Is it worth Overclocking?

[Kahnabus]

Im wondering if its even worth overclocking my system?
I used to believe that overclocking was worth it back when systems only ran under 1ghz and you were gaining 200mhz on an 800mhz system, but with systems running at 2ghz and higher whats the point, specially when MHZ no longer seems to be the big factor in a cpu any more, and most rely on FSB and Cache speeds..

 

[rstrohkirch]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/05/...ng_2006_interactive_cpu_charts_update/

 

[imported_ST]

Originally posted by: Kahnabus
Im wondering if its even worth overclocking my system?
I used to believe that overclocking was worth it back when systems only ran under 1ghz and you were gaining 200mhz on an 800mhz system, but with systems running at 2ghz and higher whats the point, specially when MHZ no longer seems to be the big factor in a cpu any more, and most rely on FSB and Cache speeds..

Might want to try reading up on the latest CPUs for a couple of days before making off the wall statements...this isn't 1995 anymore...

 

[Kahnabus]

Might want to watch who your talking to before making smart ass comments.. I asked a simple question to get an honest answer not some smart ass with a cocky attitude to give me a response..

 

[Markfw]

Just pump it to 2400 with a divier and go ! Big differnece between 2000 and 2400 ! And its easy, and at 1.4vcore, you won;t kill the chip early.

 

[Kahnabus]

Well like i said, im not too techy when it comes to overclocking. I have read a little on this forum and it seems that i need to revert BIOS version back to 1.20 instead of the 1.40 my board was at when i bought it.. I read some of the links that the forums send you too but i dont quite understand it very well. Then i tried some of it and my BIOS keeps going back to default and i dont want to mess with it.. Going back to an older bios version im a little leary about, Any suggestions?

 

[Harvey]

Overclocking is a sport. The fun and pleasure come from getting more out of your purchase than the specs say you can achieve.

Mild overclocking may show no discernable gains, but my trusty Athlon T'bred 1800+ has been running since day one @ 2 GHz (2400+) without having to raise voltages or otherwise tweaking anything. It seldom gets over 40 deg. C. on the hottest summer day, and the improvement in speed is immediately evident on demanding apps.

The extra performance cost me all of the time it took to reset my BIOS from the default auto-recognized setting.

If you overclock for whatever reason, just do it knowing you're stepping outside of any warranty you have on your chip.

 

[kb3edk]

Hey Kahnabus I've got two of the ASRock 939-Dual SATA II boards you're talking about... both of them ran absolutely terrible on all the BIOSes before 1.50 and 1.60. So I definitely recommend going to the ASRock site and using one of those two BIOS versions with that board. You might also look into trying one of the OCWorkbench custom "beta" BIOSes for the board, I've never done so myself but I've heard a lot of good things about it.

And yes it was very easy for me to go from 2.0 to 2.4 GHz on that board. Pretty much three steps:
1) Raise HTT from 200 to 240
2) Check DDR speed to make sure it was DDR333 and not DDR400 (this is your memory divider, and it was set by default on both of my ASRock boards)
3) Move both of the HTT bus settings from 1000MHz down to 800MHz

I didn't even need to bump the vcore, not that this board gives you much extra to work with anyway.

 

[Kahnabus]

K, ill try to give it a shot and see, ill let you know what i come up with,, DAMNIT I HATE UPDATING BIOS.. LOL, My DDR is 400 do i set it to 333 anyhow and i have no idea what you mean by DIVIDER..

 

[imported_ST]

Originally posted by: Kahnabus
Might want to watch who your talking to before making smart ass comments.. I asked a simple question to get an honest answer not some smart ass with a cocky attitude to give me a response..

yes i do know who i am talking to ...an admitted noob that has no clue with off the wall remarks as above..let's dissect your enlightening comments shall we?

"used to believe that overclocking was worth it back when systems only ran under 1ghz and you were gaining 200mhz on an 800mhz system, but with systems running at 2ghz and higher whats the point"

...today, overclocking is usually usually pushing 500Mhz +...on my old x2 3800, i did 900Mhz overclock with minimal voltage increase.

"specially when MHZ no longer seems to be the big factor in a cpu any more, and most rely on FSB and Cache speeds"

MHz is still the number one prevaling speed increase in a cpu. FSB, or rather HTT/LDT only determines the CPU frequency and ram speeds. Ram speeds is not as critical as latency settings, and cache is inconsequential, because it is integrated into the CPU, hence there is no "speed" setting for them.

if you don't know what fsb/htt/cache is, again, you might want to spend a couple of days reading on it before attempting to do anything....

 

[Rotax]

isn't 'everything' worth overclocking?

i wanna OC my black berry ffs!

 

[kb3edk]

Originally posted by: Kahnabus
My DDR is 400 do i set it to 333 anyhow and i have no idea what you mean by DIVIDER..

Yeah I agree the terminology is a little confusing... I've been overclocking for years and there's still some stuff I can't figure out.

Anyway, a memory "divider" is just forcing your RAM to run at a lower speed since it is not going to be able to keep up with how much you are cranking up the HTT. Most of the time you can do this without too much of a performance disadvantage.

DDR400 RAM really runs at 200MHz, just like your HTT. They call it "400" because DDR stands for Double Data Rate, it sends data on both sides of the clock signal unlike older, non-DDR RAM which was phased out years ago. Anyway, think of it as 200MHz.

When you crank up HTT to 240, your RAM tries to run at 240MHz too, but there is a chance it may not be able to handle those sorts of speeds. So you can put on a divider. DDR333 is often called the "5/6" divider since 333 is five sixths as big as 400. Basic fraction arithmetic. Anyway if you take that five sixths figure and apply it to the 240MHz your RAM tries to run at without a divider, you get 200 MHz. (240 x 5/6 = 200) So now your RAM is running right back down at the speed it says on the package while your CPU is buzzing along with a big overclock.

Anyway that's the basics as I understand them, good luck -

 

[Kahnabus]

First off Jerk! you dont know who your talking to otherwise youd have a little more respect for me, Secondly, I know what front side bus and Hyper Transport and cahce are, Im just not all that knowledged on overclocking. If you have a suggestion on wether or not its worth me overclocking my system then give one, otherwise shut your F***ing mouth and mind your own god damned business..

To the other people giving me advice I appreciate it very much and am trying my best to understand..

Oh and PS. to Jerk off,
If clock speed meant anything to AMD they would still be in the race with Intel to make them faster but obviously theyre not cause they havent even bothered to try to get there cpus up to intels speeds, instead they chose alternate roustes such as dual core processors and faster chace speeds.. JERK

 

[Screech]

Oh and PS. to Jerk off,
If clock speed meant anything to AMD they would still be in the race with Intel to make them faster but obviously theyre not cause they havent even bothered to try to get there cpus up to intels speeds, instead they chose alternate roustes such as dual core processors and faster chace speeds.. JERK

dude, no offense, but you really should read a decent review, you are making yourself sound pretty ridiculous.......CPU speed still matters in the same families of CPUs.

As for your question, yes, you can gain a noticable increase, the biggest of course is going from the lowest starting point, which on the x2's is the 3800+ -->often hit 2.5, so thats a 25% increase right there in cpu speed, not counting any improvements to memory bandwidth, etc.

 

[Kahnabus]

Wether im making myself sound rediculous or not I still didnt ask for smart ass comments from some pretentious prick.. And I dont take it to offense, I already said im not an overclockin freak, I simply wanted to see if there was good enough reason for me to overclock my system and if it was worth doing it. Ive updated my BIOS to the 1.50 version and now I need to figur out how to set my system up to overclock it, this way I can judge for myself wether or not its worth it for me to do it. I have only recently bothered to try this as of lately due to the great reviews this board has been getting for a budget board that has good overclocking ability.

 

[Witchfire]

Kahnabus... chill out a little, bro.

You're gonna run into people that rub you the wrong way in any forum... don't let it get to you.

He may have said it in a prickish way, but he does have a point. The single most important thing you can do is research if you plan on overclocking.


Most Comprehensive 939 Guide to OCing I've Found


You'll find a lot of useful, easy to understand info here. Welcome to the forum, and here's to good luck with your system

In direct answer to your question, if you plan on doing some heavy duty gaming, you'll want to get it around 2.4GHz. Your video card will bottleneck before your CPU, but you'll see some improvement. a 400MHz OC should be pretty easily attainable for you, most likely without any increase in vCore.

Hope this helps.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Hell yes! Says who? Says my Venice-core A64 3000+ running nicely at 2.6GHz in my Socket-754 rig (Valar)

 

[n7]

I'm sensing you don't actually want any help.

Six posts here, & you're acting like an asshole?

Some of here genuinely like to help people, so do us all a favor & attempt to learn, rather than making yourself look silly.

Oh, & to actually discuss your first question, is it worth it to OC?

My Opteron running at a 50% higher clockspeed than stock would say yes

 

[Kahnabus]

Originally posted by: Witchfire
Kahnabus... chill out a little, bro.

You're gonna run into people that rub you the wrong way in any forum... don't let it get to you.

He may have said it in a prickish way, but he does have a point. The single most important thing you can do is research if you plan on overclocking.


Most Comprehensive 939 Guide to OCing I've Found


You'll find a lot of useful, easy to understand info here. Welcome to the forum, and here's to good luck with your system

In direct answer to your question, if you plan on doing some heavy duty gaming, you'll want to get it around 2.4GHz. Your video card will bottleneck before your CPU, but you'll see some improvement. a 400MHz OC should be pretty easily attainable for you, most likely without any increase in vCore.

Hope this helps.

Oddly enough the V core was decreased from 1.4 to 1.33 dont know if that is gonna make a difference in preformance but it hasnt hurt it yet. I havent jumped into BF2 or MxO or anything but Im sure I will later this evening.. Ive been running on pretty much 1.8 to 2.2ghz for about the past 2 years now, it was about a year ago that i jumped from and Athlon 3400+ to a 64 2800 and now obvioulsy for the first time im jumping into the DC versions of AMD. Yeah im a noob to overclocking and JERK may have a point in researching, But that was my whole point of comming to the forum was to get advice not get dickheaded comments. And as far as clock speeds on AMD cpus its been around 2ghz to 2.4 for about two years now and it actually went down for a while there unless you had 600 to 1k to spend on a cpu and even then it was only from 2 to 2.4 and of course the FSB was higher on the more expensive boards.

 

[Kahnabus]

Originally posted by: n7
I'm sensing you don't actually want any help.

Six posts here, & you're acting like an asshole?

Some of here genuinely like to help people, so do us all a favor & attempt to learn, rather than making yourself look silly.

I have only been an ASSHOLE to one person on here, everyone else ive been listening to their advice and going to the links and reading up on them....

 

[n7]

Old guide here, but it still works well:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=1497607

As for determining the RAM speed using a divider, it's not quite just fractions unfortunately. For certain CPU multis like 10x, it works like that though.

On my CPU, e.g., to find out RAM speed with a certain divider:

Default CPU speed divided by divider (say 133.33).
1800 / 133.33 = 13.5 (always round up to next complete number; in this case, 14).

Then take overclocked speed (assuming you're using the same CPU multi), & divide by previously calculated number.

2700 / 14 = 192.86 MHz aka DDR386.

 

[Furen]

I'll try to explain the clock speed thing to you:

Different CPU architectures (or families, if you will) achieve different amounts of work per clock. For example, a P4 achieves much less work than the K7 (athlon) or the K8 (Athlon 64) but can reach much higher clocks. Intels approach, in the end, requires very high clocks to achieve a performance parity with more efficient CPUs but can also reach insanely high clocks (Intel's problems was that it hit thermal walls that it couldn't deal with. I have no doubt AMD cpus would have an insanely hard time matching a 5GHz Prescott, for example, but the fact that the 5GHz prescott would require phase-change cooling and something like 400watts of power made this point moot). AMD's clock speed dropped a bit when it went to the K8 from the K7 but the efficiency (work per clock, if you will) increased massively, so we still saw a pretty big performance increase from this.

Remember that performance is a function of both "efficiency" (work per clock in this case) and the clock speed, so performance is still very dependant on clock speed, it just doesn't get much attention any longer because it's ramping at a much lower rate than it was before (and telling someone to buy a 2.4GHz X2 or a 2.67GHz Conroe--when it comes out--to replace his 3.8GHz Pentium 4 doesnt look that good).

EDIT: n7 is correct on the divider thing. A64s take the CPU clock and then use the integer divider that would give you the closest match to the selected RAM speed (without going over). This is a purely academic discussion, though, since most underclocks end up being quite minor (something along the lines of 10-15MHz tops).

 

[TheRyuu]

Originally posted by: Kahnabus

Originally posted by: n7
I'm sensing you don't actually want any help.

Six posts here, & you're acting like an asshole?

Some of here genuinely like to help people, so do us all a favor & attempt to learn, rather than making yourself look silly.

I have only been an ASSHOLE to one person on here, everyone else ive been listening to their advice and going to the links and reading up on them....

@Kahnabus
Let it go. Calm down.

Let me quote:

Might want to try reading up on the latest CPUs for a couple of days before making off the wall statements...this isn't 1995 anymore...

Apperently that's a "Jerk" kinda statement? Don't think so. It's actually a good response. He's telling you to go use a quality search engine and search for data on latest CPU's (anandtech has a search feature on the top of the page), and that it actually ISN'T 1995 anymore.
At least that's what I got out of it (as in I'm joking so calm down)

And to answer your OP question, yes, CPU speed matters now. 240x10 (2.4ghz should be a nice boost). Just make sure to use the ram divider (166 divider, aka DDR333 divider, aka some other ratio).

And Welcome to the wonderful world of overclocking.

And good post to guy above me

 

[Kahnabus]

Cool, Furen thats about the easiest way to understand it for me and I am right about clock speeds. I never said it wasnt important But instead i said it wasnt as important.

as far as N7 thats confusing but i kinda get it.. I have mine overclocked to 2.41ghz now and my ram set at 166 instead of 200, updating my bios to 1.50 made a huge difference as far as my setting staying.. Now im guessing i could go more but i dont think its necissary. Maybe to the overclocking enthusiast it is but im not seeing a huge difference in performance although I am seeing one..

 

[Kahnabus]

Look, ive let it go already its everyone else that keeps bringing it back up and I keep responding to your comments. I dont need another person to tell me to chill out.. Ill be who i want to be you be who you want to be.

As far as him saying things like "off the wall comments" and "it isnt 1995 any more" Is sarcasm and I take it offensively, I came here for help. I know my way around computers pretty well. Ive been pissin with them since apple was the mainstream desktop computer.

What I want is Info and not comments.. Most people have done that but some people like yourself have to throw in your own 2 cents and i dont need that...