Overclock the n64?

I managed to overclock the R4300 in my N64 a while ago. Problem was that every game ran too fast. The games aren't programmed to run at the same speed with clock changes.

This looks like the guide I followed. I did this years ago. Was hopeful for a magical speed boost, but the games all ran in weird turbo mode. AND, ended up busting off those pins when I tryed to restore it to normal. Waste of time and money.....
 
That trick changes the multiplier of the CPU. I've seen some other guy who instead replaced the PLL oscillator that controls the RDRAM clock (which in turn controls RCP and CPU clocks too), that did not make games speed up. It also increases performance of the graphics/sound processor + memory and not just the CPU...
 
Nintendo was stupid not to put a fan in and increase the clockfrequency. That would have made the N64 a much better system in many ways. They saved money by not having a CD drive so a fan wouldn’t have broken the budget.
It's going to be interesting to see what the Chinese get out of the iQue with it's doubled clock.
 
The N64 chipset draws around 5W, it doesn't need a fan. It's likely heat was not the limiting factor; remember, this was a LONG time ago and N64 had fairly aggressive clock speed figures for its time; the design of the console is about a decade by now.
 
not to mention the psx had been out for a year and the n64 launched with a price that had to compete with sony's first price drop.
 
N64 is all .35u I believe. It was definitely state of the art for the time. N64 launched when Pentium Pro 200 was the top of the line. Voodoo 1 ran at 50Mhz. Rendition V2200 ran at 60Mhz. N64's Reality CoProcessor (GPU) runs at ~60Mhz, it's R4300i CPU at 93Mhz.

Comparing a PPro 200Mhz to a R4300 93Mhz isn't exactly a good comparison though. R4300 is sort of a nitro-powered 486...

Makes one wonder why they couldn't get DS to have at least equal capabilities to N64. Developing the same hardware around .11u would probably offer some serious improvements across the board. :)

IQue's N64-on-a-chip-using-SDRAM-instead-of-crap-RDRAM is pretty cool.
 
N64 CPU isn't quite a 486, it doesn't have a separate FPU (instead all instructions are run through the same pipe), and its databus is multiplexed with the address bus, which means lower performance. On the other hand, it could be more advanced than 486 in some other aspects, cache probably (486 had a unified 4K inst/data cache afair), but I'm unsure if that really is enough to make it faster overall.

N64 CPU performance is most likely ROTTEN though compared to a 486 PC due to the dodgy memory subsystem.
 
A 100Mhz R4300 (not 'i', what does 'i' mean anyway) puts out 60 SPECint92 and 45 SPECfp92 (LINK), according to a usenet post. This puts it around a Pentium 60 in performance(LINK), at least in this bench.....

But, as you say, N64 is crippled by the craptastic RAMBUS (lol that it was advertised as a feature) and other cost cutting measures.....
 
It's mot just the RAMBuds memory, the CPU cache's are small and direct mapped. Any reference that spans 8K or more will thrash the cash.

I've seen changing the link order on an N64 game affect performance by as much as 20%.
 
I thought the caches were like 2 or 4-way set associative... But you could at least lock rows in the caches so data you needed there would stay there.
 
Guden Oden said:
I thought the caches were like 2 or 4-way set associative... But you could at least lock rows in the caches so data you needed there would stay there.
Click to expand...

Nope, direct mapped.
 
Is there anyway to change out some of the componets in the N64 say like from Rdram to faster Sdram without messing anything up. I know there are some pirate hardware that came out and hooked up to the N64's speed drive under it. Dont remember the name of it but its probley hard as hell to find also what about overclocking the Cpu and changing the GPU with something like the dreamcast's or gamecube's I know there has to be doc. out there about the N64 hardware. What I want to do is make a game for it and show what the N64 could really push had it had the right hardware, also I think Nintendo was bullshiting when they said it would be too slow if they went with CD's b/c if Im right they had a pretty good speed on reading data.
 
Colonel, so what you're saying is you want to turn the N64 into something it's not to show what the original N64 could do? Your logic is faulty.
 
Save yourself the headaches. Give up the techno-necrophilia.
 
Colonel said:
I think Nintendo was bullshiting when they said it would be too slow if they went with CD's b/c if Im right they had a pretty good speed on reading data.
Click to expand...

Mario 64 would have been impossible on a CD because he N64 didn't have enough RAM. You hardly had PS1 games with big open worlds.
 
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