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Ordered the x2 3800+ today...What to expect?

OzZie

OzZie

OzZie

Soldato
Joined
9 Jul 2004
Posts
4,522
Location
Nottingham
This morning i treated myself to the X2 3800+ as an upgrade for my old 939 system. At the moment my system is pretty much maxed out (2gb ram limited, x1950 pro 512mb, and now x2) and so this was the last upgrade i could justify before i will do a proper upgrade in about a years time.

My current 3700+ is at 2.6ghz stable, won't go much higher. For most games it's fine, but could be better. With most games now being at least dual core, i thought that this would be a decent upgrade as long as i can get it back up to around 2.6ghz or so. I also do quite a lot of multitasking such as audio editing etc, which often takes its time.

Not expecting virtually any difference just in windows, but hopefully would like to see a big increase in dual core enabled games (FSX, Kyne + Lynch, UT3) etc as these are what struggle the most.

Good buy? :)
 
I went from an 3200+ to an X2 3800+ and my computer is a lot snappier, especially when doing more than one thing. Not tried any games yet as I have still to upgrade from my 6800GS :)
 
Yep a great buy.

I went from a 3000+ to an Opteron 180 (x2 4800+) and either at stock of 2.4ghz or OC to 2.6ghz it performs much smoother than my 3000+ at 2.7ghz

I would imagen you should get 2.5ghz out of that cpu. maybe at stock volts too from what I hear people say online. but its all a bit about luck tbh eh...
 
Thanks for the replies fellas. :)

Damn citylink came too early this morning and i missed em. :rolleyes:

Got about a 10 mile drive to Ikea tonight. :o

Will post back on overclocking if i get a chance to. :)
 
toledo3800x22700mhzxp12ss3.jpg


I bought about five of those X2 3800+ chips this year, all really good and I had no trouble hitting 2600MHz with low 1.3vCore, the best one hit 2700MHz which was sweet but I couldn't get any of mine full 24 hour prime stable at 2800MHz.

I did have an issue with memory for a while but this went away when I changed the vCore from 1.30v to 1.35v. I can only think it was something to do with the onboard memory controller needing a bit more juice even though the actual cpu didn't (at least with looser timings it didn't).
 
Cheers wayne.

Installed earlier on and was up and running no problems. Tested out nero 7 encoding a movie on full priority and browsing windows but it was still very slow :(

Once overclocked and a clean format, i think it should be a lot better. Are there any lists of games and applications that make use of dual core?

Thanks. :)
 
OzZie said:
Once overclocked and a clean format, i think it should be a lot better
Click to expand...
For sure! :)

Funny thing, you can 'really' notice the difference in speed when you overclock these chips? I mean two cores running at 2000MHz is no slouch but once you hit above 2400MHz they start to shine, 2600MHz x2 is so nippy in general windows use. I've got quite a few machines I built 'out there' at the moment either using mono-core Opterons @ 2600MHz or dual-core X2's running also at 2600MHz and everyone is happy.

Set your vCore to 1.35v in BIOS and start from there, you will probably get most of the overclock out the chip by 1.40vCore, anything higher only produced very small gains for me personally but YMMV.

Yeah so 1.35vCore and crank her up, make sure to keep running the Prime Large-In place FFTs tests (memory) as I found that picked up errors in the onboard memory controller whereas I was first using the Small FFTs test (CPU) and that passed with flying colours (no errror).
 
OzZie said:
Installed earlier on and was up and running no problems. Tested out nero 7 encoding a movie on full priority and browsing windows but it was still very slow :(
Click to expand...

Don't run processes on full priority if you want any other application to be even remotely responsive. Setting the process priority to low won't be any slower than high priority if there aren't many other processes running; setting it to high priority just stops the other processes getting a look in, resulting in the unresponsiveness you're experiencing.
 
Phil99 said:
Don't run processes on full priority if you want any other application to be even remotely responsive. Setting the process priority to low won't be any slower than high priority if there aren't many other processes running; setting it to high priority just stops the other processes getting a look in, resulting in the unresponsiveness you're experiencing.
Click to expand...

Bingo!
 
Ah right.

What also didnt help matters was the fact that windows was only recognising one of the cores anyway. A format has fixed this, but i'll still bear in mind not setting applications to high priority. :)

At 2.6ghz stable at the moment. So pleased for the priced. :)
 
OzZie said:
At 2.6ghz stable at the moment. So pleased for the priced. :)
Click to expand...
Nice one!

obviously do what you feel is best but I would say give it a good stability test where you are now, then when u are triple sure its stable maybe 2700MHz is your next stop.

What vCore are you on? and how are your idle/load temps?
 
OzZie said:
What also didnt help matters was the fact that windows was only recognising one of the cores anyway.
Click to expand...

Installing Windows on a Single core CPU and then adding a dual core CPU often does that. Its perfectly normal. HT CPUs do *** same thing... If you disable HT and then enable it later on, it might not show up.

I read sometime ago that there was a patch for this, or a reg hack or something but as I F&R every 2 minutes anyway, I didnt think to keep the info?

OzZie said:
but i'll still bear in mind not setting applications to high priority. :)
Click to expand...

Do that... Its the most useless thing you can adjust.
 
ive got an x2 3800 toledo - what cores yours got btw? and did you notice the stepping code on the ihs?

2003605404828539200_rs.jpg


this one can do 2750MHz stable on 1.4v (cpu-z) 1.375v (bios) and 3.06GHz 1.55v benchmarking and upto 3217MHz - 1.7v for suicide - see sig.

really nice chips for the money, a good upgrade from a single core athlon 64.
 
Big.Wayne said:
that sounds good. How stable is stable though? did u do any prime screenies? and what cooling are you using?
Click to expand...

its rock solid stable mate, i used to run folding@home 24/7 on it on both cores, but stopped because I dont want to run it maxed out constantly.

all I know is it plays games, and does what I want without crashing now and thats good enough IMO.

I dont run it full load on both cores now due to shoddy cooling:
artic cooling freezer 64 pro with 80mm fan - 120mm fan snapped off so i put an 80mm fan on, no case fans.
 
Had mine on 2.8ghz for ages. No problems. Orthos went to 90c on one of the cores at one point but i wasnt really bothered as i could play supreme commander for hours with no problems.

Thing is i dont have a high voltage going through it, it would boot at 3.1ghz and was reasonably stable at 3ghz but would crash in orthos and it crashed to desktop when i played C&C3 for a while if i remember rightly

10x280 is a nice round figure too
 
Temps are 36 deg idle when starting up. After say UT3 it hovers at around 40-41 deg. When gaming, the peak was 67deg which i think is really good.
Will try running all of the tests later on this evening to make sure it is 100% stable.

Oh, UT3 plays really well now. Before, i couldnt run it at 1024 with medium-low details above 25-30fps, and it stuttered real bad. Now i have it at 1280 with medium - high settings and it runs at almost constant 50fps and occassionaly drops to around 35 when looking at vast open scenery. Game fps has virtually doubled for £35. :)
 
Hopefully you'll get better results with your new chip Big.Wayne, I know the 07xx Optys are clocking well on lowish volts so lets hope yours does too!
 
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