E4500 in hand... want to OC it.

[Homerboy]

I have a E4500 in hand (M0) and I want to OC it.
I haven't picked a MB or a memory yet, and I would like to stay on the cheap side.
Suggestions?

 

[MarcVenice]

Gigabyte DS3L or abit ip35-e will both allow good overclocks, being able to reach 400fsb. Any ddr2 800mhz ram will do, and since it's cheap, I'd get 2x2 gb for 65-95$ at newegg.com AR, or some gskill for 95$ without rebates. Perhaps throw in a arctic freezer 7 pro, but on stock cooling you will get quite far too.

 

[Jhatfie]

Gigabyte DS3L is a good choice which I have used in two builds so far, for the same price I prefer the MSI Neo2-FR, which has overclocked the CPU better for me and has allowed for better memory overclocks as well. Freezer 7 Pro is a great cheap cooler, the CoolerMaster Hyper TX2 is not quite as good, but much better than the stock cooler and you can find them for like $10-15 if you look around.

Depending on how much you want to spend and how much memory you need, I have been very impressed with my recent Mushkin memory. 2x1GB of 4-4-4-12 for $44 after rebate at newegg and mine do about 1100mhz at 2.1v with good timings.

 

[DSF]

How far are you looking to push it? It will do 2.93GHz without any trouble on a basic P35 board with run-of-the-mill RAM.

Edit: If 2.93GHz sounds like an odd number, it's simply the resulting clock speed when you raise the frontside bus from 200MHz to 266MHz.

 

[Homerboy]

Originally posted by: DSF
How far are you looking to push it? It will do 2.93GHz without any trouble on a basic P35 board with run-of-the-mill RAM.

Edit: If 2.93GHz sounds like an odd number, it's simply the resulting clock speed when you raise the frontside bus from 200MHz to 266MHz.

push it as far as it will go

Let me ask though, will I see a big difference between that chip and my currenty OPty165 OC'ed to 2.65?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Homerboy
push it as far as it will go

Let me ask though, will I see a big difference between that chip and my currenty OPty165 OC'ed to 2.65?

You should still see a significant difference in CPU-heavy tasks.

 

[nerp]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: Homerboy
push it as far as it will go

Let me ask though, will I see a big difference between that chip and my currenty OPty165 OC'ed to 2.65?

You should still see a significant difference in CPU-heavy tasks.

Yeah expect some time to be shaved off an encode or maybe a few FPS in your FPS meter in a game. But for normal day to day use you might be hard pressed to see even the slightest bit of difference. Upgrading and building new machines is really fun but there's always the risk of being dissapointed that the performance improvement will be extremly minor for day-to-day tasks if you upgrade rapidly between generations.

I have a friend that replaced a decent X2 setup with a brand new quad intel box. He spent some serious dough on a new board, DDR2 sticks, new HD, case, PSU, 8800GTX and he just told me the other day that he is pissed that he can't tell if the new rig is any faster than the old. I told him to pick up Crysis, but all he plays is CS:S and TF2 and his previous box was giving him 100+ FPS with high settings already. Unfortunatley, a lot of people are used to the olden days when replacing a P2 300 with a P3 800 was just a generation jump but made even windows amazingly faster. Today, replacing a dual with a quad, even from AMD to intel, won't make windows itself dramatically faster. My friend is forced to run synthetic benchmarks and hope for more heavy-resource games to come out to exploit his investment. That's not fun.

It IS a great box and i'm sure if he was doing media encoding or other cpu-heavy tasks, he'd be wanting to throw a party. but he's just a casual user who reads tech forums and was led to beleive that a new intel quad box would blow his mind.

I told him I'd happily trade him my opty box, but he declined. hehe.

 

[twistedlogic]

As mentioned above, the Gigabyte P35-DS3L gets my vote.

As for RAM, any DDR2 667 should be sufficient. That should allow you to hit (333x11) 3.663Ghz if your CPU will go that high and you have enough cooling.

But DDR 800 is just as cheap as DDR 667, so whatever you can find thats cheapest.

If your looking at going past 3.0Ghz, you should look into a cheap after market cooler. Just a few that are already mentioned like the CoolerMaster Hyper TX2 (22$), Arctic Freezer 7(19$), Rosewill RCX-Z775-LX (17$), or even the XIGMATEK HDT-S963 (25$). (ALL PRICES @ NewEgg).

For a little more you could go with XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 120mm (37$), Thermalright Ultra-90 (30$), Thermalright Ultra-120 (60$), ZEROtherm BTF90 (41$), ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 (48$), or the Tuniq Tower 120 (45$).

Good luck OCing

 

[Homerboy]

Originally posted by: nerp

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: Homerboy
push it as far as it will go

Let me ask though, will I see a big difference between that chip and my currenty OPty165 OC'ed to 2.65?

You should still see a significant difference in CPU-heavy tasks.

Yeah expect some time to be shaved off an encode or maybe a few FPS in your FPS meter in a game. But for normal day to day use you might be hard pressed to see even the slightest bit of difference. Upgrading and building new machines is really fun but there's always the risk of being dissapointed that the performance improvement will be extremly minor for day-to-day tasks if you upgrade rapidly between generations.

I have a friend that replaced a decent X2 setup with a brand new quad intel box. He spent some serious dough on a new board, DDR2 sticks, new HD, case, PSU, 8800GTX and he just told me the other day that he is pissed that he can't tell if the new rig is any faster than the old. I told him to pick up Crysis, but all he plays is CS:S and TF2 and his previous box was giving him 100+ FPS with high settings already. Unfortunatley, a lot of people are used to the olden days when replacing a P2 300 with a P3 800 was just a generation jump but made even windows amazingly faster. Today, replacing a dual with a quad, even from AMD to intel, won't make windows itself dramatically faster. My friend is forced to run synthetic benchmarks and hope for more heavy-resource games to come out to exploit his investment. That's not fun.

It IS a great box and i'm sure if he was doing media encoding or other cpu-heavy tasks, he'd be wanting to throw a party. but he's just a casual user who reads tech forums and was led to beleive that a new intel quad box would blow his mind.

I told him I'd happily trade him my opty box, but he declined. hehe.

Yeah Im aware of the potential pitfalls. I'm no stranger to upgrading and OCing (I just dont keep my thumb on the pulse of the newest and greatest until I'm ready to do it... hence my post).

I do a fair amount of encoding and CPU intensive apps so the upgrade maybe worth it.
Besides it will force my hand at a fresh OS install which just increases the speed of everything