Captain EBD

Anyone use systool to overclock their system? Does it oc nicely and is it stable?

http://www.techpowerup.com/systool/

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Lowfat

i tried, its WAY too confusion, clockgen is far simplier and works fine.

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Captain EBD

where do u download it; couldnt see the download link on the page.

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Lowfat

For your motherboard, here http://www.cpuid.com/cg.php?cgid=NVNF4


Their homepage is http://www.cpuid.com/clockgen.php

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H3X4D3C1M4L

Systool scares me lol

Captain EBD

how come?

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H3X4D3C1M4L

Too many buttons to be clicked by accident

Gnerma

Being a fan of w1zzard's other app, ATITool I guess trying out SysTool is something I should have done sooner. After having a hell of a time downloading it (yeah, I don't want to talk about it) it seems pretty straight forward. I do understand what you guys are saying about it being scary, although at a glance most of the options available aren't usable outside certain systems. Some because they're for different chip sets, others because they're not even functional yet. I'm not a fan of displaying options that don't pertain to the detected environment, especially in apps like this. Besides being confusing who knows what a noob could do to his rig by changing i855GM Memory Timings on an Nforce4. That is, if they work at all and no I'm not about to try it. The "under construction" features are about as annoying as they are on web sites. I've always been of the opinion that if the feature is not there yet the link shouldn't be either. This is especially disappointing since ATITool is so good about not showing you options that aren't available on your card like temperature monitoring and fan control.

I suppose what this little app is mostly about is the auto overclocker. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it except proprietary apps bundled with some motherboards that claim to be for overclockers. Not that I've ever used one of them myself, I don't think anybody who really wants to get a good overclock bothers with them. The problem is CPU and memory overclocking is just too damn complicated to use an automatic utility for. There are factors you just can't account for. First and foremost, Vcore. If the utility can't turn up the Vcore when it detects instability and then continue cranking the clocks up is it really that useful? Also, can SysTool's stress testing code really detect instability at any given speed in 12 - 30 seconds? Granted you can lengthen each stress test considerably, up to 128 million (the default is 1 million and that takes about 11 seconds). If anything, results from SysTool's automatic overclocker can only serve as one reference among many when trying to find the sweet spot of your system.

With all that said I did try it just for poops and giggles. I've determined in the past that my CPU overclock is limited by heat. This Opteron has the near maximum TDP of 67 and it really kicks my XP-90C around... thermally. I run at 2.9 Ghz but can squeeze a prime error out of this thing if the ambient temperature is high enough. So I set the max HTT to 300, the pattern size to 2 million, cringed, then started the auto clocker at 250 HTT. The first thing I noticed is the stress code doesn't heat my CPU up nearly as hot as prime95 or SnM. It runs about 4c lower than the former and 10c lower than the latter. After about 18 minutes the utility stopped at 299.71 HTT, went through intervals of trying to set the bus to exactly 300 (and failing apparently), then stress testing. I didn't get any errors. This is a clock speed where my CPU will fail prime within seconds, so I personally wouldn't trust SysTool to just clock its way up without setting a ceiling. It might not have thrown an error until closer to 3.1 ghz although the system would probably lock up before it got there.




I could go on forever like this so I'll sum up.

What would make SysTool better?

• It needs a more torturous torture test. Something like SnM's FPU test that totally kicks your CPUs ass beyond anything any real world app could do. Along with a test like that, it would be good if it had a more bus & memory centric test such as prime95's blend test. The program could use both tests or one or the other depending on your preference and let you know which test failed and what that might mean.
• It needs to be cleaned up GUI wise. IF THEN ELSE is all it takes W1zzard. It is labeled an alpha sure but what isn't these days?
• It needs the ability to raise or lower Vcore (yeah right).

What is good about SysTool?

• The temperature monitoring
• The HDD Acoustic Management control (why not add full SMART reading though?).
• The memory timing controls (although the UI looks almost exactly like A64 tweaker)
• The Cool & Quiet control

The benchmarking has potential although I doubt you'll see SysTool benchmark results in any Storage Review or Anandtech articles anytime soon

So if you just want to change your HTT and then use your favorite stress tester clockgen is plenty. If you want some of this other stuff then great use SysTool. I doubt I will consider using it until some of my concerns have been addressed though.

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Captain EBD

wow nice post hehe
thanks.

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W1zzard

sorry for bumping this thread.

nice writeup gnerma, pretty much as i see it right now.

the reason for "why release it if it's not done" is that i see this as a 2-5 year ongoing project .. you dont want to wait that long do you?

"If anything, results from SysTool's automatic overclocker can only serve as one reference among many when trying to find the sweet spot of your system."
thats exactly what it's meant to do. helps me as a reviewer a lot

for all other rants - you know any good c++ low-level developers who would like to help working on this?

josephbay89

Does anyone know where to download Systool from? Everywhere I download from never installs a driver and when I go to launch the program my computer says no driver found. I have an HP 620 with an intel dual core.
Thanks..

Lowfat

WOW. This is the biggest thread necro I have ever seen in my life.

Now saying that the link in the first post worked perfectly fine for me. The program is also old as dirt. I have my doubts it is meant to work w/ your hardware.

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Chaos

your best bet would go to TPU and send W1zzard a PM but im pretty sure development has stopped long ago

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