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Overclocking Chapter 1

quango

Posted in Overclocking, Hardware on November 25, 2007 at 12:11 pm

Well the kit has arrived (except the 8800GT card) and I have spent a couple of days on various overclocking research and testing. Most of my hardware is fairly “safe” e.g. Q6600 cpu, so other people’s experiences in overclocking will be useful and save time.

What is frustrating is the lack of information in my ASUS manual about the different settings in the overclocking options in the BIOS. For example, what was the NB-SN HT voltage? I understand from google searches that it’s the north/southbridge link voltage, but how is it related to overclocking? I also failed to find something like a fsb-voltage-speed table, that would say “well a Q6600 at 400MHz x 9 won’t run at less than 1.xV, but shouldn’t need more than 1.yyV” - this would narrow down some of the choices we could examine.

Having searched and read some of the (occassionally conflicting) advice, there isn’t really a good guide that I’ve seen that helps diagnose why some configurations fail. For example, a failure on Prime95 after 10 minutes is a very different failure from a complete failure to even boot into the BIOS screen (which I had a lot of yesterday trying to get the FSB above 340).

In a way overclocking is a bit like jumping into a F1 racing car. You understand the steering wheel and accelerator, but there are lots of other buttons and switches - what do they all do and (more importantly) how are they related? Pressing and flicking them at random may result in a working car, but it won’t help you understand which one actually did something useful and which did not.

The other thing that is obvious is the amount of time required for overclocking. Some of the time Prime95 will fail in a couple of minutes, but to get any certainty about a configuration you really need to run it for quite a long time. Even with quick failures, it takes a few minutes for each reboot, BIOS reconfig, reboot, test cycle. Given that there are about ten different “switches” to tweak that gives a fairly large set of possible combinations.. so testing every possible combination is almost impossible. So I guess (being married with kids) that single people with plenty of spare time find it easier that I do!

Fortunately I seem to have found a nice “base” overclock at 340FSB (3.06GHz), and stable voltages to match. So far have not even touched the memory timings, just had a long morning trying to get the system stable at this 340FSB, finding out that most auto settings are inadequate. Once I’m confident with this being ok, I might experiment to see what the lower limits on all the voltages are before instability reappears.

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Here comes number eleven then..

quango

Posted in Uncategorized on November 12, 2007 at 3:17 pm

Bitten the bullet today, and placed the orders: Intel Q6600, Artic Freezer 7 fan, Asus P5NT-WS m/bd, 2×2GB OCZ memory, Samsung 226BW monitor and - last but not least a BFG 8800GT OC2.

I had been thinking about a 8800GTX but once I saw the numbers for the 8800GT it was a real no-brainer. It costs almost half the price with similar results (or better if overclocked). If I held shares in AMD (and hence in ATI) I’d be selling right now - AMD’s being trashed in the processor market and ATI in the graphics market.

I’d also hope if I were a component retailer that my 8800GTS card stocks are on sale-or-return basis - I cannot see anyone wanting the slow, more expensive, fatter model when it has the little 8800GT running circles round it. And if I’d just bought an 8800GTS I would be rather annoyed - but fortunately my timing has been lucky in that respect.

I did hanker after the Zotac 8800GT-AMP edition which is factory-overclocked at 700MHz - but it looks like availability of these is end of the month and I don’t want to wait quite that long. So I’ve gone for the next best deal I could find: a BFG 8800GT OC2, which is factory 675MHz and looks (from reviews & blogs) like it might overclock to 700MHz without a problem. We shall see.

Just have to do a lot of clearing up of stuff from my current desktop, moving files and saving passwords etc. Then Vista install and the marathon software install..

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To Spend or Not to Spend..

quango

Posted in on at 10:36 am

Is it time to splash out on a new PC? For most people my current machine would be fantastic - it’s got four raptors in a raid array, a dual-core Athlon X2 4800 and 4GB ram.

However, this is primarily a development box for Visual Studio, and even this hardware is struggling under the size of my compilations. My biggest annoyance is that my RAID controller is a PCI-X Areca card, but the motherboard (being socket 939) only has PCI slots, so the bandwidth available to the card is below what it can produce. That’s £700 worth of disks and controller not running at full potential.

The other factor is Windows XP x64 is starting to become unreliable - so it’s time to reinstall with Vista x64. Problem is I don’t want to do that and then upgrade the hardware later on - that would require another day of transferring operating systems etc.

Finally there are the games - BF2 just doesn’t seem fast enough and other players are always killing me - and I am sure that my ageing NVidia 6800GT is partly to blame (my lack of skill being the other factor).

So seeing that I can switch to an Intel Q6600 platform with an Asus P5NT-WS which has both SLI and a PCI-X slot, the temptation is there. Plus I can upgrade from dual 17″ monitors to 24″WS + 17″ secondary. Only question is do I go watercooled Q6600 and graphics? The current PC (in its excellent Lian-Li case) is fairly quiet. Hmm maybe not just yet, just go air-cooled and plan a watercooling excercise next year.

Even so, the cost of upgrading is about £900 (ex-VAT).. but it would result in an excellent system. I think I’ll dither about it a bit more..

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