The Official OC (OverClocking) Thread!

Actually that's not entirely true, depending on how long you've been building. I'm not going to try and get the year right but back in the late 90's when the PII (Coppermine processor) reigned, the fastest Intel bus speed was 100 MHz. Clock per Clock the Intel 440BX chipset was faster than Via but Via had done something unique. Via widened the frontside bus to 133 MHz which really facilitated overclocking. The Intel chipset was overclockable to about 130 MHz but the Via Apollo Chipset would go all the way out to about 146 Hz. Now remember Intel processors were based on a 100 MHz FSB. Even though clock per clock the Intel was faster Intel's offerings were hard pressed to compete with a Via overclocked processor. Also back then the FSB was a major bottleneck to any system. This prompted some memory manufacturers such as Micron to release higher bandwidth memory to match Via's wider FSB. Via had its 15 minutes of fame.

 

As far as Intel are concerned, what's new?

 

no worries, i ditched it and got an asus (M2N68-AM SE2 if you're curious)

 

routergod,
I sincerely wish you had run that by us here on this thread before you bought it. We could have advised you better. That's why we are here! For the same money you could have gotten a much better motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128342
6 Sata ports, better chipset and better power regulation (3+1)! It's the only motherboard I found for the same price that I would recommend. Especially since you are on a tight budget. MSI and Biostar don't have anything that inexpensive. It definitely gives you more bang for the buck, Cheap Asus motherboards are not very well supported, and the nVidia chipset is not the best for AMD, especially with On board graphics. I use this MB for my more inexpensive customer builds, and it's a decent enough motherboard for what it is. A 780G chipset would be better, but they are not in the same price range! There are others as well, but I don't even look at ECS, Asrock, Jetway or PC Chips because they just aren't durable enough.

Good luck with it,
Russ

 

You could have consulted us first, that's not a very good board either. Oh well.

 

i asked the original question, about overclocking the Foxconn board, in the 15 of june. i had to repeat it on the 20 of june to get even that answer. i didn't have 5 days to wait and have to ask again about what board to replace it with. my 'budget' is that i live with and do the 'man stuff' for an older lady who took me to town, walked me in a local computer store and said, its your birthday, you can spend x dollars, get anything you want. so i got the only board on the shelf that would fit my case. next year i'll ask you guys two weeks before my birthday and maybe by the day it gets here i'll know what to get.

fortunately the overclocking thing is just idle curiosity right now anyway, this bios has some little overclocking built in, and i do have an nvidia GeForce 7300 GS pci express video card so the onboard isn't bothering anything. and in case anyone has anything to say about that card it was in this computer when i moved in here.

 

Well I apologise on behalf of us that we took a while to answer your question but if you're going to be so damn rude about it, then why should we bother?

 

hey i thought i was answering in kind. how i felt when i got back here and read the responses:

"buying a mobo without asking us was dumb. and the one you got is dumb."

assumptions were made that i even had the option of putting any research into what board to get or even into deciding to get one. it was an opportunistic purchase not a planned one, for the reasons explained, but the climate here made me feel an idiot for doing it. so yea, it was a bit of irritation evident in my response to that. if the advice i'm going to get is going to be as elitist we're-smarter-than-you-therefore-bow-down then you are absolutely correct there is no need to bother. i'll find welcoming friendly newbie-encouraging advice somewhere or do as i have done for the 30 years ive been surviving to get this far and learn the hard way what i can't the easy way.

 

We didn't say it was dumb, we said it wasn't very good. There are far worse choices out there, but ultimately, if you were limited to that shop and you bought the only compatible mobo they sold, would it have made much difference? To be fair the debate we got into when you asked us was frankly both silly and distracting, so it's not all that surprising we were late getting back to you. It's stupid to have the 'we're smarter than you' attitude here at aD because not all of us agree 100% on the components that we feel are the best. However, it's usually fair to say that most of us will never recommend anything bad, even if we don't agree on what's the best. I hope never to come across as one of the individuals that thinks they know it all because with my 10 years of experience it isn't true.

 

routergod

Asking a question in any forum is at best a crap-shoot. The responses are more often than not in the form of opinions and personal preferences. That doesn't mean that some opinions and personal preferences are wrong, but it could mean that they are limited in perspective. Many of us who've been building for a while tend to select products that have weathered the test of time by consistently producing quality products. Quality boards can include brand names such as Asus, Gigabyte, DFI, MSI, and of late EVGA. Some might not like one or the other of these makes, and they will voice an opinion regarding their personal preferences. Some of our opinions assume that performance is paramount above all things, but I for one choose to balance performance with known build quality to insure reliability. Ask your questions but don't assume that the answers you receive are right or wrong until your research indicates that they correlate with similar responses from several experienced builders. I have thousands of posts on AD that go back to March 2003, and in that time fewer than a dozen of them were questions asking for advice, because in the end the only advice that I truly trust is my own.;P

 

routergod,
The unfortunate thing is, On Board Graphics do affect and limit certain things in most motherboards, even when turned off. The exception to that seems to be the AMD chipset motherboards, as you can completely turn off the On board Graphics without taking a memory hit, so that none of the memory remains dedicated to the graphics. It's just like removing a video card and replacing it with another! Unlike the OBG of old, when you do turn it off on the AMD chipset motherboards, it restores all the available memory to Windows up to the maximum that Windows can address!

No one should be making remarks about your video card. After all, it is what it is, Yours!

Sincerely,
Russ

 

I'm pretty sure that's a recent thing. Going back a bit, AMD's earlier Radeon chipsets suffered the same ills as normal IGP boards. Realistically, any true overclocker wouldn't buy a board with integrated graphics. That level of enthusiasm doesn't match up with the abysmal performance of IGPs (As landmark as the HD3300 is, that includes it as well)

 

Ok...i'll be OC'ing the Bejesus out of my Phenom II here shortly LOL! Im a little bit nervous since the core temperatures are showing differently than before! Without the Onboard graphics, I can finally get to the bottom of whats going on.

Stay tuned! LOL

 

Ha ha! 3.5Ghz is stable at a lower voltage(1.375V). I wonder if the Vrm has something to do with it? The 12V rail is also more stable on this board. Very curious. in 8 minutes, the temperature never exceeded 52C, while averaging 51-50C. The cores were/are oddly showing less than the Cpu temperature, by an average of 1-2C. Im gonna bump it up to 3.7 after a video encode, to show the difference.

 

The 12V rail shouldn't be any different with a new board unless one of them had a dodgy sensor (when reported correctly, I very rarely see voltage sensors not work), it'll be the CPU and memory voltage you want to keep an eye on.

 

Haha very nice! Good luck and Godspeed.

 

Well...apparently I saved 6 minutes by OC'ing from 3.0 - 3.5Ghz. Which appears to utilize not much more than 2 cores. 50-60& cpu utilization on average. First encode 38 minutes, second encode 32 minutes. I doubt that 3.7 is gonna give me much more improvement. Thats with Iso creation by the way which should only be around 1.5 - 2 minutes. But...lets just see how far I can take this "SAFELY" LOL!

I dont know what to say sam. On the other board, it was typical during Prime 95 to see the 12v rail dip down to 11.90 - 11.99V. During the Cpu stability test, it never dropped below 12.12! And looked like it was averaging more like 12.19v. So a sensor could be the trouble on the other board?

 

Looks like im hitting a similar instance where only 75% of the CPU is utilized. Im currently at 1.425V (3.708Ghz). I'll bump it up to 1.45V and see what happens.

 

1.45V 3.708Ghz. Non stable. Bsod(Black screen crash) in 15 seconds. But at least this time it utilized all cores. Im wondering at this point if 4 sticks of ram is whats causing it. Or if bumping the Northbridge frequency up would help. Its currently running at 1854Mhz. Well below the theoretical optimal of 2.0Ghz.