Sandok

Well you know that htere is a CPU test in 3dmark03? Well I got an ASUS PC400E-Deluxe and used the bios to overclock to 3.6ghz... And ummmm, I barely get a difference!!! 5% MAX.... How come?

squall Leonhart

Thermal Throttling?

Sandok

Eh? Well the temperatures were really low so I doubt it automaticly decreased the clock speed or anything....

squall Leonhart

um um,,,,

ok, well

did you raise the voltage to compensate for the extra speeds

HawK

03 is a pure Gfx tester, not an overal B.Mark
use PCmark or try 3Dmark 01

Sandok

Ya well there is a CPU test... Anyways, unclocked I get really low scores in PCmark so I don't trust it

squall Leonhart

i think youd be better of using sysandra to show the differences in cpu scores

No_Style

Run 3DMark01 or Aquamark3 because they're more like overall system testers.

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REGENERAT1ON

mate try SANDRA benchmark module

Zardon

yes its a decent CPU test and quickish too. btw with regards to a prior post in this thread you dont need to increase CPU voltage if its stable. in fact its best trying to run at the lowest voltage you can to prolong the life of your CPU.

squall Leonhart

yeah.. i know Zardon

i missed the fact it was stable

although maybe it does throttle back like a gpu if overclocked to high

Zardon

no it doesnt throttle back unless you are into dangerous levels of core temperatures, what is your FSB compared to before? you also need to use pure CPU tests not those 3dmarks for accurate gains/decreases (for clock increases).

squall Leonhart

ok,... just going through all avenues of finding out whats up thats all

Sandok

Well I'm tired and it's very late here so I'll post my sis results tomorrow... If I remeber! Hopefully, I'll see a difference!

Geminiwave

When I overclocked the first time, I saw very little difference. I played with the ram quite a bit and finally got a change. I'm not sure really how to explain it, but I only got a 5% gain in Sandra when going from 2.08ghz - 2.6ghz Then I played with the RAM timings and it shot up to around 30% gains(as it should be)

That may or may not help at all. I suppose with pentium systems the timings arent as important(or so I have heard) Oh well...test a few different things out.

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Sandok

Well in sis soft, it kept on crashing at 3.6 but ingame never.... anyways, i did 3.3ghz and it showed an inscrease... Dunno if it's correct tough

Zardon

if its crashing in sandra its a good indication that your CPU isnt 100% stable at the overclocked speeds, most games wont constantly use 100% cpu. have you ran prime?

You might need to slightly increase core voltage to get it stable while monitoring temperatures or lower your overclock.

Sandok

Ummm the thing is Zardon that I use the automatic overclocking cuz I got no clue how to really overclck my processor...

squall Leonhart

one good reason to not overclock till you read the over clocking guides posted all over the internet

Sandok

I hate being a newb... Well I'll try some manual overclocking when I got the time... Thx anyways!

Zardon

Dont feel embarassed about being a "newb", everyone started somewhere and yes I know when you post on some boards some asshole with a high postcount comes off with some insult to "not waste everyones time" or to do something to your mother, but those people seem to forget at one stage they didnt know their ass from their elbow.

A good first tip would be to go to http://www.memtest.org/ this site and download the file then burn via image in nero. this gives you a bootable image disc to test your memory stability and for any corruption. This is exceptionally important because sometimes with inexperienced overclocking or with an overclock beyond the limits of your memory you will risk hosing your Operating system or paging file meaning in a worst case scenario you will have to reinstall everything. that tool lets you test without going into windows. So in the case of a problem, you hit esc and go back into your bios and lower your settings (or loosen your ram timings).

For CPU testing, get yourself the hold or either prime or a program which will keep your CPU at 100% load for 30 minutes,something along the lines of ImTOO.DVD.Ripper lets you RIP and convert a DVD to a DIVX. If you want to totally test your processor, this is a good real world test as it pushes your CPU to maximum load for a constant extended period of time. Playing games will not always be the perfect way to test as very few games keep your CPU under constant load for long periods.

Now for your CPU, if you want to overclock "safely" then dont touch core volts - you are basically pushing more voltage through the processor meaning it can handle higher clock speeds (again not in every case but most), not touching core voltages is a basic rule of thumb that means although almost every CPU has a certain amount of headroom beyond its rated clock speed you wont be pushing voltages in excess of the manufacturers rated figures. If you run with a stock cooler its advised not to push much higher on core voltages if any, as they are not normally copper and wont be able to handle higher thermal outputs that come with higher voltages.

An example would be, my last northwood processor clocked a 3ghz would hit 3.4ghz on stock voltage, but when raised to 1.7 volts would hit 3.8ghz, so a 400mhz increase at stock volts and with raised volts another 400mhz on top of that. I had a high end thermalright heatsink so it could handle the increased thermal output and kept the temperatures under 50c and it was stable - if I had used a standard heatsink supplied by the CPu manufacturer you can be assured at those higher voltages the temperatures would have been drastically higher and into dangerous levels.

There are many guides tailored to beginner overclocking but if you have any questions just ask on Driverheaven, we have some experienced overclockers who can hopefully explain any questions you might need answered.

Until you get more comfortable with overclocking terminologies and exactly what you are doing just stick with stock voltages and increase in minor increments while testing, even if you run into problems at worst all you will get is an unstable system not cooked hardware.

Geminiwave

yeah and just to be Zardon's little echo here...

We all started as n00bs once. If anyone here tells you to screw of cause you're a n00b...well this probably isnt the right forum for them. I've quickly become a pro at many things that I was no good at back in july simply because people here would help me out without expecting anything in return other than "IT WORKED! THANKS!".

Oh yeah a great CPU stability test came with an earlier version of omega drivers(I was sad to see this go...) It was with Artifact tester but it was CPU tester. It made your computer crunch fractals and keep making them larger and larger until the CPU couldnt handle the load and then it would start over. I ran it for 24 hours to make sure the CPU was stable. Anyway the nice thing about it is that it will display the fractals while it renders them. GREAT cpu test in my opinion.

Another good one I've heard is Seti@home

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Zardon

ill make sure its not the right forum for them

Geminiwave

see?

Right on Zardon. Oh btw zardon, the crucial contest was rigged ;-)

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Zardon

Of course, they are all rigged (and yes for those reading this im kidding, long story).

Geminiwave

heheheh

yeah guys we're all joking here. Besides even if it WAS rigged, swimtech needed it FAR FAR more than I did. I WANTED it. he REALLY NEEDED it.

anyway back to the topic...get a reading about overclocking. I've never OCed Northwood chips but I've OCed some other P4s. Just read some stuff. ITs actually incredibly easy to do.

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pr0digal jenius

northwood's are the best thign to start learnign to OC on as they are extremely forgiving when compaired to, say a prescott or even a barton. They can usually get mild to moderate OCs on stock voltage and cooling and be quite stable.

as for the echoing of big Z's encouragement....yes...we all started somewhere. In the past 5 years i've gone from not knowing what RAM was(i kid you not) to building a basic system, to building a high end complicated little rig here, and learned a lot on the way. Learnign si what we're all about, and I must say a good 80% of my knowledge came from this forum and reading articles here or on [H]ardOCP.


as for what to try, I would just poke around and read up a lot before i did it...and from experience...always print out the guides, as in the event of a foul up, you won't be able to get back onine to see how to fix it or what you did wrong

Judas

i thoroughly enjoyed overclocking with a Celron.... they are also very good for learning....

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squall Leonhart

i was born with al this knowledge of computers and built my first at 12,

lol,

nah,i did build my first at 12, but i had a shop bought one to mess around with before that

CDsDontBurn

i first started OC on my old xp1900. Palominos are just hard to get anything out of them. Good boards to do some serious OCing on are ASUS, ABIT, and Epox are just a few i can think of off the top of my head right now. MSI boards aren't good OCing boards. They're good for reliablilty, but they just suck at OCing. That's just my personal opinion from my experiences w/MSI boards.

Older AMD chips are the better ones to do some overclocking because they have unlocked multipliers. a combination of a multiplier and FSB is what gives you your overclock. Like my old xp2400 (15x133stock, 2Ghz)i was able to do 13x166 and it came out to be an xp2700 (2.157Ghz). My other favorite setting on my old xp2400 was 12x200 which came out to be 2.4Ghz. In the past couple of years though, AMD has been locking the multipliers on their processors so all you can do now is just mess around w/the FSB.

A favorite of today is the Barton 2500. that comes w/a mult. of 11 and a FSB of 166. Having a low multiplier, people just increase the FSB to 200 or 400 (depending on what your BIOS says, usually 200 though) and they get an xp3200. if you have say DDR433 you can take that same barton 2500 upto like 2.4Ghz simply because you have better memory.

So when you overclock, having higher speed memory helps out alot. Right now, my DDR400 is what's holding me back from getting better OCing. I've hit 4Ghz already, but it was unstable, and my memory timings were really loose. As far as intel OCing goes, i'm still learning myself. I recently got myself a prescott, and still don't know too much about it because everybody i know has a northwood p4. Prescotts and northwoods both OC differntly especially since their voltages are different.

and most importantly of all, is COOLING!!!! When you're going to be doing some OCing, you want to invest some money into cooling. Big Z mentioned this briefly, but cooling is VERY important. You want to spend about $30-$50 on cooling. I recomend going w/thermalright products; mainly the sp-94 for p4 chips, and the sp-97 for athlon XPs. http://www.frozencpu.com/cgi-bin/fro...nu_search.html. Check that out from frozencpu.com. They have good stuff there.

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