P4 2.5 not as good as a P41.8???

[Foamfoot]

ok, i was running a P4 1.8a on the Asus P4PE setup. was able to overclock to 2.7 but was keeping it around 2.4-2.5 for stability. on 3dmark 2001e i actually got a score of 16000 - not bad 🙂

anyways, i needed a new PC for the office so i picked up a P4 2.5 400 MHZ, i assumed it was a C1 stepping. i figured id pop this one in my gaming system and put the 1.8 into my work one. chip arrived today from Newegg, plugged it in with some minor issues. i got it to boot at 120 fsb to get me to 3 gig mhz. it ran through 3dmark without any prob but my score was only 13500 - not a bad score but much lower then my 1.8a. is that normal. to make it worse, i tried bumping up the 2.5 a little higher but system wont boot. now i cant even get it to boot at the 120 fsb i was able to get out of the box. im pretty much stuck at 110 fsb for a small overclock. does it sound like this is a bad 2.5? perhaps ill RMA it, should i get a 533 one instead of a 400?

thanks in advance for your feedback and help, much appreciated.

 

[CrazySaint]

The 3DMark score does seem a bit low, although its possible that the 1.8@2.5's extra memory bandwidth was helping more than the 2.5@3GHz' raw speed? I dunno. As for RMA'ing it, as long as it runs completely stable at 2.5GHz, you got what you paid for. Overclocking is luck of the draw, and anytime you overclock something you assume a certain amount of risk. No sense in making the retailer pay for your bad luck. You could always sell it, though. Btw, when you were running it at 3GHz, did you have to increase the voltage? If so, make sure you didn't forget to increase the voltage when you reset the BIOS.

 

[Duvie]

I have seen this myself as just running sandra with my 1.6@2.67ghz (666) I outscore the p4 2.66 (533) cpu by 300 points....

It is likely the system bus increase along with the fact your ram was likely running much faster led to the much better score...Let say you had been running just a 1:1 ratio...at 120fsb you only had 240mhz ddr or less then pc2100, but if you had a 1.8 @ 2.7ghz would be 150fsb for 300mhz ddr or pc2400 level...if you used 3:4 ratio it would have been even greater, 320ddr vs 400ddr....


There is no guarantee when it comes to ocing and you should not rma it unless it did not run perfect at default level which is what the company warranties you when they sold it...nothing more nothing less...Oh well that is the ocing game!!!

 

[Foamfoot]

good points, thanks for the feedback. ill let it settle in a bit. i did set the voltage back. i did not try bumping the voltage up past 1.65 when i overclocked, think that's worth a shot?

 

[CrazySaint]

I would definitely not set the vcore in the BIOS higher than 1.65v on an Asus board since they are notorious for overvolting.

 

[Yeti101]

Its because the 1.8 probly has a high FSB, when you OC, your RAM OC's also, so your computer performs much better, but......... It shouldnt be that much of a diffrence

 

[Foamfoot]

yeah, guess thats why all you fine folk told me to get the 1.8a in the first place 🙂 let's me take advantage of my corsair xms 3000 RAM. thanks again for all of your feedback.

 

[Jojo1971]

i got a 2.5 which runs stable at 3.0 @ default voltage.. no matter how i tweak it ,it just wont run stably above 3.0..(im using asus p4b533)....then i RMA'ed the asus mobo and got the Abit IT7 max2- this time i could it get to as high as 3.125 ,stable..Im still not contended with this setup(coz of low bandwidth) so im gonna RMA the 2.5 and get me a 1.8.. I hope i will enjoy my journey with the 1.8...🙂....

 

[AdamK47]

Originally posted by: Foamfoot
ok, i was running a P4 1.8a on the Asus P4PE setup. was able to overclock to 2.7 but was keeping it around 2.4-2.5 for stability. on 3dmark 2001e i actually got a score of 16000 - not bad 🙂

anyways, i needed a new PC for the office so i picked up a P4 2.5 400 MHZ, i assumed it was a C1 stepping. i figured id pop this one in my gaming system and put the 1.8 into my work one. chip arrived today from Newegg, plugged it in with some minor issues. i got it to boot at 120 fsb to get me to 3 gig mhz. it ran through 3dmark without any prob but my score was only 13500 - not a bad score but much lower then my 1.8a. is that normal. to make it worse, i tried bumping up the 2.5 a little higher but system wont boot. now i cant even get it to boot at the 120 fsb i was able to get out of the box. im pretty much stuck at 110 fsb for a small overclock. does it sound like this is a bad 2.5? perhaps ill RMA it, should i get a 533 one instead of a 400?

thanks in advance for your feedback and help, much appreciated.

3 gig mhz eh? Never heard of it. A multiplier of 25 makes it very difficult to overclock to the extremes. The 1.8 at 2.7GHz would perform better in a lot of areas with it's 150MHz bus than the 2.5 at 3.0GHz with its 120MHz bus. It's alright, a lot of n00bs around here make the mistake of buying a high multiplier CPU for overclocking. A better bet would have been the 2.53GHz CPU with a 19x multiplier.