What can I expect roughly?

shireknight

shireknight

shireknight

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Joined
19 Jun 2008
Posts
99
My system :-

CPU Intel Pentium 4 550J (3.4 GHz)
Memory 2048 MB DDR RAM - (4x 512 MB - PC3200)
Motherboard MS 7046
Video / Graphics Card ATI 4850
PSU 600w

So far my 4850 has reached a maximum temperature of 81C so clearly it is not being used to it's full potential (as predicted by folks on this board) and after reading a few of the overclocking threads I would guess that my PC is a perfect candidate for some overclocking.

Can anyone please give me an idea of what sort of speeds I might be able to achieve at minimum risk of killing my PC -I suspect 3.6 would be easily achievable but do you think I could get more?

What is the approx ratio of the increase in CPU speed to FPS gain in my games ie if I increase my CPU to a 3.6 will my FPS increase by 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 fps?

Also I have found where in the bios settings the FSB is mentioned but those options are greyed out and cannot be changed is this because I need special software to break into the bios settings?

Thanks in advance for your advice guys :)
 
You can overclock as much as you like but that PC will always bottleneck a 4850 by a massive amount.

£125~ (or less 2nd hand) on an E2180 (which you can have fun OC'ing), P35 board and 2GB of DDR2 is the way forward.
 
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shireknight said:
My system :-

CPU Intel Pentium 4 550J (3.4 GHz)
Memory 2048 MB DDR RAM - (4x 512 MB - PC3200)
Motherboard MS 7046
Video / Graphics Card ATI 4850
PSU 600w

So far my 4850 has reached a maximum temperature of 81C so clearly it is not being used to it's full potential (as predicted by folks on this board) and after reading a few of the overclocking threads I would guess that my PC is a perfect candidate for some overclocking.

Can anyone please give me an idea of what sort of speeds I might be able to achieve at minimum risk of killing my PC -I suspect 3.6 would be easily achievable but do you think I could get more?

What is the approx ratio of the increase in CPU speed to FPS gain in my games ie if I increase my CPU to a 3.6 will my FPS increase by 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 fps?

Also I have found where in the bios settings the FSB is mentioned but those options are greyed out and cannot be changed is this because I need special software to break into the bios settings?

Thanks in advance for your advice guys :)
Click to expand...

i wouldnt be able to live with 81 degrees, the max i will take would be 70, i dont feel right about telling you to overclock your graphics card, id say no.

with that CPU the difference in frames if you purchase a 8200-8500 or a Q6600/Q9450 would be nearly double, but main impact will be minimum frames per second which will increase.

overclocking from 3.4 to 3.6 would probably be a 1-2FPS increase.


AbsenceJam said:
You can overclock as much as you like but that PC will always bottleneck a 4850 by a massive amount.

£125~ (or less 2nd hand) on an E2180 (which you can have fun OC'ing), P35 board and 2GB of DDR2 is the way forward.
Click to expand...

CPU is the limiting factor but i wouldnt say massive, and it does depend entirely on the game/settings.

125 for the mobo/ram/cpu sounds like a good idea as the system is about time for an upgrade.
 
Ok I finally went ahead and ordered a new PC, here are the stats:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (2 x 3.16 GHZ) 1333FSB - 6 MB
Corsair XMS2 4GB DDR2 PC-6400 800 MHZ (2 x 2 GB 800)
ASUS SKT-775 P5K S/L 1333FSB
OCZ Stealth Xstream 600 psu
Sapphire HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 PCI-E
500 GB SATA HDD UDMA 300 7200 16MB
Thermal Take Blue ORB II fan
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-BIT

Potentially what Ghz could I overclock this to please, without any additional cooling above what I already have?
 
I have 4 sticks of that same RAM and it really only runs at it's rated speed of 800MHz. That will be your limiting factor I think - so 3.8GHz is probably about as far as you'll go. The good news is that 400x9.5 seems to be achieveable on very low CPU voltages - 1.2V or so, which makes the CPU very cool running and therefore you should get a very quiet system.

If you haven't opened the packaging, then I'd be tempted to return the RAM for 4Gb of PC8000 or even PC8500 RAM, which would almost certainly allow 4GHz+.
 
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