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E1200 Celeron Overclocking

Tooks

Tooks

Tooks

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Joined
24 Oct 2005
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Lincolnshire
I've had a P3 1Ghz Coppermine machine for downloading tasks for a while now, and decided it was a bit long in the tooth. I had 2GB of DDR2 spare, so purchased a Celeron Dual Core E1200 CPU along with a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H 630i based motherboard to bring it into the 21st century. No big budget, so pretty cheap too!

I haven't seen many, if any, overclocking results with these E1200 CPU's so thought I'd make a thread to see how others are getting on.

I've got mine to 2.7Ghz so far, but struggling to get any further, as the graphics go west at the windows boot up screen. I've tried volts up to 1.5v but it doesn't seem to make any difference. I'm limited by the options in the bios too, no FSB/chipset voltage adjustments or graphics tweaks.

Having said that, 2.7 is 1.1Ghz over its stock frequency, so not too bad (I guess we've been spoilt by the E2XXX chips!), and load temps are low to mid 50's with the stock intel cooler. The cooler is one of the new low profile units the same as that packed with my E8400, and they do seem to run a lot quieter than the old ones.

I'll post some Orthos/CPU-Z pics when I've taken it as far as I can, but so far 1M Super PI is 29s, and the 3dmark06 score with the onboard 7100 GPU is 403! :p For reference my 1Ghz coppermine/1GB SDRAM with a PCI FX5200 scored 2m 54s 1M Super PI and 83 in 3dmark06. :D

Anybody else messing with one of these at the moment?

Any requests for benchies?
 
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Yeah, I suspect so. It is a bargain basement rock bottom budget board after all!!

It's only got single channel memory capability and voltage options, as I said, are pretty limited, but it was this or a G31 based board. I went for this N630i as it had better onboard audio including a HDMI connector and one of the other duties of this machine will be digital tv recording, something the P3 couldn't manage. Oh, and it was cheap!

I only really needed to be able to hit 2Ghz for the TV tuner software, so it's easily achieved that, so job done I guess.
 
Integrated GFX really limit your overclock, as you basically overclock the graphics card as you overclock the motherboard. If you've got an old gfx card lying around, stick that in and disable the onboard gfx - not only will the performance be better, but it should remove your current limit :)
 
I've got a spare GPU knocking about, so I'll give that a go and see what happens. Hadn't realised that onboard GPU's limited things in such a way. A long time since I've had one actually!
 
Ive got this motherboard and its fine - can get 3ghz+ no problem. For the price the gigabyte is a top buy. Why waste another £50 to get 200mhz more? Thats like 1.5 seconds off on superPi
 
Celeron

*Shudders*

They were terrible with 512k cache on just one core, I can't begin to imagine what they are like with 2 cores and 512k cache. Even a 2xxx series for £10-£20 more would be a worthy upgrade, especially if the memory performance is lacking.
 
Stonedofmoo said:
Celeron

*Shudders*

They were terrible with 512k cache on just one core, I can't begin to imagine what they are like with 2 cores and 512k cache. Even a 2xxx series for £10-£20 more would be a worthy upgrade, especially if the memory performance is lacking.
Click to expand...

I don't know, for real bargain pc's I cant see how you can go wrong with one of these. Even a 2.7Ghz OC would be plenty for your average home media PC.
 
The performance from the E1200 seems perfectly acceptable in my mind for most people who are just going to be running XP/Vista and using their PC primarily for internet browsing and looking a photos.
 
I should point out that it's the motherboard that is imposing the single channel RAM issue, although even that doesn't seem to be noticeable in windows and the browsing/tv recording/downloading I'll be using it for.

It's obviously not the fastest CPU on earth, no way, but it's very cheap and seems to have overclock potential. That 2.7ghz is on the stock 1.325v by the way.
 
Reviews of this chip show that the cache is the problem and the extra 10 quid for a 2xxx

series chip make this celeron redundant unless its much cheaper.

Its a shame really as I was going to get one to see me until Q9450 and overclock it

within and inch of its life,
 
Compared to the equivelent x2 3600+ then i think it looks good, apart from the 3600+ having a slightly quicker clock speed i reckon the dual core celeron comes out on top
 
Ah I see, the 10x multi on that chip will help a bit.

I've got a pci-e graphics card to slot in later on, so I'll see if ditching reliance on the onboard graphics helps me clock this E1200 to 3Ghz+.
 
Yep, tried up to 1.55v!

I've just fitted an 8500GT PCIE card, and disabled the onboard graphics, and still I get as far as the windows xp splash screen before it hangs. That's at 2.8Ghz. Anything less than that and it's fine.

So, that's 350FSB x 8 multi, and I get the same problems even at 350FSB x 6 multi, so I suspect it's the board that's limiting things now. The FSB limit for me seems to be 345.

With your E2180 at 3Ghz, I presume that's with a 300FSB?

Never mind, I'm happy with 2.7Ghz. It's not my main PC, and it's nippy enough at that clock speed and records and plays back the digital tv stuff it was setup for just fine.

It was a strict budget upgrade, max £75, so I don't think I'd have got much more for the money to be honest, at least brand new anyway.

The 8500GT is my brothers, so I'd best drop that back off to him tomorrow! :)
 
Yeah 300 FSB. I can get up to 320 FSB but have to put far too many volts thru it and I only got Stock Heatsink. To be honest because I run my HTPC 24/7 I drop down to 2.8gig so I can run stock volts without any fear of the PC over heating while Im out etc. I dont really see any performace loss.
 
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