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Hardware Hacking AMD Hardware

Athlon 64 In-depth Overclocking Guide 193

Posted by CowboyNeal from the cranking-it-up dept.
jmke writes "Everything you ever wanted to know about Athlon 64 overclocking, and then some. If you are confused about HTT, LDT, memory dividers and relationship between these settings, then read on. This in-depth overclocking guide will show you how to get the maximum from your brand new Athlon 64 system"
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Athlon 64 In-depth Overclocking Guide More

Athlon 64 In-depth Overclocking Guide

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  • OMG. What kind of.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @01:46AM (#12586286)
    Idiot would do that to this sort of NEW, EXPENSIVE hardware?

    Would you overclock a Z-Series IBM server? Would you overclock a 20 4-way xeons in a cluster?

    Give it a while. Its not like the MOST OF US will need that speed...

    Hell, I use a 1 GHz machine and develop on a 500 MHz machine. Yeah, 500 MHz because many users are still stuck on 300's and 450's.

    • Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What kind of person is up in the middle of the night reading Slashdot? ... hmm. Self-defeating argument. I rest my case.
      • Well, given that Slashdot is accessable to anyone in the world, and the world spins around the sun, it may not be the middle of the night just yet.

        It's 4:50pm where I am as I type this so your argument is flawed....ha ha ha


        Obviously, in order for one to argue such redundant crap as I have, you'll probably expect that I'll still be reading Slashdot at 1am tonight. After all, it's a Friday night.


        You'd be right ;-)

      • LOL.

        The kind of person who, 10 years from now, when he gets his amazing new 200,000 GHz 512 bit processor with a terabyte of RAM, will say, "How do I overclock it?"

    • Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by J_Omega ( 709711 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:19AM (#12586402)
      Is $150 for a lower end Athlon 64 really THAT EXPENSIVE?

      No, of course most wouldn't try to overclock an IBM server or clustered 20 4-way xeons. Why? Most people DO NOT OWN THOSE. That's corporate equipment. People can afford to play with $150 chips at home, and will.
    • Athlon 64 hardware is comparable in price to Pentium 4 hardware.

      Based on your argument, what kind of idiot would overclock a Pentium 4? [google.com]
    • Athlon 64 != Opteron
    • Time is money. If you develop on a 500mhz machine and have to wait for it to complie things, etc. Then you may be worse off than if you had purchaced a faster machine.

    • Re: What kind of.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by zokrath ( 593920 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:35AM (#12586469)
      Overclocking is not something that is generally done professionally; it is a hobby, simply to show off and make one feel important. The same is true of 'tricking out' a motor vehicle, or modding a PC case, or the entire industry of do-it-yourself interior decoration.

      When rendering, and presumably other activities that might theoretically benefit from increased performance from overclocking such as data analysis and science simulations, your are often leaving the computers working overnight or over the weekend, and the last things that you want are crashes or visual errors due to unstable hardware. Sometimes I even underclock my rendering system, for it is far better for a render to take a few extra hours or days than to have the whole render wasted because somethign went wrong with your elite hacked overclocking with ten percent enhanced performance.

      Overclocking also reduces the life of the components, noticeably when they are rendering at full capacity nearly 24/7 for most of the year.

      There are certainly professionals that overclock, but they have either carefully weighed the cost benefit ratios and decided on the most logical course of action, or have had a series major setbacks and mistakes and are desperate to finish before the deadline next monday; the boss will not be happy when he finds out that another project is late because of your bumbling incompetency, Jones, so you had better move right in to your cubical for the next week, or you will find yourself moving right out, permanently. You can have that little wife of yours bring you meals; I certainly would not mind having her around the office. Maybe she will finally see reason and bail out on that train wreck of a career that you are conducting, and set her sights up closer to where her standards should be. And if not, she will still be something nice to look at. Tell her to wear something that will cheer you up...Man, this is going to be a Hell of a week. Now get back to work, Jones.
      • Overclocking also reduces the life of the components, noticeably when they are rendering at full capacity nearly 24/7 for most of the year.

        Component life only seriously degrades when part voltage is raised more than a little, and even then, some parts are more forgiving than others.

        If you're not doing any of that, it's free performance. If you are competent, why not, even if just a little (for a home user; obviously not on most enterprise equipment)?
      • I volunteer to come and kick Jones' boss' ass. Damn apostrophes...
    • ever heard of a gamer? Those guys need all the juice they can get.

    • Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blackicye ( 760472 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:46AM (#12586516)
      The kind of "idiot" as you so delicately put it, that refuses to pay $249.00 - $359.00 for a $169.00 Processor.

      $482 Athlon 64 4000+ 90nm Rev
      $478 Athlon 64 4000
      $359 Athlon 64 3800
      $369 Athlon 64 3800 512K 90nm Rev E
      $334 Athlon 64 3700+ 90nm Rev
      $282 Athlon 64 3700
      $249 Athlon 64 3500
      $249 Athlon 64 3500 939pin
      $250 Athlon 64 3500 90nm 939pin
      $272 Athlon 64 3500 512K 90nm Rev E
      $174 Athlon 64 3400
      $152 Athlon 64 3200
      $169 Athlon 64 3200 939pin
      $169 Athlon 64 3200 90nm 939pin

      (Prices from pricewatch.com)
    • What kind of Idiot would do that to this sort of NEW, EXPENSIVE hardware?

      Probably the kind of "idiot" that knows how to avoid frying his new, expensive chip. Overclocking doesn't cause chips to just randomly explode; it's incredibly easy to avoid damaging a processor, if you know what you're doing. And why would you even try if you didn't know what you were doing?
    • Back in the day I overclocked a Celeron 300A to 450. It is still running, in fact, it is sitting next to me.

      I am currently typing this on an AMD 2500+ (barton) overclocked to 3200+.

      Why would I do this? Speed. I play games. I want the max FPS I can get out of my machines. As simple as that. Is my stuff brand new expensive hardware? No. Not anymore. But it was when I built both systems. *

      * (Ultra top of the line? No, but then I bought the parts specifically because they were know good overclocking parts.)

    • Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by boron boy ( 858013 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @05:20AM (#12586951) Homepage
      Until you have actually tried overclocking, I don't believe you can criticize overclockers.

      The likelyhood of frying parts is not very high. Before that happens you will get restarts, BSODs etc, telling you that you've messed up the settings. If you do it properly, and test your systems stability with Memtest86, Prime95 and the like, then there is no harm.

      I have my Athlon 64 3000+ running at 2.2 gHz up from the stock of 1.8. That's the speed of a 3500+ which at the time of purchase cost $170AU more. Do I need that extra speed? No. Is it handy? Yes. Games run smoother. Compilation is quicker. More research for folding@home is acheived.

      Give it a go. It's plain old geeky fun.

      • The likelyhood of frying parts is not very high.

        That didn't stop me from frying a 20MHz 486SX by changing the mobo jumper settings to run it as 25MHz. No restarts, no fatal OS errors, it just stopped booting up one day.

        Sorry OC'ers, I'm going to side with the chip manufacturers on this one. I think they know better than you what clock speeds their chips optimally run at. If your 1.8GHz Athlon wasn't likely to fail at 2.2GHz under normal conditions, they would have sold it as a 2.2GHz and made more pro

        • Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:4, Informative)

          by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @01:08PM (#12591164) Homepage
          I think they know better than you what clock speeds their chips optimally run at. If your 1.8GHz Athlon wasn't likely to fail at 2.2GHz under normal conditions, they would have sold it as a 2.2GHz and made more profit on no more work.

          Actually you're wrong.

          Generally all of the chips in a single speed series come right off of the exact same assembly line, and each one is then tested for individual speed tolerances. This produces an erratic supply of lower speed tolerance chips. As the manufacturing process on a particular line ages it also tends to work out all of the bugs and the supply of low quality chips falls off. The market still demands a variety of price points to attract the maximum of low end buyers *and* to maximize profits from high end buyers. Therefore they ROUNTINELY grab "higher speed" chips to fill orders at the cheaper price points.

          The longer a line has been out the more likely a mid or low end labeled chip is fully capable of handling the top rated speed, or even above.

          Also they use fairly generous safety margins. Their CPUs get included in countless different mother boards with unpredictable variations and quirks. The voltage may be a little high or low, timings may vary, signal quality may vary, and most importantly different temperatures and cooling capabilites. Also they are supplying probably a hundred billion CPU-hours, they don't want to get a bad rep if even an insanely rare multiple-failure happens to hit a critical customer on a critical system. They use pretty generous safety margins.

          Now if you're tuning a specific set of hardware with particular voltages and particular timings, and especially if you have a better than typical cooling system, then you can exactly tune the speed of the CPU. You don't need a huge saftey margin to cover huge uncertainties because there are no uncertainties. You can push the speed and maybe even the voltage a touch if you keep the CPU comfortably cool.

          Also an overclocker is probably willing to accept actually running into a once-in-1000-hours system reset if it means he can get that much more speed out of it. That's not something you want to have happen on a mission critical business server, but it is an excellent tradeoff if it gets you 1000 hours of smoother gameplay.

          Disclaimer: I have never actually overclocked myself (I've only tweeked BIOS timings), but I am about to buy a new computer and I am probably going to get a motherboard with enhanced overclocking capabilites. For just a few extra dollars and with a bit of serious geek-knowledge and and some (enjoyable) tuning and testing my system I can probably get a decent speed boost.

          Not a bad tradeoff at all. Few 'hobby' activities provide such a direct tangible benefit. Even hardcore automotive 'horsepower overclockers' only see a benefit in rare race-type conditions and no benefit at all in day-to-day driving.

          -
      • Although I agree with you, you can't overlook the fact that you need more expensive system parts to successfully overclock (e.g. motherboard, RAM).

        Those more expensive costs eat into your processor savings.
      • I recall overclocking my system bus. It's rated for 133 mhz, but it would post at 145 without issue. Everything ran fine, except one little thing: hash checking in Azureus. Every other thing I could throw at it completed without issue. So beware -- sometimes the nasties are hiding.
    • Well most overclockers I know do it with cheap products.

      Like for eg. If I go out and buy the cheapest Athlon64 3000+ (1.8Ghz)for 150$ or so and overclock it to 2.8Ghz, which is very possible, then I get a HUGE difference in performance, that I would only be able to get by shelling out many hundreds of dollars more otherwise.

      Basically all the cpu's with the same core are the same, only with different multipliers. If you buy the cheapest CPU you should be able to go to the highest speed of the range, if you
    • err.. athlon64's are really cheap, the kind of a thing you would buy if you buy a new gaming desktop. ..plus.. how the hell would you manage to damage the hardware this way? if you buy a 150$ chip and by one option at the bios it runs at the speed of the 250$ chip.. why the hell not give it a shot? it's not like you're going to lose anything, it just fails to boot if it doesn't work - after which you reverse back to the stock speed or a milder overclock.
  • yet another liquid cooling story is on the way!

  • Seriously though (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_mutha ( 177709 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:22AM (#12586414)
    Hardly anyone doing professional work on a machine will overclock it. Generally it just makes your system unstable and prone to crashing and making murphey's law become a reality on your precious data. Overclocking IMHO is more for gamers that want to take out as much juice as possible from their processors, and even so, it won't make that much of a difference. Generally its just for bragging rights.

    • Re:Seriously though (Score:5, Informative)

      by Satertek ( 708058 ) <brian@satertek.info> on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:30AM (#12586442) Homepage
      Wrong. If done right, you can have a perfectly stable machine. It does take considerable time to get it just right, and there is always some risk, which is why "professials" do not overclock as commonly.
      • Professionals usually don't own the hardware they work on, which is a bigger reason why they don't overclock.
      • The problem I have with overclocking is that everytime I had an issue with the computer, there was that little voice that said "It's the overclocking". Eventually, that voice would drive me crazy to the point where I was running stock again.

        Besides, even when I had overclocked my Athlon XP system, I couldn't really notice any difference between the overclocked and stock set up anywap.

    • Re:Seriously though (Score:3, Informative)

      by btarval ( 874919 )
      Oh, please, spare me. I can show you a number of so-called "professional" boxes which will break under a load that I can throw at it.

      The really funny thing is that people doing "professional work" are doing so with pure blind trust in the manufacturer. Very, very few "professionals" bother with the most basic of QA. They just open the box, plug it in, and run, based on pure blind faith.

      I've worked with various computer companies, being involved with the bring-up of a wide variety of hardware, from work

    • Generally it just makes your system unstable and prone to crashing and making murphey's law become a reality on your precious data.

      Uh, no. When the system starts becoming unstable, you know you've reached the limit. The point of overclocking is to push the chip as far as it is able to without becoming unstable.

      The reason it's so popular is that many chips are capable of being pushed very far without any added instability. To the crowd that builds their own machines anyway, it's just another thing to t
    • Hardly anyone doing professional work on a machine will overclock it.
      If you need the speed and you are making money from it you buy more machines.
    • I didn't overclock my P4 2.8 to 3.0 for bragging rights. I did it because it's the same chip as a 3.0 and runs rock solid stable that way.

      The way I see it, I didn't overclock a 2.8, I underpaid for a 3.0. And yes it does make a difference. That's why they sell both.
    • Obviously you are not a big overclocker. I have been overclocking machines since P5's were still that ugly gray clay. When done properly, without trying to achieve astronimcal results, you can quite safely and sanely increase your system 10-15% with no adverse effects. Should you do it on a mission critical server? If you even think you should, really, you shouldn't have that job, that is where you want rock solid stability, that is why server motherboards are so expensive. Other than that, take baby s
    • I agree- but that isn't why overclocking is interesting. Overclocking is a good measure of the possibility of near-term clock speed bumps. From reading the article, it looks like the Opteron can basically go to 2.7Ghz just about anytime AMD feels like, it can probably go to 2.8GHz, and we may see FX-59 or -61 CPUs passing 3GHz in the near future.

  • Already done it. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:23AM (#12586418)
    I've already overclocked my 64 to a 96. W00T!
  • I wish they would not waste /. front page space on these silly overclocking stories. The kernal of the whole overclocking fantasy is a kind of very American delusion, of how the "rugged individualist" can beat the "corporate drone".

    Question: If you frigging overclockers are so frigging smart, why don't you design faster chips?

    Answer: It's bleeding hard work.

    Of course the real laugher is what the overclockers do with their "extra" cycles. Nothing useful, let me assure you. At least I've never seen a

    • Most of the oveclockers i know are actually carry overs of the car hot rodding genere rather than kids trying to "get the top score". Many of the new "standard" cooling parts (quallity copper coolers, heatpipe coolers, etc) were first employed (beta tested?) by the overclocking community.

      Admitedly there are the crazy "i gotta get high numbers" peeps, but they usually have chips whose life span is measured in hours.

      As for what to do with extra cycles? i find folding@home is a good use (as does the people o
    • Why the troll about individualism? Where are the moderators? Oh right, this is Slashdot, where I'll be modded down for pointing this out, but 'shanen' gets a +3, In-fucking-sightful.
    • You want to improve the world?

      No, they don't. They just want to overclock. What a rant!

    • Of course the real laugher is what the overclockers do with their "extra" cycles. Nothing useful, let me assure you.

      It all depends. If you can get 2x300MHz celerons to both be stable at 450MHz it makes a major difference, and you can get a lot more done. At the time 2x300MHz celerons cost less than one 450MHz pentium II, and the dual board didn't cost a great deal more than a similar single CPU board. In that case chips way above spec were being sold as celeron 300MHz chips to meet demand.

      Now lets loo

    • Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dr.badass ( 25287 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @03:42AM (#12586709) Homepage
      Question: If you frigging overclockers are so frigging smart, why don't you design faster chips?
      Answer: It's bleeding hard work.

      What the hell does this have to do with anything?

      Most chips are just higher-clocked versions of earlier bretheren. There are occasionally different cores, but the difference between Chip A @ 2.5GHz and Chip A @ 2.8GHz generally has nothing to do with differences in the design, and everything to do with pricing.

      Of course the real laugher is what the overclockers do with their "extra" cycles. Nothing useful, let me assure you.

      Are you going to assure me that when, many years ago, I overclocked a 300MHz chip to 450MHz, the >50% improvement in compile times wasn't "useful"? How about the fact that I saved about $300 overclocking a cheap chip instead of buying a faster-labeled one? Did that not actually happen? I remember it so clearly, too.

    • Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mejesster ( 813444 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @04:00AM (#12586756)
      I don't see why this is so fantastically irritating to you. Does it bother you when someone has a ferrari that they just drive to work or an SUV that they just drive to soccer practice? You know, it really bothers me that you have a kitchen and don't bother to cook up gourmet 5 star meals.
      • Isn't it more like buying a Ferrari and then fiddling around with the engine yourself just to get a little extra performance?

      • Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tore S B ( 711705 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @11:38AM (#12589894) Homepage
        Does it bother you when someone has a ferrari that they just drive to work or an SUV that they just drive to soccer practice?

        Yes, it fucking well does - that's environmentally irresponsible.
        Yes, it would hugely annoy me and I would most definately make a point of it.

        Really bad analogy :P
      • Does it bother you when someone has a ferrari that they just drive to work

        Yes, they should be in a car club minimally, but preferably running autocross/solo2 at the local track on sundays.


        or an SUV that they just drive to soccer practice?

        That's what minivans are for, either get out camping and off the non-beaten path or buy a minivan. You are obviously a soccer mom, so face the facts and buy the van already (you will never have another adventuresome excursion in your life so stop pretending).

        You
    • Thank you for taking the time to post your incoherent rant.

      1. I have overclocked my home PCs for years. I've never spent a lot of time on it, and I've never sacrificed stability.

      2. Do you feel that everthing you do has to improve the world? If so, I wonder how well you are living up to such a high ideal?

      3. Wanting more system performance (at zero or low cost) does not imply an obligation to become involved in the design of "faster chips".

      4. Some people who overclock actually use their computers for in
  • discussions ranged on weather the A64 would even be overclockable at all.

    Or are they just edited by the /. editors :-)~

  • If it ain't broke... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Francis85 ( 875901 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:35AM (#12586470)
    If it ain't broke... overclock it?

  • Actually Overclockers... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:36AM (#12586473)
    keep on because of a rumor that after the 4GHz barrier you can create a tear in the time-space continium... :)

  • Increase usable life of your box (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Deliveranc3 ( 629997 ) <deliverance@level4 . o rg> on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:43AM (#12586507) Journal
    Gives you another few months, you start thinking about that shiney new GPU CPU and stuff and salivating, but you know it's going to drop to .3 of the price in 2 months.

    So you overclock. If you bought the low end last generation you can keep going WAY LONGER!.

    I had a 9000 pro and was able to overclock to survive DOOM 3 and CS source... didn't need a 9600 pro or XT and wasn't tempted until the 600gt showed up... now I'm good for a few more generations unless it's another really awsome one (like the 9700 pro).
    • I really don't understand how you could be quite so wrong.

      I've an Athlon "1700+" which I've underclocked to 800 Mhz. That drops the CPU temperature in excess of 10 C. That's going to double it's usable life.

      It may even give me enough time to finish transcoding the LOR trilogy.

  • Not just for gamers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Nowak ( 872479 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @02:50AM (#12586524)
    As someone who does real-time generative audio/video processing, I have to say that oftentimes what a 2GHz machine cannot run comfortably, a 2.5GHz machine can do satisfactorily. 12FPS may not be good enough, but 15FPS may be passible. People often dismiss overclocking as something just for gamers, but in reality, it can be useful to anyone doing processor-intensive, real-time processing. I feel that some of the anti-overclocking opinions here are a bit unjustified, and more of a knee-jerk response to a loosely correlated l33t culture. The only games I play are Clan Lord and Civilization III... hardly a reason to overclock. However, for video processing, I need all the power I can get despite my modest budget.
  • And here I got one of those new Athlon64s because I wanted to be able to underclock it.

    It reduces stability, it decreases component life, and it increases power usage and heat. If you want to do it, I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not going to complain if Intel and AMD come up with a way to effectively prevent it, and I'm still going to think it's stupid.
    • " And here I got one of those new Athlon64s because I wanted to be able to underclock it.

      It reduces stability, it decreases component life, and it increases power usage and heat. If you want to do it, I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not going to complain if Intel and AMD come up with a way to effectively prevent it, and I'm still going to think it's stupid."

      Running a CPU at lower than its rated speed is just plain silly.
      You gain no stability over running the processor at its rated speed.
      Say you want t
      • "Running a CPU at lower than its rated speed is just plain silly. ...
        So you see, there is no point to what you're doing, and I think its stupid :P        "

        Only if the assumptions you made were correct. Given the information you seem to have, your conclusions are reasonable. But you're missing something.

        Newer desktop Athlon64s have laptop-like power-saving features. Basically, the chip I have (Athlon64 3000+) can run at 1.0 ghz or 1.8 ghz (changes between 1.1v and 1.4v). This can be changed dynamically at any time
        • Well yeah, AMD's new "Cool and Quiet" feature, much like Intel's speedstep will lower your CPU frequency and voltage, thus lowering temperatures, and allow lowering the speed of the CPU heatsink fan.

          But the benefits of this technology are not to extend processor life, or primarily to decrease power consumption.

          Its to make your PC run quieter, most overclockers running air cooled CPU heatsinks don't really care about the noise though, and the ones that do, splurge on watercooling systems.

          I've heard (and
          • "But the benefits of this technology are not to extend processor life, or primarily to decrease power consumption."

            Electromigration is greater at higher voltages, so I would say going from 1.4 volts to 1.1 volts would increase the processor life. It's not a primary motivation, but it certainly doesn't hurt when deciding to buy the thing.

            Heat, power consumption, and noise are all directly related, so an attempt to improve one necessarily improves the others.
  • Kids these days. Back in the old times, you didn't go under or over clock, you went through it!
    • Kids these days. Back in the old times, you didn't go under or over clock, you went through it!

      If you want to get all old-skool about it - - 1960s/1970s DEC (now Compaq (now HP)) machines were *frequently* overclocked. The PDP-7 could be overclocked by shorting some pins in an R401 Master Clock Flip-Chip in row N somewhere on the CPU which would override the Clock Speed setting on the front panel (yes - there were two knobs on the front panel, coarse and fine timing settings. Would be used to tune program

  • Overclock AMD on HP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by apache guevara ( 776292 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @03:27AM (#12586645)
    Overclocking on the Pentium I was fun. CPU speeds were still far far away from the GHz levels and in school, it had amazing brag value. Never matter that the recursion programs we wrote in TurboC (it was way back ... I was a kid) never seemed to compile any faster.

    Overclocked my HP Athlon 2.2GHz upto 2.5 Ghz. Noteable difference? Well, super pi http://www.computerbase.de/downloads/software/benc hmarks/super_pi/ [computerbase.de]did calculate PI to 512K decimals in 49 seconds (It was 52 seconds earlier). Didnt make much of a difference to anything else that I use. (Am an MBA now ... what i use is powerpoint and outlook ... I sold out!!)

    The fact remains that overclocking is not a performance enhancement ... the results are just incremental, but they do give the kicks. Very zen!

    Remember the "Turbo" button on the machines those days?
    • Overclocking 486-66 to 100 is when i stopped overclocking. It was 1/3 of processing power. it was noticable in the internet, Word, watching videos. Now... Going from 2.2 to 2.5 is not worth the time expenditure. In fact for 2 years untill a month ago i have p4 1.4 and the only reason to upgrade was because the motherboard blew.

  • Overclocking...pffff (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spactonic ( 683577 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @03:35AM (#12586683)
    I was just happy that I could plonk a NEC V20 in my IBM XT - going from a 4.77 MHz 8088 to a whopping 8 MHz!

  • I've always like to overclock my PCs - and I've never sacrificed stability. It's true that the hardware will fail earlier in theory as a result of overclocking, but unless you are running crazy timings with way too much voltage or whatever, the hardware is still likely to last until it's practically worthless. If you can overclock with just a modecum of skill, you literally get more performance than you paid for. I ask you: how can it be wrong, when it feels so right?

    I think that overclockers tend

  • I am amazed by the number of people against overclocking. If you get a new CPU and overclock, well I would guess you are in the world where you are happy to play with hardware just to see what it can do. If it breaks it's your own fault and presumably if you are happy to try you don't mind loosing the money - if the cpu life is shortened do you care, probably not as you are going to be a early adopter of the next quickest speeds!
  • Turn the power supply on.

    Honestly, every one i've seen is so insanly overpowered, it isn't even funny...

    On top of that, people will try to overclock a cpu when the problem lies elsewhere... RAM, drives, etc.

    An 4Ghz 64-bit cpu is nearly worthless if you mate it with 64 megs of ram and a 3600 RPM laptop drive...
  • ..for not supporting Linux on K8T800Pro chipset!
    I've got Abit AV8 with amd64 3200+. Now, I'd sure like to see how far the CPU can go, but the damn motherboard does not show any temperatures. Gkrellm does not support that chipset, nor does lm_sensors.

    Only a madman would try overclocking without seeing how hot the CPU is. Overclocking and hoping that my cooler can remove the excess heat is not very reliable way to do it, I'd say.

    If you know a way to see the temperatures on AV8, let me know. I haven't found
  • "This in-depth overclocking guide will show you how to get the maximum from your brand new Athlon 64 system"

    With a minimum of warrantee... to be exact NONE.

    I'd like my processor to last for a while, so I don't take stupid risks for a little extra speed.
  • WOOHOO 20% higher clockspeed !
    It gives 10% more realworld performance.
    And 10000% higher failure/error rate!
    Well having 100x higher error rate might go undetected most of time since errors in cpu are not that common without overclocking.
    Anyway. I'm thinking that what the overclocking gives is minimal increase not worth the potential problems. Not everyone get problems, and not everyone who got problems realize them.
    How you tell if the X server crashed by change of a bit at some place or by software failure i

    • Re:Overclocking (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @06:56AM (#12587291) Homepage Journal
      lifetime?? the average lifetime is well beyond the time the chip is worth anything.

      *Few people get lucky because they need to mark some chips at lower speed than they are truly capable and they keep certain margins on the chip timings to ensure it works.* quite a lot of people "get lucky" as you put it. on a64's you often see 300-400mhz overclocks, that's not much unless you look into the cpu prices and how they hike up at those 300-400mhz. and those run whatever test you want for 24/7.. i got a k6-2 300 that has run at 450mhz for something like 6 years or whatever year they were introduced.

      overclocking is not worth it usually when you buy the machine.. but ironically.. INCREASES THE LIFETIME as you can use the chip some time longer to play games etc, comfortably.
      • Well when you go for 0.9u or deeper technology the lifetime begins to matter...
        You got 50% clock speed increase at time when the memory interface wasn't such a bottleneck as it is today. The older processes tolerate overclocking better. What I'm saying that what you get today isn't worth the risks. When I used 366 celeron I would of overclocked at the END OF ITS USABLE LIFETIME. Not before, before that its unnecessary risk which I took and once changed my GFX card and HD because of experimentation, got repl

  • To be honest (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BlightThePower ( 663950 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @06:17AM (#12587119)
    I'm beginning to wonder if the pendulum has swung to making underclocking the smarter move. Certainly I've never had as stable, cold and quiet a machine as when "Cool 'n' Quiet" (on my MSI NForce 4) is kicking in (dynamically lowering the multiplier). You might say I should have bought a slower cheaper machine in the first place but just sometimes (DAW stuff, those VSTis can be hungry beasts) I need the grunt, but not all the time.

  • why so many people so ignorant towards OC (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    CPUs are batch produced. before testing there is no mark on the CPU, their frequency are not determined. under strict testing, some will fail. then the remaining CPU will be marked to some certain frequency which they can handle, with little or quite some headroom. in case the market needs more lower end CPUs, some CPUs might get marked lower than what they could handle.

    if U don't know these procedures, don't EVER talk about overclocking, or undervolting, or anything.
  • with PC3200+ RAM on a SIS(AFAIK lowest price chipset there is) based mommaboard.

    Running CPU at stock 2.2 GHz and mem(HTT) at stock 400MHz.

    It's unbelievably cool with 42 degrees C reported after sustained 92% user 8% system operation.

    If I understand the article, the optimum OC path is to keep the HTT at 400 by upping the CPU clock and upping the divisor, unless I want to worry about all the other system clocks and peripherals running beyond speced speed. If this is correct, let me know and I'll have a loo

  • So many peope talking out of their ***... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Okay, maybe not the most friendly subject line I could come up with, but you should hear yourself, all of you...

    Last week, I bought an A64 3000+ with Venice core and a Neo 4 Platinum motherboard. A 3000+ runs stock at 1.8GHz. I bought this core with the very purpose of overclocking it. And well, it did damn well. This CPU is now running @ 2.65GHz, without upping the core voltage, without dangerously high temperatures. Actually, I will be buying a better cooler one of these days to keep it cooler that it ru
  • Although I have always been an Intel man, the good words I keep hearing about AMD has me considering building my next system with a CPU from them. But frankly, I don't know anything about AMD.

    Is there a website that spells everything out for newbies? I'm talking about information for all the different AMD chips and how they compare, socket types; the sort of thing. (The sites I have seen so far seem to assume that you are already knowledgable about AMD.)
  • I am building a A64 system - should say built a system and are now troubleshooting. The BIOS will only recognize about 3.4G in a 4x1G configuration.

    I'm running a SLI-DR board (rev AA0) with 4x1G of RAM and a revision E (Venice core) AMD64 CPU. The BIOS only recognizes 3,407,334 KB RAM. I've tested each stick, ran them in pairs, and tried them in another machine - so I don't think this is a RAM issue. I will be dual booting, but 64-bit Gento and Win2K (not moved to Win64 yet, but will when the MSDN kit sho
  • For the first time, I have a system that I don't feel overclocking will help. Applications start instantaneously, games run smoothly. At the moment, CD and hard drives seem the bottleneck. In short, my Athlon64 is ***fast enough already***. Granted, I don't think this will last too long, but it's been quite nice for the 9 months I've had this box.

    Granted, if I was running an antivirus suite, I'd probably welcome overclocking...

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