Advice on Prescott OCing

ronsplooter

ronsplooter

ronsplooter

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11 Oct 2006
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28
Hi all,

I'm new to the forum and indeed overclocking as a whole so I'm looking for some advice on OCing my Prescott 3.4.

What kind of OC's are obtainable on air cooling for this chip and is it worth doing?

My specs according to CPU Z are:
skt 775 Prescott 3.4 with 2mb L2 cache
GigaByte GA-8I915PM-FS mobo (don't know if this is up to much as its a Fujitsu Siemens out of the box one)
2Gb PC3200 RAM

I just bought a 7900GTO (running at 700/800 :) )from overclockers but I get the feeling that my CPU is holding it back ad wondered what your guys thoughts are?

Apologies if I've missed anything out but this is my first post so be gentle.

Thanks
 
for gods sake...

this nonsense about prescotts being TOO hot is utter rubbish.. they are hotter than A64s/C2Ds etc but that has to be taken along with the fact that they are designed to withstand more heat.

It's not comparing like with like, if its engineered to run hotter than most then why is it a problem if it does just that?

I had a P4 570J at something like 4.4ghz, they don't even start to think about throttling before 80c which is a good 20c above your average a64 etc.

So idle temps in the 60s and load of early/mid 70s are totally normal and acceptable for these chips. Everything needs to be kept in perspective, he doesn't need some bananas cooling solution to keep it under 40c to clock it.

Plus the guy is new so why not do the sensible thing and suggest he gets a freezer 7 pro or something like that and clock the nuts off his chip (which it will, way past 4ghz if its a 6 series) and stop making nonsense comments about pies.

My suggestion would be get a half decent cooler (but no need to go nuts on ninjas/towers etc), stick your ram on a divider (sure its pc3200??? ddr2 is reasonably unusual at that speed) then get cracking. I'm guessing you have a p4 640 and they clock like crazy :)
 
ronsplooter said:
What kind of OC's are obtainable on air cooling for this chip and is it worth doing?
Click to expand...

Normally 4GHz+ should easily be possible if you have CPU voltage adjustment, 3.8GHz if you don't. And of course it's worth doing. It's a free performance upgrade. However - you are running the Intel 915 chipset which is infamously bad for overclocking as the PCi and PCIe busses are linked to the CPU FSB so it will almost certainly stop booting somewhere between FSBs of 217 and 230. However, you are incredibly lucky as you have a multiplier of 17! So every extra 1 FSB you get is an extra 17MHz so if it does carp out at 215 FSB you will still be doing 3.655GHz and if you get to 230 then you'll be running almost 4GHz anyway. Give it a go, you've nothing to lose.

ronsplooter said:
I just bought a 7900GTO (running at 700/800 :) )from overclockers but I get the feeling that my CPU is holding it back ad wondered what your guys thoughts are?
Click to expand...

Pretty much anything short of an overclocked E6600 is going to hold up a 7900GTO so don't worry about that. It's a brilliant card will stand several upgrades.

I would definitely support Matt100's recommendation of the AC Freezer Pro 7 (on special offer at OcUK this week) - it's a truly superb cooler for £15. I would honestly doubt you'll get much more than 4GHz out of that chip anyway, but if you feel the need of a motherboard upgrade - look for at least a 945P based board like the Abit AL-8 or if it has to be mATX then the Abit LG-81 is the best Intel overclocking mATX board ever made. Both these boards come up regularly second hand at between £20 and £50 depending on condition so you should be able to get a cheap upgrade.
 
Cheers for the advice guys.

I've been looking at the Freezer 7 Pro already so will probably order one now based on your recomendations.

I'll let you know how i get on.

Thanks
 
Plus he has a 650 version which is quite a bit cooler than the 5xx series :p You should see idle temps with an AC7 of about 39-45 and load of no more than 60C at 4ghz (if it gets there)
 
Should do at least 4.2 ghz on a freezer, i have a 3 ghz 630 @ 4.1, wich is 50C under stress, i can oc more but i dont need the speed, its fast enough.

fini said:
Attach a pie to a stick, attach stick to Prescott so that it hangs out in front of him. Done.

fini
Click to expand...

The scotts arent that bad, a scott @ 4 ghz is just as fast as a a64 @ 2.6 ghz.
If you compare a 3 ghz scott & a a64 3000+ venice @ stock theyll both have same performance approximatly, i found my cpu perform a lot better than a stock 3500+ in all games. Its when the a64's get overclocked, then they become a lot better.
 
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