This is for comparison purposes -- I thought a couple weeks ago I almost got "flamed" because people thought I was thumping my chest.
There is nothing extraordinary in my over-clocking, because I followed the reviews and settled for what seemed like a sure thing. Some people are picking low-latency PC3500 and pushing it past its spec, and I suppose this works. Also, I do not discount the posts that have appeared above.
What I did was to just find the best price at the time for some OCZ EL Gold PC4000's -- the 1 GB kit. Whatever memory I used, my objective was to socket 1 GB -- not 2 GB or 512 MB -- but 1 GB to avoid bottlenecks in video processing.
Initially, I chose a 2.4C P-4 to match with this, because (for at least the 30-cap batches) the over-clocking potential was phenomenal according to various reports. Certainly, I heeded THG in their January '04 review on the OCZ's, to save time and trouble -- and especially, dollars.
I found with the 2.4C, even with a 25% over-clocking to 3.0 Ghz and the memory running right at its DDR500 spec and stock latencies, the processor temperature actually would lag behind the motherboard temperature by 2F or about 1C at idle!! Thinking that this may have been an error of the sensors, I had another thermal sensor taped close to the processor, and indeed the front-panel monitor reported temperatures that were in the neighborhood of the internal value.
I considered going up to a 2.8C, thinking that if the cooling profile was similar to the 2.4, I could get an over-clock easily to 3.47 Ghz. But I am in the habit of buying "retail" despite any over-clocking potentially voiding the warranty anyway -- couldn't find a retail box, and read some user/buyer reviews on the 3.0C.
With memory timings still at stock 2.5, 4, 4, 7, running at DDR500 (1:1), very slight voltage adjustments all within the warrantied spec for the components, I was able to get my OC up just a tad more to DDR506 -- with the processor running at 3.808 Ghz, no errors on MEMTEST86 running for hours, and stable configuration under the stress tests I ran. I benchmarked with PCMark04 (FX5950 Ultra video card) at about 5,760 -- I think that was right -- within 200 points out of 6,000 of matching Intel's own PCMark04 run against the new 3.8E CPU posted at their web-site. That's the 570J Prescott with 1 MB L2 cache.
If you plan to use a Northwood with the 512K cache, it pays to use faster memory and run it to spec or above spec in stable configuration. With the lower L2 cache, faster memory pays off with performance gains, even with slower timings. Some tech-news-reviews on OCZ attempts to explain how they focused their approach to latencies in a manner different from the prevailing assumptions in the industry -- one of which was that CAS latency was an important measure of speed, and their design instead paid more attention to RCD, RAS Precharge and Precharge Delay. Apparently they have done something about optimizing bandwidth even under looser timings.
This does not preclude advantages to be had from other memory models and manufactures touted in posts previous to this one.
With the CPU drawn from the right batch, and that would be the so-called 30-cap processor, and depending on the mobo and cooling solution, you would hope that the difference between a 20% OC and a 25 or 26% OC makes a difference of from 2 to 4F in your idle and load temperature values, but that could just be the luck of the draw. I'm currently running PRIME95 at a room temperature of 70F, and the load temperature values don't go over 105F or 41C with all fans turned down to 2,000 rpm or lower with the exception of the CPU fan on the XP120 heatpipe cooler.
For motherboards that allow VDIMM voltage increases above 2.85V (and mine -- a P4P800 -- doesn't), you can push the OCZ modules to 3.0V without voiding their warranty, and probably get to DDR533 or a 1066 Mhz FSB setting, but I don't know what effect this will have on air-cooled temperatures. I can only report what my air-cooled temperatures have been. If your mobo is like mine, it is possible to purchase an OCZ "DDR Booster" which fits in a vacant memory slot, has its own digital voltage readout and adjustment mechanism, and allows the BIOS limitation on voltages to be over-ridden. Nifty little gadget for -- what is it? -- $60?
Good luck with your Northwood processor.
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