Overclocking my CPU

[Rurouni]

My question is do you really see/feel the difference of a processor which was overclock and a processor which is not? As i have read some tech book, regarding overclocking sometimes the difference is only minimal. and the risk is your putting your processor in a short period of is life.

Long time ago when I'm using Duron CPU, I would have to oc it to be able to play h264 movie.. at vga resolution! That + core avc codec did the trick. But right now I don't oc my PC because it's fast enough for my needs (Athlon 2 x3). Actually I would love to have faster PC for transcoding streaming purposes, so oc'ing it wouldn't cut it... needs a new one

I do oc my PC at work to 4.4GHz (i7 3770k).

 

[Grall]

My question is do you really see/feel the difference of a processor which was overclock and a processor which is not?

Depends entirely on what you're doing of course. During normal windows use, like file management, web surfing, stuff like word processing and so on you notice pretty much no difference at all between say a 2GHz CPU and a 4GHz CPU.

If you're doing heavy stuff like video transcoding, raytracing or distributed computing (bitcoin mining, folding@home and so on) it makes a huge difference.

and the risk is your putting your processor in a short period of is life.

Meh. Overclocking in of itself has almost no effect at all on lifespan. CPUs are solid state devices; no moving parts. The danger comes from overvolting the chip to push the clocks even higher, as long as you don't go out of bounds with the voltages the risk to the CPU really is quite minimal. The main risk is to your data, as system stability can be worse in an overclocked state.

I've run my PC overclocked for four years now and it looks like it can no longer handle it. I've had some crashes recently, so I dialed the speeds back to stock. Crashes stopped. System still runs fine though, so no real problem. Mainly my ego is a bit annoyed at again sitting at 2.66GHz...

 

[Sxotty]

Long time ago when I'm using Duron CPU, I would have to oc it to be able to play h264 movie.. at vga resolution! That + core avc codec did the trick. But right now I don't oc my PC because it's fast enough for my needs (Athlon 2 x3). Actually I would love to have faster PC for transcoding streaming purposes, so oc'ing it wouldn't cut it... needs a new one

I do oc my PC at work to 4.4GHz (i7 3770k).

Back in the day the celerons overclocked from 66MHz to 100 on the bus which was huge. I remember some enormous overclocks on the athlons as well (the laptop chips), but by and large I don't bother myself anymore. It seems the effort to get marginal improvements is too large now.

 

[Rurouni]

Back in the day the celerons overclocked from 66MHz to 100 on the bus which was huge. I remember some enormous overclocks on the athlons as well (the laptop chips), but by and large I don't bother myself anymore. It seems the effort to get marginal improvements is too large now.

Back in the day everything counts. I think I've used Pentium at 100MHz which was marginal for playing mpeg1. I used the pencil trick on my Duron to go, iirc, from 600 to 1GHz. Actually, the last Intel on my desktop was that Pentium. After that it is always AMD (from the K series to my current Athlon 2 X3).

Current CPU is fast enough, so I don't see much use for overclocking. But 10% to 20% ish improvement should be easy if you've got an unlocked multiplier. But right now my concern is more about perf/watt so I would prefer to under volt and under clock as much as possible as long as it doesn't interrupt everyday usages. I can't under clock my current CPU because it's a bit marginal for transcoding. Maybe it's time to upgrade to something better... Right now my PC is idling (while downloading in the backgroud) at around 80-90watt (monitor off), which I think is too big. How much power current PC use for that purpose? I'm not talking about Atom or the likes, but about i5/i7 or AMD equivalent. If it's still to big, I might go to the Atom route for download/file sharing purposes, but that means having another PC for transcoding which needs to be turned on whenever I want to watch something and broke the instant gratification experience.

Btw, sorry for the OT post. I just don't want to start a thread just for this stuff

 

[I.S.T.]

I have a 40 to 45% overclock going on my 5 year old CPU. It was closer to 60-70% but i backed it off earlier this year.

It's a Pentium Dual-Core 2180, basically an Allendale with even less L2 cache.

 

[HMBR]

I have a 40 to 45% overclock going on my 5 year old CPU. It was closer to 60-70% but i backed it off earlier this year.

It's a Pentium Dual-Core 2180, basically an Allendale with even less L2 cache.

lower end "C2Ds" are great for OC, my 2.5GHz e5200 could run at 4GHz, a pretty good gain, I also have one e2140 (1.6GHz, with the right MB can run at 3.2GHz)...

unfortunately this kind of OC died with LGA 1156.

but even some 2500k, 3.3GHz up to 4.5GHz+ just by changing a multi and adding some voltage still sounds great.

 

[Albuquerque]

I can't begin to say how much overclocking has helped my past computing experiences. 386SX16 -> 25Mhz helped tremendously in Wolf3D (had to swap the crystal on that one). 486DX33 -> 50Mhz not only helped Doom with the "high res" mode, but it also accelerated my VLBus for my IDE and video controllers. This was a great help to the VESA implementation of MS Flight Sim, and playback of AVI files visibly got better. So did disk transfer rates; boot times into Windows very much got faster as did load times on certain games.

PentiumMMX166 -> 250mhz (83 x 3) was a godsend for Quake and Quak 2, and made Unreal playable (software mode) at 800x600. Celeron 333 at 504Mhz was utterly fantastic for making Q3 playable with my GeForce 3 Ti200 (that was also overclocked to nearly ti500 speeds).

My last truly epic overclock was a Pentium 1.8A that ran at 2.8Ghz for probably three years. It held a softmodded ATI 9500np->9700pro + overclock, and that entire rig was the most fantastic gaming rig I'd built probably ever. Whatever I threw at it (at the time), it would just plow straight through.

Back to current day -- overclocking absolutely still has a place; as evidenced by all the "boost" and "turbo" functions now built into pretty much every modern CPU and GPU. There are some tasks that only get faster with more clockspeed. My 3930k sits at 4.5Ghz; does it really need to? Depending on what I've got going on, it's certainly faster than it was at the stock 3.2 / 3.8 turbo.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Back in the day the celerons overclocked from 66MHz to 100 on the bus which was huge. I remember some enormous overclocks on the athlons as well (the laptop chips), but by and large I don't bother myself anymore. It seems the effort to get marginal improvements is too large now.

Ah, the wonderful Celeron 300A. Pretty much all of them could do a 50% overclock to hit 450 Mhz. And that was also the time that motherboard manufacturers figured out a way to allow the Celeron 300A to be used in a dual socket motherboard. That was my first dual CPU system. After that, it was painful to go back to single core computing on the desktop. Even HT didn't come close to the overall smoothness of computing once you experienced 2 full cores.

I still remember having to actually change the clock crystal back in the old days if you wanted to overclock.

Ah the good old days (or NOT!).

Regards,
SB

 

[Grall]

486DX33 -> 50Mhz not only helped Doom with the "high res" mode, but it also accelerated my VLBus for my IDE and video controllers.

Aye... 50MHz VLB was a pretty big kick in the pants performance-wise. RAM bandwidth got buffed too, by the way, that should have helped just as much methinks. Bus speed was the big downside with the DX2 and DX4 486es, you got faster CPU core, but only 33MHz VLB and RAM clocks. DX2 486es in particular were dodgy as I recall regarding what code actually ran faster on it, as quite a lot of stuff was slower than on a 486-50 thanks to the much faster bus of the latter.

Today, PCs tend to wonk out pretty quick if you overclock I/O buses. I miss those simpler good old days sometimes...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Bus speed was the big downside with the DX2 and DX4 486es, you got faster CPU core, but only 33MHz VLB and RAM clocks.

If you got the 75 Mhz 486 DX4 you got to have a whopping 25 Mhz bus. Only the 100 Mhz 486 DX4 got the swanky 33 Mhz bus.

And god forbid you actually went for a 486 SX. No FPU for you then. I had a friend into flight sims that got one thinking it'd be great. Only to wonder why it ran soooo slow. He was sad when I told him he'd basically just bought an overgrown 386 without the math coprocessor (yes, I know it's more than just an overgrown 386).

This was also when the CPU cache was on the motherboard and not on the CPU itself, upgradeable as well. Although starting with the 486, they included a small L1 cache onboard, but still had the CPU cache on the MB. Oh man, the memories.

Regards,
SB

 

[Grall]

If you got the 75 Mhz 486 DX4 you got to have a whopping 25 Mhz bus. Only the 100 Mhz 486 DX4 got the swanky 33 Mhz bus.

OMG yeah... I totally forgot about that. 486 era wasn't really my era though, I was still an Amiga fanatic back then. Desperately wishing, hoping for some miracle... When P5 class CPUs became affordable I finally caved in though and bought a PC (with an AMD K6 CPU. Not awesomely fast at float calculations... )

This was also when the CPU cache was on the motherboard and not on the CPU itself, upgradeable as well.

Heh, yeah, early mobos had banks of DIP SRAM sockets, and later there were these sticks you plugged into a wide slot instead, with surface-mounted PQFP chips. Quite elaborate, really. ...Although neither of my two mobos with cache on them had any upgrade options. It was all soldered onto the mobo. And voltage regulators back then were often passive and had quite large heatsinks on 'em...

Oh man, the memories.

Yeah, and the kids today don't know anything about it either...! They think xboxes and iphones have existed since forever! *waves fist in curmudgeonly manner*

 

[Albuquerque]

After the 486DX50 I had one of those AM486DX3/120's that would occasionally do 150Mhz depending on luck and temperature that day. Good lord that thing was fast

 

[Grall]

I ran my 166MHz K6 at 208MHz on a 83MHz bus, on Intel 430VX chipset as I recall. My PowerVR PCX1 board really liked the faster PCI clock, it boosted framerate quite significantly.

Later, with a K6-III under the hood, I switched to VIA Apollo-based chipset, which was utter shite compared to Intel's. I only did it for the AGP interface so I could stick in a decent video card, and the bigger cachable memory range. The Intel board only supported 64MB cached memory. Not that it did much, the VIA chipset was worse at everything basically. Board was finicky as hell, slow... I ended up defecting to a Dell Dimension box with a P4-willamette @1.7GHz and 512MB DRDRAM. Shit, it was fast in comparison to that K6-III.

I still have that PC standing here. It works, barely; you can't actually use it for anything anymore. Updates to windows XP has totally killed performance somehow, you can't even surf the web without crazy stuttering (due to disk paging I suppose.)

 

[I.S.T.]

Strange, I've used XP on a slower system and it was fine...

Northwood based Celeron(Which was the same as a Williamette based Celeron but at a smaller process) rated at 2.4 or 2.6 Ghz.

This CPU was a marvel in the least positive way possible. It was shown that the 2.0 Ghz model could be overclocked to 3.0 Ghz and gain less than 2% speed or some such nonsense. Plus, my system only had 512 megs of DDR before Intel had dual-channel DDR chipsets...

I'd wager that something went wrong with that system there.

 

[Albuquerque]

Sigh, the good ol' days.

I've tried many times to find the same model Packard Bell that I started x86 with. It was the very first computer at Best Buy (American electronics retail chain) that featured a CDROM built in. Came with a Sound Blaster "pro" card, 1Mb of system ram, 386SX16 and an Oak VGA card with something like 512k of memory. Came with a unique speaker assembly that sat underneath the 15" 1024x768i CRT.

Came with Windows 3.0 and a TON of random CDROMs. I learned so much on that rig... Damned thing cost over $4000 at the time, back in the mid 90's.

 

[Grall]

This CPU was a marvel in the least positive way possible. It was shown that the 2.0 Ghz model could be overclocked to 3.0 Ghz and gain less than 2% speed or some such nonsense. Plus, my system only had 512 megs of DDR before Intel had dual-channel DDR chipsets...

Probably a combination of single-channel RAM (IE, not much bandwidth to speak of), willamette's tiny on-chip L2 (256k) and at least early P4 revisions' super huge cache lines (128 bytes), which led to huge ejection rates which in turn cannot be fed due to lack of RAM bandwidth...

Intel was rather pissed at DDR initially since they'd banked on taking over the memory world together with rambus, and tried to make DDR look as bad as it possibly could. Didn't work though, thankfully.

 

[I.S.T.]

The first two P4 based Celerons actually had 128KB L2 cache.

Yes, they were that bad.

Ironically, the only good Prescott models were the Celerons, which had doubled L2 cache and combined with the other changes were actually pretty decent low cost performers, close to Athlon XP speed or the same.

 

[Grall]

*Ouch* on teh 128k L2! Man, that really must have sucked, performance-wise!

My 2nd Intel (Dell) PC had a Prescott @3GHz with 1MB L2. It sat in a BTX chassis, which is another failed idea of Intel's, but I actually rather liked BTX. It was much better organized for modern systems where the southbridge didn't get squished in under the video card, RAM sockets didn't conflict with the video card (again!), and things were generally much better organized. Add-in boards faced the correct way up as well, for the first time since the ISA bus went the way of the dodo...

I rather liked that chassis, it ran pretty quiet thanks to a 120*38mm PWM front fan, and I added two 80mm aftermarket arctic cooling fans with built-in rubber grommets in the back. That helped immensely with creating a steady cooling airflow across the CPU heatsink, cutting down on front fan RPMs significantly. The chassis' downside was the power supply was only like 275W or somesuch, and had no aux PCIe power connector at all so any heftier video card than the included Geforce 6800 was rather out of the question. (Board overclocked pretty well though!) Chassis also had room for only two hard drives, but other than that it was pretty sweet. Of course, being Dell back then meant power and front panel mobo connectors were 100% proprietary, the chassis was proprietary (even though BTX form factor, it used metal clips to hold PCB in place instead of stand-offs and screws), and the PSU form factor was proprietary as well. Had to throw everything away to upgrade anything in it. Bah.

I added some green CCFL lighting at the front to it, which was all the rage back then. Looked sweet, illuminating the bigass front fan...

 

[Blazkowicz]

The overclock I really remember was my Celeron 500, run at 75 FSB, it was already outdated when I got it but it saw a lot of gaming (CS, Max Payne, Q3 etc. and older games), divx movies which were still quite a novelty back in 2001. The vid cards were S3 Virge PCI 4MB and Voodoo2 SLI but despite their old age I was tremendously CPU limited.
This poor rig died because of running on FSB 83, which looked fine if you pretended to ignore some random instabilities. It also had a weird bug : I had dropped it and after that, it could only boot if run outside the case.
My single worst purchase was done for this rig, I thought the PCI bus had too much stuff crammed it and sharing the bandwith (one 2D vid card, three 2D vid cards, sound card, NIC) so I bought a used SiS 6326 AGP, which had a fine 2D picture but was slow as hell.. I could watch the GUI elements be drawn and video playback was unusable. Mindboggling. I had to get the S3 Virge back in, and realized how great S3 Virges were, these cards did deserve their reputation for 3D gaming but were cheap and high performing 2D cards

Much later, my other overclock : the Sempron LE-1100, a single core 65nm K8 at 1900 MHz, which got an easy 25% overclock (with undervolting). Without o/c, it trounced my older XP 2400+ already (with which I had killed the motherboard again). The stock heatsink was more than adequate, dead silent. This CPU did put very little heat out, I later learned they used it underclocked on netbooks and called it Athlon Neo.
It was awesome.
Also, I lost all overclocking ability on this mobo (which is still my PC's mobo) when I tried a pair of bad ram sticks to try them out. sigh.. two memory slots were fried and it didn't ever boot again with o/c, even with bus at 201MHz instead of 200. Which makes me wonder why it boots at all at 200 and is 100% stable still.

 

[Rootax]

I remember my Athlon on a Slot A. 600mhz stock, 850 o/c I believe, with the help of a "Ninja card", don't remember the exact name. You had to open the Athlon cartridge, and put the card in. Then you could change the multiplier, the voltage, etc. Alpha and GlobalWind were the two leaders in coolers. It was awesome