OC Cheat Sheet

[econnelle]

I haven't overclocked a CPU since I bought a Celeron 300 and got it to 450mhz.

I never really saw the need for it since the cost of ram and other equipment outweighed the price difference of the chip. Plus I never wanted the fastest, just stable.

I do a lot of side work and stability/reliability has always been king.

The Core 2 has kind of changed that, at least at home. I built my wife a E6300 system based off of a Foxconn P9657AA-8EKRS2H motherboard.

I sat down and played with it a bit, clocked it upto 2ghz which was enough of an experiment and to give it a little grunt on boot up of Vista. I'm using cheap but reliable Kingston Value Ram PC667. I tried higher but failed so I just bumped it a little to see how it did. Everything is dead stock except the FSB. I don't care to go higher since its more than fast enough for her, I just did it to play around a bit.

I plan on replacing my AMD 3700+ with a Core 2 system and was strongly considering building a E4300 and overclocking it.

I sell mostly AMD systems simply because there wasn't a cheap and solid 965 Core 2 MB out there that did RAID without some kind of 3rd party chip. I've had plenty of people interested in Core 2's but been holding off due to pricing differences.

Now the Foxconn board has fixed that so this is my limitation for the motherboard. I have to use the Foxconn board. I prefer to have at home what I sell so if there is a problem I have a comparable platform. If I can't get very fast thats fine. Its been very reliable for the 2 weeks its been running, zero problems and only $107 for a 965 and ICHR8.

What kind of ram should I look at? I see most articles use a wide variety. The rest of the system will be 2 7200.10 Seagate drives in RAID 0, 2 gigs of ram, XFX 880GTS 320 meg OC'd card, and a Samsung SATA DVD RW.

Oh the PS is another thing that must stay the same, a Xion 500watt Goodpower. I've used these for a year with fantastic results and they are dead silent.

I don't really care how fast I go with it, so long as its faster than a E6400. This is the experiment to get it faster than a E6400, or hopefully a E6600 without spending more on the ram and cooler than I would on the actual chip itself.

Stock cooling is prefered but aftermarket is fine but it must be as quiet as stock.

If that item limits me so be it...if I'm chasing something that is going to be more work than its worth then I'll just pick up a E6400 and be happy with it.

Thanks

 

[Zap]

Welcome to the forums!

If you want something relatively cheap and full featured, perhaps consider the Nvidia 650i chipset boards. They start at $110 and have SLI, RAID, all kinds of stuff. The lower end P965 in that price range usually don't have the RAID Southbridge. With a bit of research you can find boards that will take those Core 2 Duo chips to 3GHz and more. Your 1.8-2GHz overclock is actually nothing for any of the latest Intel or AMD chips.

Speaking of AMD, they still are a reasonable choice at the low end. Their dual core chips have been showing up under $100 on occasion, and they do overclock really easily. Also, they are undisputed for single core chips if that's what your clients want - cheap starting at under $50 for an excellent performer and upgradable to dual core. I know dual core is the "popular" thing to have, but for someone just sending emails and browsing web pages, why pay an extra $50?

For RAM, depends on how high you want to overclock. With the E6300/E6400 and a P965 chipset board, if you want to hit really high speeds you'll need DDR2 800 (or RAM capable of that). I think the Nvidia chipset can let you run RAM a bit slower so you can get by with DDR2 667.

This Super Talent RAM seems to be a great deal. $60 for a 1GB stick of DDR2 667 zand many have overclocked these to 800-900MHz.

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: econnelle
I built my wife a E6300 system based off of a Foxconn P9657AA-8EKRS2H motherboard. I plan on replacing my AMD 3700+ with a Core 2 system and was strongly considering building a E4300 and overclocking it.

I sell mostly AMD systems simply because there wasn't a cheap and solid 965 Core 2 MB out there that did RAID without some kind of 3rd party chip. I've had plenty of people interested in Core 2's but been holding off due to pricing differences.

Now the Foxconn board has fixed that so this is my limitation for the motherboard. I have to use the Foxconn board. I prefer to have at home what I sell so if there is a problem I have a comparable platform. If I can't get very fast thats fine. Its been very reliable for the 2 weeks its been running, zero problems and only $107 for a 965 and ICHR8.

I don't really care how fast I go with it, so long as its faster than a E6400. This is the experiment to get it faster than a E6400, or hopefully a E6600 without spending more on the ram and cooler than I would on the actual chip itself.

Stock cooling is prefered but aftermarket is fine but it must be as quiet as stock.

If that item limits me so be it...if I'm chasing something that is going to be more work than its worth then I'll just pick up a E6400 and be happy with it.

Thanks

They reviewed the little brother of the Foxconn you mentioned at AT... the Foxconn P9657AA- 8KS2H which has the ICH8 w/o the RAID. I assume they're otherwise the same board and will overclock the same. They only got it to 343 FSB on that review.

But 343 FSB will be plenty to make an e4300 shine... 9 x 343 = 3.08 GHz, which is sometimes achievable on stock cooling, sometimes needs an aftermarket heatsink. You can definitely hit 2.6 - 2.8 GHz on stock cooling on the e4300 without much problem. That's plenty faster than a stock e6400.

BUT, here's a caveat. You have to make sure they updated the BIOS on the Foxconn to support a 1:1 memory ratio on the e4300. Since it has the lower 200 FSB, some boards can't run it at 1:1 without a BIOS update. Otherwise you'll be limited in your overclock.

What kind of ram should I look at? I see most articles use a wide variety. The rest of the system will be 2 7200.10 Seagate drives in RAID 0, 2 gigs of ram, XFX 880GTS 320 meg OC'd card, and a Samsung SATA DVD RW.

You only need DDR2 667 to take the e4300 up to 3.0 GHz... 9 * 333 = 3.0 GHz. I'd recommend a good inexpensive CL4 set like this Corsair XMS2 DDR2 675 2GB set for $163 (it's 1.9V RAM so up the ram voltage by 0.1V).

On another note, if you're looking for budget Core 2 Duo RAID without an additional 3rd party chip, there are 945P boards with the ICH7R southbridge. For example there's this ASUS P5LD2 R2.0 for $99, which acc. to Newegg reviewers was good to OC up to 350 FSB. (Look on ASUS's product page you'll see the ITE chip is not a RAID controller, it's for IDE support... Newegg's description is misleading) There's even a well-reviewed ASRock for $84, though not for overclocking.

 

[phog]

For relatively cheap MB with RAID and good OC with cheap RAM, an Nvidia 650i board is probably your best bet. The only problem with these boards is that it is a relative new chipset and especially with older BIOS versions on the ASUS board (P5N-E SLI) there seem to be quite some RAM incompatibility issues. So you might want to find out which RAM works well.

I have this board myself and do not have any RAM problems at all, actually it is 100% rock solid in all respects for my configuration (which includes Linux for OS stability ). It is also really easy to OC these boards as you can 'unlink' RAM and FSB speeds so that you can configure both speeds independent of each other, something a 965 can't do I believe.