Overclocking CPU and Graphics

[War_Caymore]

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?

[ZeroPaladn]

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.

[War_Caymore]

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)?

[NikG]

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.

[ZeroPaladn]

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.

[War_Caymore]

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?

[Blade]

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

[[Gandalf]]

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.

[Blade]

[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.

[[Gandalf]]

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.

[Silent Avenger]

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.

[Andy]

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.

[Clayton]

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?)

[[Gandalf]]

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).

[War_Caymore]

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?