Is overclocking worth it? for my rig, details inside, please advise. :)

Juxax

Juxax

Juxax

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1 Dec 2006
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Firstly, my rig:

I'm using a Athlon 64 X2 3800 @ 2.0Ghz (stock) 2GB DDR RAM, 250GB SATA II, BFG Geforce 8800 GTS 640, 19" Widescreen, 1440x900, 75Hz. And I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate, just recently installed, was using XP.

Is overclocking a processor worth the hassle/chance you could burn it out? purely from a performance gain point of view. I know overclocking is a hobby for quite a lot of you, therefore I am hoping your knowledge will be exstensive in how much performance you'll get from it, beacause I imagine the first thing that comes after a stable clock speed would be a benchmark.

I've read somewhere that it's possible to take a 3800 X2 to 2.65, however I don't know if there would be any restrictions as far as the motherboard goes. I've read somewhere that the ASrock939-Dual SATA II has a voltage limit, and a frequency limit of 2.74, but I saw that someone had managed to take a proscessor, same as mine, to 2.5Ghz on that board.

I don't know much about my system, but I know I don't wanna be using my pc then all of a sudden my prosc melts from heavy usage, at full load both cores run about 50, according to core temp, and from what I've heard if I had the arctic cooler it'd run about 15-18 less. So if I overclock I'd wanna stay at stock voltage, and overclock purely to gain some extra performance.

I get bottlenecked quite a bit, I mean bioshock runs smoothly, average at 30 FPS. with full settings and DX10 maxxed. When I used XP it ran better, but no DX10. Medal of Honor Airborne ran pretty bad on XP, then I forced on all settings on GPU at nvidia control panel, and it ran smoother, on Vista it runs slightly worse...

So, with Crysis on the horizon, and I get the feeling my cpu let me down by that little bit on XP, and marginally more with Vista. I feel a performance increase is needed for Extra Stability. My card can easily max theese games, but my Prosc struggles.

So, I ask you, would the performance gain, overclocking from 2.0Ghz, to 2.5 make a reasonable, and noticable increase in performance to actually warrant halving the life of my CPU? I mean, would a 3800 clocked at 2.5Ghz, match the performance of a Proscessor running at 2.5 Stock?

I don't know how overclocking works, performance wise, I've read faqs, both here and on toms hardware. And my uncle knows what he's doing, but y'know I just wanna get some advice/opinions from people who've done it.
 
The question you should really be asking yourself is do you honestly believe you will be using your processor in 20 years time? If halving it to 10years worries you then maybe overclocking isn't for you. Your CPU, given the proper precautions, will not just 'meltdown'. Every cpu degrades over time and overclocking will speed up that degradation but not to such a point where you will have a dead cpu after a few years of overclocking unless you are pumping extreme voltage through it or its constantly overheating.

You will see an advantage in overclocking - how much depends on what other components you have and what software you intend on basing this judgement.
 
A quick reply to allay some of your fears.

As a start, and keeping the risk levels right down, you should be able to achieve a decent 20% overclock without doing more than tweaking up the FSB, and possibly increasing vCore by 0.1 or 0.2 volts. Run Orthos overnight and you are set.

A 20% overclock will give your machine a lovely little boost for the likes of Crysis.

50C at load is nothing - no fear of burn out. Start getting worried at 70C
 
Hobby ?!?! 3 things i do when i get in from work.

Cup of Tea
Roll a Cig
Bump up the FSB on my games machine and start testing.

What you might find is that u'll need to loosen the memory timings in order to get that AMD to clock high. and some extra volts, i would start off just by sticking the FSB up by 10 Mhz, then running Prime95 ( or what ever u wanna use to stress both cores )

But watch ** temps, As i'm sure a lot of ppl here will tell you....
Volts don't do tooo much damage, but heat is the real killer.

IS it justed used for games ?? or do u use it a lot like 24/7.....

Just depends on what u wanna use it for.... to how far u push it
 
I use my pc quite frequently, but I don't leave it on when I'm not using it. I just play games really, surf the net, download midget porn, etc.

I think I can take it to 2.5Ghz on stock voltages, just by upping the frequency in the BIOS, but I read an article stating that my motherboard has some limits. I don't wanna get into hardcore overclocking, or messing with voltages, just as high as I can go on stock voltage without causing instability, how high that is I don't know, but i've read some articles saying 2.6 is max for my prosc, but 2.5 might be the max for my mobo.

And in the reviews section of OcUK for my processor, someone said he managed to overclock it at 2.5. So I think I'm gunna go for that, see how it goes. I got core temp, atm my GPU idles at about 66c, prosc 41-42. So it's fairly cool in there, but my case blows. So I wanna get a Arctic Cooler Freezer 64 pro.

My full system also includes:
60G IDE HDD.
Akasa Paxpower 500W PSU.
Akasa Extractor Fan (below GPU)
Front Fan in case.
 
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yer i said " iI just want some extra juice " when i first started.
Bought a new case, then some extra fans, then a new graphics card, then before i new it, i had just spend 200 quid on a watercooling kit and a second card for SLi

lol

Well let us know what kinda speeds u get out of stock voltages. Have you thought about overclocking the graphics card aswell ? might help smooth things out.....
 
If anything my speed is slow due to bottlenecking, increasing gpu clock would just add to the bottleneck.

thing is, a mate of mine had offered to swap his 40" HDTV, PS3, 5 Games, 2 Controllers for my pc. I might do it, cuz I know however much I spend overclocking I'm not gunna be able to play theese new games the way I want to, and I cbf with watercooling ********. too much hassle, for someone who doesn't know how to put a stock hsk on a cpu :P
 
Juxax said:
If anything my speed is slow due to bottlenecking, increasing gpu clock would just add to the bottleneck.

thing is, a mate of mine had offered to swap his 40" HDTV, PS3, 5 Games, 2 Controllers for my pc. I might do it, cuz I know however much I spend overclocking I'm not gunna be able to play theese new games the way I want to, and I cbf with watercooling ********. too much hassle, for someone who doesn't know how to put a stock hsk on a cpu :P
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Then do a simple 20-25% overclock - that will take you to 2.4-2.5 Ghz. Well worth an evening's investment, plus a night's stability run. If you get a performance boost, then great, if not, and it sounds like you're not interested in doing anything more, then do the swap!
 
that sounds like a deal, not sure if i could part with mine, it's my hobbey now, but there my be some one who pulls me away from this, as she makes very good tea ;)
 
Yeah, I'll give it a bash. And run prime 95 for 1-2 hours and check for stability.

Do you _have_ to go into the BIOS to overclock CPU frequency, or can u do it with a program followed by a restart.
 
Juxax said:
Do you _have_ to go into the BIOS to overclock CPU frequency, or can u do it with a program followed by a restart.
Click to expand...

Some mobos come with a program to change the FSB, but I would keep it simple and do it via BIOS - dead simple. Remember to go up in 10 Mhz steps, not one hit. Can't remember the multiplier for your chip, but say it is 10, and you are starting at 200Mhz, then I would recommend:

Tweak to 210 Mhz - restart - run Orthos/Prime95 for 30 mins - if OK - restart
Tweak to 220 Mhz - restart - run Orthos/Prime95 for 30 mins - if OK - restart
Tweak to 230 Mhz - restart - run Orthos/Prime95 for 30 mins - if OK - restart
Tweak to 240 Mhz - restart - run Orthos/Prime95 for 30 mins - if OK - restart

If you want to go further start tweaking in 5 Mhz steps until it falls over, then tweak back to the last stable setting.

Then run Orthos overnight. If it's still green - your set.
 
thanks buddy. 1 more thing, if I sleep, and sometime during the night it turns red, isn't that like, burn out imenant? or does it just stop itself, shut down the pc or something
 
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when it goes red it just means that the underlying app (prime) has received an unexpected result (miscalculation) and halts. Nothing will burn.. hopefully. Also turn your speakers off as when it alarms it makes an audible noise... I can't remeber if this is via the system speaker or the audio line out
 
Juxax said:
thanks buddy. 1 more thing, if I sleep, and sometime during the night it turns red, isn't that like, burn out imenant? or does it just stop itself, shut down the pc or something
Click to expand...

It just means your system is unstable, that's all, the processes that were stressing your cpu have now stopped so there is no chance it will overheat/melt. You might find the application crashes, or windows freezes, sometimes your PC may even reboot - all quite normal.

As needmorstuff says, if you have a little speaker attached to the motherboard you may get some nasty beeps, might be worth unplugging if you go to sleep :)

If you are overclocking, there is a risk you may corrupt the data on your hard drive so make sure any valuable stuff is backed up. Not common but a possibility.
 
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