On 23/01/13 17:09, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote:
On Wednesday 23 January 2013 07:52:03 PM IST, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
[...]
In my experience, most of the time you can overclock. The issue is
with the user not knowing exactly how to do it. You need to
understand a few things and how they affect each other. It's not just
a knob you can turn.
That pretty much applies to me. I don't know much about hardware stuff.
Regarding your 1 Ghz overclock, you probably have good components in
terms of RAM & SMPS.
When I bought this rig in 2008, I knew nothing about good components,
blindly trusted local vendor... also internet shopping wasn't advanced
here.
So pretty much substandard components.
The part that's really important is the mainboard. RAM doesn't matter.
In my case, I had pretty basic 800MHz DDR2 RAM. Raising the FSB would
bring it above that, so I changed the DRAM ratio to 1:1, and the RAM
then ran at only 600Mhz.
That was the starting point to rule out RAM problems. After that, I
raised FSB but kept the VCore constant until I hit the first
instabilities. When that happened, I raised VCore a bit. Rinse and
repeat, until the VCore was still below the maximum recommendation by
Intel. That happened at 3.4GHz (378MHz FSB * 9 CPU multiplier = 3402MHz
CPU clock.) The E6600 CPU I got was an average sample. Others were
running it at 3.6GHz (or even higher with water cooling.)
This was a process that took about 3 days to complete (needs a lot of
stability testing.) The good thing about those older CPUs was that the
performance boost I got by OCing wasn't just scaling linearly with the
CPU frequency. It was scaling *better* than that, because raising the
FSB also made the mainboard itself perform better and with lower latencies.
Now that I know stuff, I'm thinking of assembling my own AMD FX8350 rig
soon by buying components from the web.
So, let's close this topic :-)
As I said above, the mainboard is really the only important factor.
