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Can anyone advise on OCing a Pentium Dual Core?

F

finners

Member
I have been looking at building a Pentium D 960 based dual core system for CAD/CAE, heavy number crunching and some to moderate gaming. Having researched its looks like waiting for Conroe might be a good idea. As I need a system pretty much straight away I have decided to get a cheaper CPU and mobo and just replace these with Conroe and a Conroe mobo when they arrive. Although I don't wish to have to upgrade anything else but just the chip and motherboard at the end of the summer.

I am interested in OCing the CPU, but as I have never attempted to OC before, I would like to keep the risk of toasting the machine at a minimum. I was interested in OCing a pentium D930 or 940 up 0.2 Ghz.

Is this easy/possible? Do I need expensive RAM or will Value RAM be adequate?

Hope you can answer some of my questions😉

Thanks
 
Well, there's a lot to answer there, i'm not going to try to cover everything you need to know but i'll do some of it.

Overclocking isn't that hard, but it does require patience to do it well. A little 200mhz boost is very easy to do, check out this writeup http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores_uk/ it's a rather poor writeup in places but it does cover how to overclock pentium Ds rather well.

Generally more expensive RAM is better, i suspect that intel will still be bandwidth limmited with conroe, as such the faster the RAM the better (conroe will be DDR2 800 compliant i belive). I do not know if it's a cost efficent upgrade, or where the sweet spot is. Irrespective of that a small overclock is easy enough to manage.
 
Thank you Bobthelost.

Of course I do not expect anybody to post telling me how to OC step by step here but links are what i'm after.

As long as I know that its quite safe to OC a PD 930 with air cooling sub 4Ghz then I will go ahead and buy my system. I stress that I dont want any water cooling. I will however buy an improved CPU heatsink & fan over the stock unit supplied by Intel. So investing in some fast good quality RAM is also important.

Cheers
 
Yeah that's about right. Overclocking a chip will decrease it's lifespan, but if you don't overvolt then it's negligable as long as your temperatures are reasonable, and as long as you don't go to silly voltages the decrease in lifespan won't be a problem. Hell if you're planning on buying a new CPU soon then you can push it as far and as hard as you like.
 
By "decreasing its lifespan" do you mean that one day the CPU will just clap out or will the performance graudually deteriorate?

And also just to clear up; does OCing risk only the CPU? I dont want any other components being fried as I need to keep them when upgrading to Conroe!!

Anybody have any suggestions on a good motherboard and RAM that will handle possible an extra 400Mhz OC with this chip?

Thanks
 
The chip could just curl up and die, or it could stop being stable at the overclock setting. The former is the more likely way for it to fail. However remember that CPUs are designed for somewhere around 10 years of use, cutting it down to 4 is a massive reduction in lifespan but if you're only planning on using the chip for two years then it's hardly a problem.

Overclocking does not damage any other parts as far as i know (well it can screw up the files on your HD, so back up any and all important data).
 
Step 1: Buy AMD
Step 2: Buy DFI Motherboard.
Step 3: Read guides at DFI-Street.com

Overclocking solved. 🙂

Oh... and get a really good power supply and heatsink.
 
You could do it with value ram since you can use a memory divider to support lower memory speeds but having faster ram gives you more headroom and just makes things easier. It all depends on your budget I guess.

You could get a scythe ninja for $39 at newegg and some pqi ddr-667 for $105 after rebate. The Asus p5ld2 is a nice lower cost board.

Or you could get a more expensive opteron. That would give you better performance but at a higher price.

If you can wait, conroe is supposed to be pretty nice.
 
I dont wanna go AMD because i want to use my ddr2 ram for upgrading to Conroe.

Gettin a little worried hearing that OCing can corrupt HDD files.
There must be warning signs for this and it rarely happens yeah???!!!
 
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