E4300 that requires high voltages to 3GHz upgrade?

Kaiju · 17 Apr 2008 at 18:25

My E4300 has been a good sport over the last year, but i'm now in the mood of a change due to the high voltages I need to make 3GHz.

3GHz (334x9) needs 1.35v + .1v offset (1.45v) to be stable.
3.15GHz (350x9) needs 1.425v + .1v offset (1.525v) to be stable.

I've spent countless hours with p95, OCCT, etc and trying lower multiples with different bus speeds, but the amount of FSB holes i've found and not being able to run the bus in sync with the RAM 800DDR (400x9,7 & 6 won't boot) has led me to find greener pastures, not that sync/async really matters.

So, the E2160 looks like a good overclocker and damn cheap. What are your suggestions?

I don't program or edit movies, so the cache is irrelevant to me.

steve258 · 17 Apr 2008 at 18:29

yeah E4300 is generally a very poor clocker, mine needed 1.53V to be stable at 3.1Ghz.

However moving to E2160 is going to be a downgrade and clocks higher than 3.15Ghz is not guaranteed even though all E2160 should be the newer M0 revision. You are not likely to notice any difference bear in mind that because of 1Mb less cache it needs to be about 100Mhz faster to be on par with E4300.

If in doubt look at the benchmark thread in my sig to get an idea of the performance you'll be getting/losing.

Kaiju · 17 Apr 2008 at 18:39

steve258 said:
If in doubt look at the benchmark thread in my sig to get an idea of the performance you'll be getting/losing.

Woah, excellent review on the E4300/2160 comparison. Really good work indeed!

So, you think I should stick with the E4300? As I'm back with the Intel stock HSF, I need to shove a huge fan to the open side of my case @ 1.45v/3GHz. Maybe my next purchase should be a Tuniq Tower or Zalman 9700NT. I had a SI-120 that cooled the chip nicely, but I moved to Hong Kong and forgot to take it with me. Bah!

So yeah, is there really a substantial upgrade to a 3GHz Dual core at the moment bar Quad cores, which i'm really not fussed about anyway as a gamer, lack of movie editing, etc.

steve258 · 17 Apr 2008 at 18:54

An aftermarket cooler is always a good idea if you overclock regardless of the CPU you are using so I'd get one anyway.

If upgrading then really you're looking at the Q6600 or E8200/8400 for it to be worthwhile. If you game a lot then E8200/8400 would be a better choice for now but then the Q6600 quad is just £20 more than the E8200. The quad handles games very well too plus as a bonus you get better performance in encoding/multitasking.