e6400 50% Overclock on P5W DH -- super easy and stable (so far)

[jg0001]

[This is a follow up and clarification to a prior overclock thread -- previously, I was trying to resolve a mouse issue, but it turned out in all of my moving things around I had knocked the wireless mouse receiver off of my desk.. duhr!]

Okay... with much enjoyment and little work, I took my e6400 and Asus P5W DH Deluxe to a 50% overclock, using nothing more than a FSB push to 399 (and a lock down of PCI-e bus to 100 and PCI to 33.3). Every other setting is on AUTO, but to clarify -- there is no additional voltage to my CPU over stock. Also -- I'm using crapola 2yr+ old 'valueram' memory from my old 775 board rated DDR2-4300 (533mhz).

[I turned OFF all the Q-Fan control stuff in the BIOS (which applied only to the Zalman 9500AT (the 4pin version of the 9500LED) and 1-extra case fan I added) and set all other fans to high speed for my tests. It's still a lot quieter than my old case.]

I ran SuperPi1.5 repeatedly to check performance versus stock to be sure my oc wasn't screwing up something else in the system. I also ran 3dmark06 and scored just under 7000. There were no visible problems and I did watch the entire 20 minutes or so of it.

For stability and heat generation tests, I ran Prime95+CPU Burn-In (at the same time). Over a 6 hour testing session, Prime95 encountered no errors. My CPU temps never got over 39C; when I stopped the process at the end, my CPU dropped to 32C within 10 seconds and returned to idle at 28C thereafter (the room temp was prob 11-12C (75F)).

Now, I'm pretty lazy about OC'ing, and this was the easiest damn OC I've ever tried. I can probably go higher with better ram or something... but I probably won't bother... the simplicity and heat generation are perfect right now.

Setup:
CPU: Core2Duo e6400 2.13Ghz oc'd to 3.19Ghz
Motherboard: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (1101 BIOS)
HSF: Zalman 9500AT (the 4-pin, non-light up version)
ThermalPaste: ArticSilver5
Case: Antec P180B (with addt'l 120mm fan blowing on lower portion of mobo)
VidCard: eVGA 7900 GTX Superclocked
Memory: 2x 1GB of Kingston ValueRam DDR2-4300 (533Mhz) -- this is OLD ram, will upgrade for newer CPU, but probably leave old RAM with the e6400 (previously, I reported I had 3200 ram, 4300 is the correct figure)
HD 1: WD 36GB Raptor, Sata, 16MB cache
HD 2: Seagate Perp Recording 320GB, SataII, 3Gb, 16MB cache
Opticals: Samsung 18xDVDR + LG 16xDVDR w/Lightscribe
Floppy: yes!

 

[imported_inspire]

Didn't happen to run Prime (Blend Test) on both cores for 24 hours and come out stable, did you?

 

[jg0001]

Everyone seems to be dying to say this setup won't work or won't be stable. Frankly, I haven't had the chip for much more than 24 hours. Every other OC I've played with typically failed an OC in under 2 hours, let alone 5 or 6 hours.

What would satisfy everyone? If it did a 20+ hour Prime95 x2 test? Even if it couldn't get to the 20+ hours, I don't imagine I'd have to tweak much or clock it down all that much. A 50% working OC, minutes out of the box, is pretty damned awesome. If I have to tweak for stability (that's "IF"), it's still pretty damned awesome.

And let me ask this -- what if it fails at the 19th hour? Would you actually dial anything down or take your chances as I'd not be surprised to see WinXP crash for some other randomness over a 20 hour period of max CPU load.

 

[imported_inspire]

I completely understand that you haven't had the chip for very long. It's just that when you use the word 'stable' on these forums, you're implying a (100%) in front of it.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see you pass a 24h Prime stability test, but a lot of the folks here won't give you full credit until you pass it. In any case, you're right - you probably won't have to drop down below 45% - and that's still impressive.

To answer your question, I probably would clock back - I've failed in the 15th hour and I'm still fighting with my machine. That may just be a matter of a difference in patience thresholds. As far as WinXP.... meh... salient point.

 

[jg0001]

A single instance of Prime95 sucks down almost all of my available memory to the point where if I try to run SuperPi1.5 at the same time, I get an out of virtual memory error (I run NO pagefile). I've read others say that once it hits the pagefile, the CPU utilization falls off as the HDD slows the process considerably --- since I wanted a full blown calc + 100% CPU test, I ran only one instance of Prime95 and threw in the very very low on memory CPU Burn-In to pump the usage up to 100%.

At the same time I had these running, I toyed with ie7 beta and it responded fairly readily despite the goings on in the background.

 

[jg0001]

I edited the title to "... stable (so far)". I understand your point there for sure.

 

[jg0001]

If it pleases the court (of opinion), look at it this way. An unskilled, non-engineer like me took an e6400 out of the box, plopped it into a mobo and oc'd it in 10 minutes to 150% stock and had it working (for my purposes) for many hours with no real advanced tweaking.

If I can do THAT, then surely some of the more skilled among you can get 50% stable and more, with all your fancy tweaks and whatnot.

The point was that this is one hella-easy chip to do big OC's on, and I'm just adding in my results thusfar, even using crap ram.

 

[imported_inspire]

Originally posted by: jg0001
A single instance of Prime95 sucks down almost all of my available memory to the point where if I try to run SuperPi1.5 at the same time, I get an out of virtual memory error (I run NO pagefile). I've read others say that once it hits the pagefile, the CPU utilization falls off as the HDD slows the process considerably --- since I wanted a full blown calc + 100% CPU test, I ran only one instance of Prime95 and threw in the very very low on memory CPU Burn-In to pump the usage up to 100%.

At the same time I had these running, I toyed with ie7 beta and it responded fairly readily despite the goings on in the background.

That's some good stuff right there - I didn't know that the Page File did that. In fact, I don't know what the page file does. Would you mind explain what it is and what is does and how it can be disabled?

That may actually help me out with some of the problems I'm having...

 

[jg0001]

The pagefile acts as temporary "memory" storage when you run out of real "physical" ram. i.e. if you wanted to do something that would otherwise use 1.5 GB of ram and you have only 1 GB of ram, it would 'swap out' some memory from the RAM to the harddrive as needed. Using the harddrive is vastly slower than using real ram.

You have only 1 GB of ram, so it isn't generally a good idea for you to disable the pagefile as WinXP + any reasonably new game can easily suck down more than 1GB of memory.

I usually run 4GB of ram and disable the pagefile completely to avoid any chance that WinXP goes to use the slower HDD. At 2GB of ram, I probably should be running a pagefile, but other than for these benchmarks, I usually don't find I need it.

Frankly, if you don't know how to change it, it's probably best that you don't change it. If you are adventurous, you can find the settings under the "Advanced/Performance" tab on the System settings in control panel... (I am on an older PC at work right now (win2000) so can't tell you the exact button presses for winxp)).

 

[imported_inspire]

Thanks, that helps a lot!

 

[Golgatha]

Run two instances of Folding@Home, Prime95 Torture, and something to get the hard drives and optical drives spinning for 24 hours and report back.

 

[Thor86]

Nice results, but as some people said, try running two instances of Prime95 LargeFFT tests and see how long it can run before erroring out.

Reminder, this is only a cpu stability test, and maybe little memory/mch, but other tests are better for those.

Also gaming/3d tests using BF2, 64player online for more than a few hours couldn't hurt.

 

[getbush]

Could you pat your head with one core and rub your tummy with the other for 24 hours please?
kthxbye

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: getbush
Could you pat your head with one core and rub your tummy with the other for 24 hours please?
kthxbye

That's priceless. Although, we don't count it unless you're standing on your head when you do it.