Overclocking advice for games performance please.

marky1124

marky1124

marky1124

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Joined
11 Aug 2004
Posts
29
Hi,

I'm trying to squeeze the last out of my system before buying a new one for the new games frenzy coming in November.

I have a system built out of :-

Athlon 64 3500+ (Winchester core)
MSI Neo 2 Platinum motherboard
1GB OCZ PC3200 CL 2-2-2-5 (2x512MB match pair in Dual channel mode)
Nvidia 7800 GS
150 GB WD Raptor (SATA)
120 GB Western Digital
160 GB Western Digital
No name brand aluminum case
Standard AMD HSF
A PCI slot mounted air blower


I've overclocked it as follows, 1st column is stock settings, 2nd is overclocked settings (I've used code tags to give better column spacing) :-

Code: 
		Stock	Overclocked
Voltage		1.4v	1.45v
HT		x5	x4
CT		1T	1T
CPU		x11	x11
MemBus		x200	x200
CL		2-2-2-5	3-3-3-10
Method			nTune.3hrs
		
FSB		200	234
CL		2-2-2-5	3-3-3-4
AGP		67	77
GPU		450	588
Gmem		625	692
		
CPU		2200	2574
Temp (idle)		45'C
Temp (loaded)		62'C

Which has given me the following boost:

Code: 
3DMark 2006	3905	4759
SM2.0		1820	2298
HDR/SM3.0	1811	2221
CPU		872	1006


I ran prime95 stable for 12 hours and I've also played games for months with this overclock setting all stable.

Now my question is can I do much more and get any really appreciable results from any further efforts? My interest is in latest 1st person shooter games' performance.

Thanks very much in advance for your comments,
Cheers,
Mark
 
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if you want an honest answer i think a dual core is the way to go as winchesters were a bit limited in OCing unless you had the cooling....

venice cores were much better but i think some people got around 2.7 out their 3500s at some points.

3800+ for £40...

i had an opty that was sat at 2.8ghz and it got wasted by my new 3800+ at 2.0ghz (stock) in world in conflict.

18fps for the opty @ 2.8 versus 18fps at stock for the 3800+. once i clocked the 3800+ im up to 26fps and its a lot smoother.

best thing i bought... :)

one thing on the OC though...

knock your AGP back down to 66 before you graphics card throws a fit and craps itself. i dont know if the MSI had an AGP lock or not... if not you're screwed on the OCing regardless.
 
Thanks helpimcrap. I take it you are suggesting a X2 3800+? It looks very interesting for £40. What clock speed were you running your X2 3800+ at to get that 50% increase in frame rate? What HSF did you use?

The MSI board does have the AGP lock if you set the AGP bus to 67. I let nTune overclock it since I thought it would improve performance. Am I wrong?

I tend to look at Toms Hardware CPU charts to compare CPU performance, they test with FEAR but the trouble is they have two charts with wildly different results but the same title:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2006.html?modelx=33&model1=493&model2=480&chart=169
Shows 3500+ @ 43fps & X2 3800+ @ 51 fps

and

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2006.html?modelx=33&model1=493&model2=480&chart=170
Shows 3500+ @ 101fps & X2 3800+ @ 106 fps

From my experience of FEAR I think 43fps for 3500+ seems more like what I saw. So I guess if the X2 3800+ does 51fps at stock then overclocked it might reach 60-70fps.

Cheers,
Mark
 
i have FEAR so i will run a benchmark for you but i cant for the life of me remember what i got with the 2.8 opteron.

i'm running my 3800+ X2 @ 2.7 currently (still 26fps in WIC).

overclocking yourself is the best way normally....

set everything manually and then just increase FSB until it stops booting into windows... then up vcore a notch and keep upping FSB until it stops booting into windows until increasing vcore doesnt do anything then back it off a bit until it loads windows.

then if it does load windows run superpi for a quick stability test (use prime for longer...)

just make sure you put memory on a divider each time you up FSB. ideally put your memory on the lowest divider possible to take the memory out of the equation.

oh, and yes you should lock your AGP to 66!

2 quotes from google...

"locking the PCI/AGP frequency at 33/66 will give you more stability"

"yeah definitely lock AGP/PCI freq's.. too high on the pci could cause hdd corruptions etc.."

which i seem to remember from my days on AGP.
 
hmmm with a 2.7ghz X2 3800+, 2gb RAM @ stock and X1800XT @ stock i get...

@ 1280 x 960 with everything on max inc max AA/AF...

93 FPS average... low 41, highest 228.

this is before i just installed a dual core optimiser from AMD as well so i will have to reboot and retry.

i do recall this seems a hell of a lot higher than on the opty though! think i got around 50-60 on that with the same setup.

edit - ignore the above, it was a bogus result i think as i updated to 1.08 and ran it again and every test i've done since has been nowhere near. at 1280x1024 i'm getting 55fps average and at 1024x768 i'm getting 73fps average.
 
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marky1124 said:
Code: 
		Stock	Overclocked
Voltage		1.4v	1.45v
HT		x5	x4
CT		1T	1T
CPU		x11	x11
MemBus		x200	x200
CL		2-2-2-5	*2-2-2-5*
run the memory on a divider to keep them at 200mhz on the latencies if you can - requires a calcuator.
		
FSB		200	234 - try to up it more.
CL		2-2-2-5	*2-2-2-5* why did you post this again?  :confused:
AGP		67	*66*
GPU		450	588
Gmem		625	692
		
CPU		2200	2574
Temp (idle)		45'C
Temp (loaded)		62'C
Click to expand...
 
Hi helpimcrap,

I'm sorry for the confusion of listing the Cas Latency values twice. It's from my notes. The first line is how they were set in the bios at boot, the 2nd line is the result of nTune changing the values. So in this case nTune tightened them down from 3-3-3-10 to 3-3-3-4.

I'm not with my PC at the moment so I can't look. I'm not sure whether I have a 'memory divider'. I know that I do have a bios setting for memory speed and it has 200 and 166 and other lower values. Is that the setting you mean?

I have been disappointed with my memory. 234 is by far the best result I've got out of it. When I bought it Anandtech was raving about how well it overclocks, they almost got it to 300. See their results in this article. I've tried stock memory voltage and higher values and at 2-2-2-5 I can't reliably increase it beyond about 205.

Thanks for your interest,
Cheers,
Mark
 
marky1124 said:
I'm not with my PC at the moment so I can't look. I'm not sure whether I have a 'memory divider'. I know that I do have a bios setting for memory speed and it has 200 and 166 and other lower values. Is that the setting you mean?

I've tried stock memory voltage and higher values and at 2-2-2-5 I can't reliably increase it beyond about 205.
Click to expand...

thats fine... keep the memory on 2-2-2-5 at 200mhz... you could do 2.5-3-3-6 and get a bit more but 2-2-2-5 is often better on AMD machines.

and yes the memory divider is what im on about... so if you set your memory divider to 150mhz and your FSB to 200 then your memory would run at 150mhz... increase the FSB to 250mhz and your memory is running at 200mhz (because of the divider)but your CPU would be running at 250x11 = 2750mhz. does that make sense?
 
helpimcrap said:
memory divider is what im on about...
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I don't have that option. The manual only shows settings like:

  • Max Memclock (Mhz) (200/166/133/100)
  • 1T/2T Memory Timing
  • CAS# Latency (Tcl)
  • RAS# to CAS# delay (Trcd)
  • Min RAS# active Time (Tras)
  • Row Precharge Time (Trp)
  • Spread Spectrum
  • HT Frequency
  • Adjust CPU Ratio (x4 to x20)
  • Adjust CPU FSB Frequency
  • Adjust AGP Frequency
  • CPU Voltage
  • Memory Voltage
  • AGP Voltage

So the only control I think I have to reduce the memory is by running it at 166 instead of 200. From my original testing I concluded that running it at 200 & 1T with relaxed CL settings yielded better overclocked gaming performance than when I tried 166. However I've mislaid lots of my notes and so don't have all the details to hand.

Incidently I tested dropping the AGP bus to 66 from 77 and saw a 4% drop in frame rate on Tomb Raider Anniversary. I overclock the graphics card GPU core, GPU memory and AGP bus. Is that not the right approach?

Cheers,
Mark
 
Focusing on CPU performance

I'm wondering whether buying a Tuniq Tower 120 HSF will let me see an appreciable improvement in my CPU overclock? Right now I'm able to get to 2.57Ghz and I'm sat right on the edge with load temperatures of 61-62'C.

Since my next system will be Intel core 2 based then this Tuniq Tower will be useful in the next system as well as the current one.

Cheers,
Mark
 
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