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Overclocking CPU and Graphics

Author:	War_Caymore [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 12:58 pm ]
Post subject:	Overclocking CPU and Graphics
I've heard of people "overclocking thier CPUs and graphics cards so taht they run to a possible X 4 fold. The new computer i'm getting will ahve adequate airflow and cooling (due to the new liquid cooling system i'm going to put in after i get a new monitor) so i'm jsut wondering, how do you do it?

Author:	ZeroPaladn [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:26 pm ]
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I'm no expert, but you can modify your settings of your processor in BIOS (normaly F2 when your computer is just starting up). The speed of your processor is set so that it can run without need of cooling and will not overheat and eventually melt/short your computer/expel the mystical blue smoke . Remeber, just a small change can mean setting up a whole new cooling system so the processor will not overheat, but you allready have that covered. EDIT: As for clocking your Graphics Card, I hav no clue, although it may be connected to BIOS as well (I've never checked), I'd look it up on ither Wikipedia or Google it.

Author:	War_Caymore [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:31 pm ]
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ZeroPaladn wrote: The speed of your processor is set so that it can run without need of cooling and will not overheat and eventually melt/short your computer/expel the mystical blue smoke . Remeber, just a small change can mean setting up a whole new cooling system so the processor will not overheat, but you allready have that covered. That little comp lasted longer than expected Yeah, i read up on tigerdirect.ca when reading a review for the processor that my comp is coming with and he said that with adequate cooling, that he was able to OC the CPU to over 10Ghz. If i'm going to overclock anything, chances are it'll be my graphics card. It was only 150 bucks while the chipset w/ motherboard was 300. Also, that would be suicide! Who needs that much processing power (10Ghz)?

Author:	NikG [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:34 pm ]
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Here's a great site for learning about overclocking and stuff: http://www.guru3d.com/ It deals primarily with graphics cards (and there are reviews for almost every card out there), but it also has info on other hardware (so you might find info on overclocking your cpu). That site is also the home of RivaTuner, which is the most popular overclocking prog (on the software-side, I believe) out there. Edit: found a direct link: http://www.guru3d.com/Overclocking.htm Also, 10ghz???? I don't think that's possible. Read any overclocking tutorial and they'll tell you NOT to attempt to OC by more than 10%... You run a very serious risk of frying everything in your case.

Author:	ZeroPaladn [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:41 pm ]
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I got my 3.2GHz comp running @ 3.5 right now, and it is doing fine with the stock cooling system right now. It is possible to double your clock speed at the most, but that is requiring some MASIVE cooling sytem.

Author:	War_Caymore [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:53 pm ]
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Ty for a little tutorail on overclocking the processor, now how bout the graphics card? i'm only getting a 256MB and it says taht it's able to support 200% overclock without needing a new cooling system for the card. The card itself is powerful and runs really fast but will overclocking it reduce it's performace other than giving it more RAM?

Author:	Blade [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 3:06 pm ]
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War_Caymore wrote: It was only 150 bucks while the chipset w/ motherboard was 300. A chipset comes on the motherboard. It consists of the northbridge and southbridge, and controls the interfaces between the system processor, system RAM, I/O devices, adapter cards, etc. War_Caymore wrote: i'm only getting a 256MB and it says taht it's able to support 200% overclock without needing a new cooling system for the card. Well, telling everyone that it's a 256mb card doesn't really describe it at all. From what we can tell the card could be: Geforce 6200 Geforce 6800xtreme Geforce 6800gs Geforce 7800gs Geforce FX 5200 Radeon 9550 Radeon x1300pro Radeon x1600 Radeon 9600xt That's only to name a few. Saying that one is able to achieve a 200% overclock, doesn't mean that you will be able to too. Every card is different. I had a Geforcee 6800 (regular) which was clocked at 325/700 .. I was only able to get it up to 340/720 before the system froze, while others were able to get theirs running fine without artifacts at 360/~800. It's the same idea with the CPU. Just because someone can overclock an Athlon XP-M 2500+ to ~3.0 Ghz, stable, doesn't mean someone else can. On air, I was only able to get mine up to 2.5 Ghz, stable. This was with a complete Cu 80mm heatsink with a Vantec 80mm Tornado cooler. @ 2.5 ghz, it was running at 32C idle and 38C load. You need to use software overclocking (like mentioned above) to overclock your videocard. It depends on which card you buy. If you buy an Nvidia card, you'll need to use RivaTuner. If you use ATI, then you'll have to use ATITool. Overclocking ATI Overclocking Nvidia

Author:	[Gandalf] [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 3:06 pm ]
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Four times as fast? I highly doubt that one... I stably overclocked my P4A @ 1.6GHz to 2.32GHz which is a 45% performance boost, and that's pretty dang impressive if you ask me. Think about it, 4 times? That would make a 2GHz computer run at 8GHz... cough Good luck with that one... edit Err... on further reading: Quote: OC the CPU to over 10Ghz. He was most likely either joking or completely insane.

Author:	Blade [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 3:27 pm ]
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[Gandalf] wrote: Four times as fast? I highly doubt that one... I overclocked my P4A @ 1.6GHz to 2.32GHz which is a 45% performance boost, and that's pretty dang impressive if you ask me. Think about it, 4 times? That would make a 2GHz computer run at 8GHz... cough Good luck with that one... That's an "alright" overclock, but there have been people with the P4 2.4C (which is supposed to be an AWESOME overclocker, much like Athlon XP-M chips) to ~4ghz. But that's using phase change cooling. I think that the highest overclock that I've heard about is getting up near ~5Ghz. But I haven't read about overclocking since my Athlon XP-M days.

Author:	[Gandalf] [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 3:31 pm ]
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There are two key differences. One, I edited my original post to say "stably" (that's a word, right? ), and two, I did this with no liquid cooling or some sort of crazy liquid nitrogen freezing system. I think the only difference from the original system was one extra fan. And besides, that's 67% compared to my 45% for a fraction of the cost. Not too bad if you ask me. edit Oh, and just in case someone gets picky... I used the work "performance" loosely in my first post. Obviously I meant clock speed.

Author:	Silent Avenger [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 3:53 pm ]
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I remember one of my friends tried to overclock his P4 which ran at 3.8 GHz stock and he tried to overclock it to I think close to 5GHz and he ended up having to buy a new motherboard because the overclocking fried his old one. I'm also wonder if anyone here has tried to overclock Intel's Core 2 Duo Extreme. I know it's highly unlikely anyone has since the CPU costs about $1, 300.

Author:	Andy [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 4:42 pm ]
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i dont think you guys understand what overclocking means.. when normally overclocking a chip you're not pushing it to a newstandard, but simply it to a level the chip manufacture expected it. when a fab produce chips of the same architecture, they aim at a specific standard. some chips end up better, some end up worse. but its the same chip. they then set a bar for the different range of chips and sell them at different clockspeeds. thats why there are such things as x1900xt, x1900xtx and x1900xl for ATI. so if you get a pentium 4 2.8ghz cpu, and know its the same arch as the 3.6ghz, you can probably push it to 3.2 without any problem at all. but pushing it beyond 3.6 will not increase the performance by too much the extreme overclockers who push their cpu to 5 ghz, with hardware hacks are just for shows. just because they're running at 5ghz, doesnt mean they're doing much better than 3ghz. having a high clock speed means nothing if most of them are wasted. flops are what really matters.

Author:	Clayton [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:18 pm ]
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Does overclocking really give you that much benefit? If it does, is it only really noticeable at a dangerous level (ie, you could very well melt your HD away?)

Author:	[Gandalf] [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:32 pm ]
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Freakman wrote: Does overclocking really give you that much benefit? Did you at all read Andy's post? The main point is that megahertz, gigahertz, jibahertz, they're not all that important. You can have a 2GHz computer performing better than a 3.2GHz one. So no, overclocking doesn't make that much of a difference, but it does tip things in your favour, as long as you avoid the consequences (ie. melted cpu, smoking motherboard, increased power usage, etc).

Author:	War_Caymore [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:40 pm ]
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Blade wrote: Well, telling everyone that it's a 256mb card doesn't really describe it at all. From what we can tell the card could be: Geforce 6200 Geforce 6800xtreme Geforce 6800gs Geforce 7800gs Geforce FX 5200 Radeon 9550 Radeon x1300pro Radeon x1600 Radeon 9600xt That's only to name a few. I'm sorry. It's a Radeon X1600 series 256MB @ 800Mhz. Sorry for the confusion. So just wondering how do you overclock it?

Author:	Silent Avenger [ Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:51 pm ]
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Freakman wrote: Does overclocking really give you that much benefit? If it does, is it only really noticeable at a dangerous level (ie, you could very well melt your HD away?) I've tried overclocking my pentium D dual core and I didn't really notice increase in performance so I just didn't bother. Plus if you cool your CPUs and GPUs properly. I made extreme procautions when I did my overclocking with double stacked high airflow fans and a high capacity heatsink with 6 heatpipes. So cooling like this with just air should keep a CPU cool enough but if you want to go farther there is always the option of liquid cooling.

Author:	Andy [ Thu Oct 12, 2006 5:12 am ]
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*sigh... the VPU is not running at 800 mhz! the upcoming G80 and R600 wont even be running at 800 mhz!. thats the vram speed, which does matter, but not nearly as much as the vpu clockspeed. Look for a program for ATITOOL, developed by some crazy russian dude, that ati wont hire for some reason... for nvidia cards, you're looking for a reg hack called coolbits

Author:	War_Caymore [ Thu Oct 12, 2006 10:45 am ]
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here are the specks for the graphics card. its pretty sweet considering the price.

Author:	Andy [ Thu Oct 12, 2006 4:16 pm ]
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War_Caymore wrote: here are the specks for the graphics card. its pretty sweet considering the price. i think the world you're looking for is specs it's not bad.. but like i said, the vpu is at 500mhz, and the gddr2 is at 800. gddr2 is outdated, ati's x1950 is on gddr4. and that x1600 is still the same x1600 that gave me countless headaches when i used to work at ati. and wtf is his? never heard of that brand

Author:	Blade [ Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:17 pm ]
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Andy wrote: War_Caymore wrote: here are the specks for the graphics card. its pretty sweet considering the price. i think the world you're looking for is specs it's not bad.. but like i said, the vpu is at 500mhz, and the gddr2 is at 800. gddr2 is outdated, ati's x1950 is on gddr4. and that x1600 is still the same x1600 that gave me countless headaches when i used to work at ati. and wtf is his? never heard of that brand I think the acronym you're looking for is ddr2

Author:	[Gandalf] [ Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:31 pm ]
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Or maybe not.

Author:	War_Caymore [ Fri Oct 13, 2006 4:02 pm ]
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this thread suddenly became a thread to blam me and only me. i feel special anywho, if you guys think the card is so crappy, how bout some low-income suggestions?

Author:	Silent Avenger [ Fri Oct 13, 2006 4:08 pm ]
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Well what's your budget?

Author:	Blade [ Fri Oct 13, 2006 4:31 pm ]
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Wikipedia wrote: GDDR3 is now commonly used in most NVIDIA- or ATI-based video cards. However, further confusion has been added to the mix with the appearance of budget and mid-range graphics cards which claim to use "DDR2". These cards actually use standard DDR2 chips designed for use as main system memory. These chips cannot achieve the speeds that GDDR3 can but are fast and cheap enough to be used as memory on mid-range cards.

Author:	War_Caymore [ Sat Oct 14, 2006 7:38 pm ]
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under a grand. its all i can affor to spend right now. so this computer for 800 is probably the best deal i'm going to get. Unless you guys know something better for near-same price. if so tell me. most of the parts and stuff is from here. The guy i'm buying the comp off of made the computer a while back and was unable to sell it. so he's selling it to me at a flat rate of 800 bucks, inlcuding the graphics card.

Author:	Blade [ Sat Oct 14, 2006 8:36 pm ]
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my bro asked me to quote him for a comp, so I made him a few, a couple weeks ago.. its a pretty decent computer, and the graphics card is better than that of the x1600pro. It's using AMD's Socket AM2 platform. I got all the prices from http://www.ncix.com - LG GSA DVD+RW 16x6x16 Dual Layer, 10X/6X DVD-Ram - Black - ASUS M2N-E Nforce 570Ultra (PCI-E16, PCI-E4, 2PCI-E1, 3PCI, SATA RAid, Sound, GBLAN) - AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Orleans SingleCore @ 2.4Ghz - EVGA Geforce 7600GT @ 560Mhz Core/1.4Ghz 256MB - Seagate Barracuda 250GB 8Mb Cache, SATA2 - Mushkin EM2 PC2-5300, 2x512Mb (1Gb kit) DDR2-667 CL5-5-5-15 (Timings aren't great, but Price is right) Came to a total of $790 before Taxes and S&H. It doesn't include a case or psu, but you can get a cheap case and cheap PSU for like $40 But taking a look at the prices now, it looks like it might be a little cheaper than then. EDIT: I just redid it and it costed ~$630 before Tax & S/H. It came to $715 after Tax/S&H

Author:	Silent Avenger [ Sat Oct 14, 2006 9:41 pm ]
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I suggest that you poke around ncix.com and have a look at their barebones PCs you might find one that you can upgrade for less money. Also Blade have you ever bought anything from ncix? I'm just wondering do all their parts such as motherboards ship ready to use or do we have to do work on them like bridging so that they work properly?

Author:	Blade [ Sat Oct 14, 2006 11:18 pm ]
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Silent Avenger wrote: Also Blade have you ever bought anything from ncix? I'm just wondering do all their parts such as motherboards ship ready to use or do we have to do work on them like bridging so that they work properly? "Like bridging"? I don't really know what you mean. If you go to their PC Builder and pick any of the PCs there, you can completely change anything on them to anything they sell. At the bottom of their pc builder, you can have them assemble it for you for free. It'll probably cost a little more money for shipping though. If you're new, using the PC Builder and don't know what parts are compatible with other parts (IE: Using an Intel processor on a Socket AM2 motherboard, or using a Socket 939 board with AGP and buying a Geforce 7900GT graphics card) it may be a bad idea to completely change the system you're going to buy. Because you are able to mismatch those componants. If you order individual parts (not use the PC Builder), they'll send them as individual parts, and assembly will be up to you. If you buy retail parts (not OEM) then they'll all come sealed in boxes. I have ordered a lot from this company and they are very good. There are many more shipping options than TigerDirect offers, prices are generally cheaper and for people like us who live in Ontario, we are only charged GST (obviously) because this company is in BC. There is one thing I noticed though. Processing is slower than that of TigerDirect. NCIX doesn't work on weekends, and it usually takes ~3 days for them to process the order and ship it. Shipping is pretty fast though. I usually use Purolator or UPS groundmail (usually about $15-$20) which usually arrives within 2 days of NCIX shipping it.

Author:	Null [ Sat Oct 14, 2006 11:43 pm ]
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People who obsess over their hardware remind me of those people who put neon lights and spoilers on their cars.

Author:	md [ Sun Oct 15, 2006 5:01 pm ]
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It's like Gentoo Ricers, 'cept with hardware; Too bad people don't realize they are paying 50% more for a 5% (at best usually) performance increase. It's really not worth the money.

Author:	Silent Avenger [ Sun Oct 15, 2006 6:47 pm ]
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Blade wrote: "Like bridging"? I don't really know what you mean. Some mother boards have contact points that have to be connected together to do different things a good example would be using the connectors to change a hard drive from a primary drive to a secondary one. With some motherboards you have to do this to get the motherboard to work properly. I was just wondering if the motherboards from NCIX have this already done.

Author:	Blade [ Sun Oct 15, 2006 7:33 pm ]
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Most newer motherboards are dubbed jumperless (except for a few things). Almost everything is done from this bios. I know that all the recent motherboards I've purchased do not use jumpers for this type of option. I've never actually seen that type of option, but I've seen options like that on older boards (ie: boards that use the socket 7 platform). If you are using an IDE hard drive, you'll have to set that harddrive using jumpers on the rear of it. If the board you are buying is retail, then they'll ship it as it is packaged by the manufacturer.

Author:	Windsurfer [ Sun Oct 15, 2006 8:18 pm ]
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Blatant boasting: For 530 dollars i made a computer. I put it in a suitcase. The Pentium d dual-core was over clocked to 3.8 gigahertz on stock. I have a gig of over clocking RAM running at 2-2-2-5 and 478 mhz. The graphics card is only an ATI x850 xt, but it over clocks well to about 25%+ on the gpu and about 15% on the G-RAM. The hard drive is one of the fastest on the market, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250 gigs. Loudest computer I have ever had... I need a fan speed controller. Badly. *edit: spelling mistakes

Author:	Andy [ Sun Oct 15, 2006 11:55 pm ]
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Blade wrote: Wikipedia wrote: GDDR3 is now commonly used in most NVIDIA- or ATI-based video cards. However, further confusion has been added to the mix with the appearance of budget and mid-range graphics cards which claim to use "DDR2". These cards actually use standard DDR2 chips designed for use as main system memory. These chips cannot achieve the speeds that GDDR3 can but are fast and cheap enough to be used as memory on mid-range cards. uhh, ddr2 doesnt go 800 mhz my friend and Windsurfer, barracudas arent the fastest on the market.. ever heard of raptor drives? barracudas are reliable, but not fast.

Author:	War_Caymore [ Mon Oct 16, 2006 7:47 am ]
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wow... I hope tehre's a monitor in that thing too. lol it can be like a spy laptop, except for the extremely loud fans and neon lights. ;D

Author:	War_Caymore [ Mon Oct 16, 2006 9:49 am ]
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Blade wrote: my bro asked me to quote him for a comp, so I made him a few, a couple weeks ago.. its a pretty decent computer, and the graphics card is better than that of the x1600pro. It's using AMD's Socket AM2 platform. I got all the prices from http://www.ncix.com - LG GSA DVD+RW 16x6x16 Dual Layer, 10X/6X DVD-Ram - Black - ASUS M2N-E Nforce 570Ultra (PCI-E16, PCI-E4, 2PCI-E1, 3PCI, SATA RAid, Sound, GBLAN) - AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Orleans SingleCore @ 2.4Ghz - EVGA Geforce 7600GT @ 560Mhz Core/1.4Ghz 256MB - Seagate Barracuda 250GB 8Mb Cache, SATA2 - Mushkin EM2 PC2-5300, 2x512Mb (1Gb kit) DDR2-667 CL5-5-5-15 (Timings aren't great, but Price is right) Came to a total of $790 before Taxes and S&H. It doesn't include a case or psu, but you can get a cheap case and cheap PSU for like $40 But taking a look at the prices now, it looks like it might be a little cheaper than then. EDIT: I just redid it and it costed ~$630 before Tax & S/H. It came to $715 after Tax/S&H Is that all in canadian currency? Also, i'm no computer wiz on putting together a computer. I know the bare essentials such as how to hook up multiple drives, putting in RAM, exe. but to do all the wiring, i'm going to need a bit of help on... also, do the drives use SATA cables or the old EDIE ones? *Edit: whats a "PSU"?

Author:	Mazer [ Mon Oct 16, 2006 11:36 am ]
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Power Supply Unit. Pretty important that you have one in your computer.

Author:	Windsurfer [ Mon Oct 16, 2006 11:51 am ]
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Andy wrote: ...and Windsurfer, barracudas arent the fastest on the market.. ever heard of raptor drives? barracudas are reliable, but not fast. "one of" Yes, Raptors are faster... 10k rpm compared to 7200. However, it also depends on what you measure. Due to the large cache on the Barracuda, and the number of heads, burst write and read times are signifigantly better... But then again, there are other drives that beat the barracuda there too. Because of that, I stated "one of". (Also, the barracuda is about half of the price )

Author:	Blade [ Mon Oct 16, 2006 3:54 pm ]
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Andy wrote: uhh, ddr2 doesnt go 800 mhz my friend If you're talking about the x1600pro, then the double data rate is 800, so it would be 400mhz * 2. It wouldn't make sense to create an x1600pro that runs the memory at 1600mhz, especially since some of the x1900xt's dont run quite that fast with GDDR3. Yeah, all those prices are in Canadian currency. The company is from BC after all

Author:	War_Caymore [ Tue Oct 17, 2006 7:55 am ]
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ah. ty.

Author:	Andy [ Tue Oct 17, 2006 6:20 pm ]
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Blade wrote: If you're talking about the x1600pro, then the double data rate is 800, so it would be 400mhz * 2. It wouldn't make sense to create an x1600pro that runs the memory at 1600mhz, especially since some of the x1900xt's dont run quite that fast with GDDR3. wikipedia wrote: DDR2-400: DDR-SDRAM memory chips specified to run at 100 MHz, I/O clock at 200 MHz ddr2 doesnt double the frequency listed. its already doubled.

Author:	Blade [ Tue Oct 17, 2006 9:33 pm ]
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Andy wrote: Blade wrote: If you're talking about the x1600pro, then the double data rate is 800, so it would be 400mhz * 2. It wouldn't make sense to create an x1600pro that runs the memory at 1600mhz, especially since some of the x1900xt's dont run quite that fast with GDDR3. wikipedia wrote: DDR2-400: DDR-SDRAM memory chips specified to run at 100 MHz, I/O clock at 200 MHz ddr2 doesnt double the frequency listed. its already doubled. So, if that x1600pro lists their memory frequency as 800MHz and you say that it's already been doubled; that means that it is able to perform 800 MT/s. So if those chips were used to run in a regular system, it would run at an FSB of 400MHz and the chips would run at a frequency of 200MHz. So then these chips used on the x1600pro would be the same type of chips used on PC2-6400 sticks of memory.

Author:	vTm [ Wed Oct 18, 2006 4:15 pm ]
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15% overclocking is safe

Author:	Windsurfer [ Sun Oct 22, 2006 3:27 pm ]
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vTm wrote: 15% overclocking is safe I'd have to say that is one of the more useless comments I've seen. I'm pretty sure any amount of "overclocking" is "safe" as long as you don't touch the voltage, and there is some mechanism that reverts to some stable setting. I have actually overclocked an ATI 9200 LE's GPU from 200 to 350 mhz and the mem from 165 to 230 mhz, and it ran fine for more than a year. Similarily, I overclocked my GF's computer (only a PII) from 133 to 150 with no problems. The only danger from overclocking is what you need to do to allow the frequency that high... Volt-modding especially. Higher voltage on any electronics than what they are designed for usually has bad results, unless you know what you are doing.

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