The Overclocking Thread (1 Viewer)

[Sefi]

For me, one of my favourite things about the humble PC is overclocking (for those who don't know, it's making a piece of hardware run faster than it actually should).

Some people will say it's bad, and in some cases it is, but if you have the right hardware, and a little bit of know-how, you can easily get anywhere from a 10-50% increase in performance out of a component.

So, If you OC, what have you managed do to?

Heres what I've done with my PC:
OC'd my 3.00GHz P4(HT) to 3.45GHz (FSB from 200 up to 230 with 15X multiplyer) although I've managed to run it at about 3.5, but it tends to crash there.
My A6600TD core went up from 300 to 450Mhz and the RAM from 500 to 615 (stable)
The ram is ddr333, although thanks to some ram ratio tweaks its running above 400.
It's all stock cooling, the only extra being a case fan at the back.

Aparently a mate of mine has his 2.7GHz p4 running at 3.7 using dry ice as collant, but I've never seen it.

 

[phatic]

Ah yes, I was quite into o/c'ing a while back. It got pretty tech - I was doing some voltage hard-mods, soldering pots onto IC's and all that... quite fun.

As for results, I o/c'ed my skt 754 Sempron 2800+ from 1.6Ghz to 2.7Ghz on stock cooling, after a volt-mod from 1.39v to 1.57v. Ram (DDR400) was running at 212Mhz or so.

Also I got my 7600GS from 450/800 (core/mem) to 750/900, after some volt mods. I had to attach a fan though, since at stock this model is heatsink only. Performance wise this gave about 1750 extra 3dmarks.

If anyone's interested in volt mods, give me a yell, and I might be able to show you how. Requires some confidence (not necessarily experience) in working with electronics though.

 

[Sefi]

Volt mods eh? If it gets me more speed for free, I'm in

 

[phatic]

aye, higher voltages generally allow for faster clock speeds, but there is more heat, and often shorter lifespan. In many cases you can change voltages such as CPU through BIOS, but most nvidia graphics cards need hard mods to change it (ATI's can be soft modded I think).

Have a look at BIOS and see if you can change CPU volts... Just keep an eye on temps when increasing it. What graphics card do you have?

 

[Sefi]

Lol, i've got an almost 50% OC. I'm happy with it.

 

[Collin]

The volt mod is one of the primary reasons which made the 7900GT such a good purchase. With a bit of luck (and some guts), you could push it to 1.7v and clock the stock 450 to 800MHz under water. Taking pipes deficiency into account, you've easily got yourself a GTX performing card under certain benchmarking scenarios. Twas a very cheap way of getting a '7900GTX SLi' performing setup prior to NVIDIA releasing the G80.

 

[DeathB4Life]

AMD +2700 Athlon XP 2.17Ghz to 2.30ishGhz by raising the FSB from 166mhz to 175ish...

truely amazing.

 

[bizadfar]

AXP 1800 palomino @ 1.6ghz (pretty crap obviously!)
AXP 1700 DUT3C Tbred B @ 2ghz (free from friend)
AXP 2600 XP-M @ 2.6ghz 1.87v (250fsb dead)
AXP 2600 XP-M @ 2.72ghz 1.93v (242~fsb)
Sempron 2600 D0 @ 2.45ghz
Sempron 2800 Rev E @ 2.88ghz 1.72v (removed IHS and shorted!)

Current:
Opteron @ 3ghz
&
Opteron @ 2.9ghz

All i really am acheing for is a new hard drive, that thing stutters so much esp when moving around large files and loading/opening large stuff.