite of being so good, is simply the wrong chip at the wrong time. It's way out of touch with the economy as the average person simply can't afford it. i7 is a technological "Tour de Force", but it's just not affordable for most people! Even the wealthy aren't buying them! I know a lot of Doctors and Dentists because I spent 40 years repairing Medical and Dental equipment, and not one of them has bought an i7 platform yet. I also know a group of about 20 Doctors that bought a house that they all share and use it as their "computer Get-away". It's where they go to play around with their computers without being bothered. Lots of the latest High Tech stuff, but no i7's at all. Why? They tell me it's because they don't want to be stuck with an Orphan Platform with no support, and they know Intel has had a history of doing just that sort of thing in the past!

Core i7 is going to be shelved before the year is out! It can't support itself because it suffers from severe "Buyer Drought"! Whether we ever see it again, depends on what happens to the economy over the next couple of years. Intel has poured so much money into Core i7, that they may never make a profit on it at all. It was late coming to market because of technical problems in getting to 45nm. Intel has poured so much money into it, that without mainstream support, it's just not a viable product for the economic times! Sales are next to nothing, compared to any other chip. Even the lowly single core P4 Prescott outsells core i7! In fact the Single core Celeron and the P-4 account for 23% of Intel's total sales, compared to only 10% for Core i7. The only CPUs selling in any significant numbers at all, are Phenoms at the moment. They now account for 34.2% of all the AMDs sold! That's a 27.2% increase in the last year!

I'm having a very hard time following your logic here when you say weight class. It seems to me you are using the CPU speed to determine AMD's and Intel's equality. Like comparing the QX9770 at 3.2GHz to the 3.0GHz x4 940, or even the Q9650 at 3.0GHz. The QX9770 is more than 6 times the $215 cost of a x4 940 at $1500. Even the Q9650, at a super low price for the moment, is still more than $100 more expensive then the x4 940. At $1500 for the QX9770, it damn well be better than anything with a lower price tag! LOL!! You also keep saying AMD's best and Intel's best. It's totally meaningless as it doesn't reflect what their target goals are! AMD made the decision not to try and compete with Core i7 a long time ago. A very smart decision IMO! Whether AMD had a better crystal ball than Intel, remains to be seen, but it was the right decision. AMD has made all the right moves and has three very good Phenom IIs. Two for socket AM2+ and one for socket AM3. They are positioned well and are priced right to compete with anything in their price/performance range and are finally making some money for AMD. They are positioned right where the mainstream buyer is going to spend the Lion's share of his or her money for the next couple of years, and AMD does not have the burden of a Core i7, hanging around it's neck! It's now no longer about how good or how fast the CPUs are, it's about what people can afford.

I live in Southern California, and right now there are more than 3.4 million people out of work. That's slightly more than 10% of the entire population, statewide. I know you look at all this from the viewpoint of an enthusiast, and you want to see all this new technology grow. Hell, we all do, but for the next couple of years, people are going to have to settle for a lot less, and both AMD and Intel are going to have to hunker down and fill those needs. When things finally get straightened out, a lot of high end CPUs will cease to exist. You mentioned rumors of 8+ core CPUs, and they will be coming, but not for a couple of years at least! In fact I doubt that either company will be doing a whole lot of R&D over the next couple of years. They'll both be concentrating on survival!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Sam,
The E6750 was the second generation C2d, while the Wolfdale is 3rd generation. I still don't see the E5200 beating the Kuma at encoding. Both CPUs can be overclocked quite well, but practical limitations will probably dictate about 3.8GHz. I'll let you know more when I get the new motherboard and be able to overclock it again to at least 3.7GHz.

As far as the cost of an i7 platform goes, the cheapest I can come up with is $578, delivered!
http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/2120/37396338.jpg
That's for a Zotac motherboard, 3GB of triple channel Crucial ram and an i7 920.

The cheapest I could find for an AM2+ platform is $301, delivered
http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/3964/amd.jpg
That's for a PC Chips MB, 4GB of Crucial 1066 Ram and a x4 920.

Let's be honest here! I wouldn't accept either system, and I doubt very much that you would either. The AMD platform is still almost half the cost of the i7! While I could shop around and maybe save a few bucks, the savings would be eaten up by the additional shipping charges! I could have saved an additional $2 on the ram, but even for a comparison, I just couldn't bring myself to include Transend Ram! LOL!

Like I said the haskins69, Core i7 is a dead issue. The market it does have is growing smaller every day, as money gets tighter and tighter, with the worst yet to come! The Core i7 is a great platform, but unfortunately it's one that's totally out of touch with the economic times. It's taken over 5 months for i7 to claw and scratch it's way to 10% of Intel's total production. It just matches the Celeron in sales. Even the 4 generation old P-4 outsells it, as does everything but the Pentium Ds. In fact, single cores now account for 23.2% of Intel's total sales! To make a play on words (thanks Rob), It ain't no Mystery, I7's history! When this mess is finally resolved, all the high dollar CPUs will be history because they'll have no market.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

haskins69,
With all due respect, You either don't understand the situation, or you don't want to understand it! Right now rich people aren't spending a dime they don't have to spend. Because of the business I was in, I have perhaps 300 or more people I know on a first name basis that are millionaires, a number of whom are computer enthusiasts, and not one of them has bought an i7 Platform. Lots of C2Ds and Yorkfields, but no i7s!

No offense, but you have got to be one of the most stubborn people I have ever met on this forum! Your statement about comparing the $288 i7 920 against the $214 Phenom II 940 is ridiculous. First thing is, you still have to buy the CPU, motherboard and memory! You have no choice, while anybody with an AM2+ motherboard only has to buy the Phenom II and flash the bios. The minimum cost for the i7 platform is currently $578, and that's for basically junk! Even if I had to buy the same 3 items for the AMD, the cost would be right around $300 for the platform. For the last time, The Phenom II is not competition for the i7, nor was it ever intended to be, so why do you choose to compare them?

Rich kids be damned, I7 will never sell enough to remain in production. Had Intel chosen to build it on the LGA 775 platform, it might have been a different story, but they didn't! Now, Intel's stuck with a huge White Elephant. It's not the first time that a company has had a superior product that wound up being a failure, and it certainly won't be the last. For now, i7 is doomed! Hopefully we will see it again when times get better, but that's not going to be anytime soon. Given Intel's history, I wouldn't hold my breath!

You also don't seem to realize that Intel's position is much more fragile than AMD's! Financially, AMD is in the better position, thanks to a couple of very shrewd business moves. They have themselves well positioned to ride out the storm, by concentrating on being competitive where the sales are most likely to be, so AMD is not going to fail as they have all the areas covered where there's likely to be sales. Intel's production costs are higher because of their Core 2 Quad chip design, which requires that the cores and cache to be connected manually and tested, which requires human intervention and time. Even though the process AMD uses to make their true quad CPUs is more expensive, the overall production cost is less because there is no human intervention required! Intel is also losing sales to AMD for the first time in years. Mostly at the expense of C2D sales. AMD has a lineup of processors from the $29.99 Sempron LE-1250 single core all the way up to the $215 Phenom-II 940. Aside from AMD's Quads and the Kuma, the Current crop of CPUs can be used on socket AM2 and Socket AM2+, so anyone who owns a decent AM2 or AM2+ motherboard, has some very inexpensive upgrade choices.

Even though I do have some connections to do with the financial workings of AMD and have even been used by the people I know, to start a rumor or two, it just boggles my mind! AMD has also gone so against it's history in that they haven't made a mistake or failed to meet a promised date for a product release in so long, it's amazing!

AMD's dual cores range in price from the 64x2 4400+ at $44.00 to the 64x2 6000+ Windsor for $99.99, the last of the 90nm chips, and it's still around because it's a good selling chip! All of this gives AMD great coverage of everything from the low to low mid CPU market, right where the majority of sales are going to be for at least the next couple of years. Couple that with AMD's brilliant move in selling off it's CPU Fabs, while still retaining control of them, which covered all their back indebtedness, puts AMD completely in the Driver's Seat, because they are ready for the worsening economy, while Intel is not! I think when it's all over with and the economy is all straightened out, AMD will have achieved parity with Intel in market share, or darn close to it! Hey, that's a good thing for all of us, because healthy competition means lower prices!

Respectfully,
Russ