Computer Question: Any Overclockers here?

J

J. MacDonald

Joined
Jun 8, 2000
Messages
3,140
I'm jazzed. I mostly finished upgrading my family's computers What I really mean is that I got a new CPU/Motherboard and Memory for my machine, so my wife inherits my old parts and our boy gets her old parts.

This means that I've now got a Pentium 4c 2.4 ghz CPU in an Abit IS7 motherboard with 512 mb PC3500 DDR433 ram with the 800mhz front side bus.

My wife gets my old P4 1.7mhz in a Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra motherboard with 512 mb of Mushkin PC2700 DDR333 ram and our boy will inherit her old P3 866mhz in an Asus CUS-L2 motherboard with 384mb of PC133 memory.

These are meaningful upgrades for all involved. I'm not sure what to do with the old PIII 600 CPU and Asus motherboard that will be orphaned after I finish upgrading our boy's machine.

Besides the upgrades on their own, what really jazzes me is that after all my years of trying to overclock PCs, I finally seem to have gotten a good mobo/CPU/memory combo. I've been at it since the original Celeron 300a that would only run at 400mhz, not the 450mhz everyone else was able to get (Pentium II 450 was teh fastest chip available at the time). My P4c 2.4 ghz seems to be running stabily at 3.12ghz!!! To put in perspective, a 3.06ghz chip is about $500.00 on a pricewatch.com and is the fastest factory clocked chip you can currently buy. My P4c 2.4ghz can be had for about $180.00 and mine is running at 3.12ghz. This is now one real fast computer and I'm still using air cooling! I hear there's a new liquid cooling system out for just over $100.00 that would reduce fan noise and might even let me run faster!

Time to go play some video games!

jmx
 
Not doing any overclocking, but I'm running dual P4 Xeon 1.8gH processors (HyperThreading enabled), 400mH FSB. I'm planning to upgrade to 2.4gH CPUs, but I'm waiting for the price to drop a little further.
 
You might try a Koolance case. I've got two of them, and water cooling will typically let you push quite a bit further than air. They are also a lot quieter than, say, Delta fans.

I tried evaporative cooling cases (e.g. Vapochill) but they made me insane. They were just too flakey.

A nice thing about the Koolance is that it can also cool your video card, and if you are mainly playing games, then you'll get more benefit by overclocking your video card.
 
I think fancy cases are too pricey and LOUD :(

What's funny is I visited some friends and one of the guys at the house had a coolance case but barely overclocked his AMD. Mine is running on air and is clocked some 200mhz more.
 
I'm using an Antec full tower that I've moded to suit my needs and am not interested in changing the whole case, but I have been sort of curious about a couple water cooling kits that have recently come to market. I'm not sure how much further I can push this CPU, although with water cooling maybe I could get 3.5ghz! My main reason to go with water would be to reduce noise. Even with Fanmates in place to let my extra fans run just over stall speed, the three extra case fans plus a CPU fan make for a nice whine. Before the Fanmates when the fans were all running at full speed, it sounded like my case was about to take off.

jmx
 
I just built a new computer as well. It's a noname case housing an Asus A7N8X motherboard with an Athon XP 2000+ (1800Mhz real speed), 512megs of PC2700 DDR333 RAM, Radeon 7000 64meg vid card, firewire, USB 2.0 (6 ports, all from the mobo), CDRW, and a 30gig ATA133 drive. The mobo also has built-in 5.1 Audio and ethernet. I want to add a 150+ Mb drive and a DVD-R at some point in the future (I just bought a digital camcorder and want to download/edit videos). I'm not really into overclocking since I'm not a power-user, however this Asus board makes it easy with the bios controls and the auto CPU speed reset in the event you push it too far. Just power it off and back on and it resets to the default speed. Plus, this board monitors temps better than older boards I've used.

As far as temps go, when I built it up, the CPU ran at 44 degrees Celcius and the mobo ran at 35 degrees Celcius. That was using the cpu fan and powersupply fan only. I added two quiet case fans at the back to exhaust warm air and the temps on the CPU and Mobo dropped 4 and 7 degrees C respectively with no noticeable increase in noise. Further mods include some soundproofing and maybe a watercooling kit just because I like to tinker with stuff like that :D Danger Den makes a nice kit with everything you need for about $250. Another company, whose name escapes me, makes another nice kit for just over $200. These include everything (pump, waterblocks, hoses, radiator, etc).

The old computer was an Asus mobo with AMD K6-2 500, 384 megs of ram, 3DFX Voodoo3 2000. It served me well for 3 years without a single crash (Win2k). In fact, other than power outages, two drive failures, and keeping up to date with OS patches, it never needed a reboot. I got as high as two months between reboots. I kept the pieces. They may get resurrected one day.

Chris
 
Nice job Chris. Asus makes great boards. Generally they're as stable as you can get. I was a 3dfx Vodoo fan myself for a long time and was sorry to see them go. I had a Vodoo 2 add-in 3d only board way back when my Pentium 133 was king, then moved on to a Vodoo 3 3000 in my Clereon 300a days and finally a Vodoo 5 5500 when I finally stepped up to a PIII. The 5500 still lives in an Asus CUSL2 mobo in my son's machine with a PIII 866.

You say you're not a power user eh? From what I know, video editing is about as taxing as anything on a CPU. With the soft menu and one of those oh-so-overclockable Athlons, why not get a few extra free clock cycles? If it runs stabily, what's the harm?

ThermalTake has a water cooling kit called the Aquarius II for about $150.00. The reviews say it's not up to massive overclocking, but does a pretty good job and is almost silent.

I find it very satisfying to fire up a freshly built, or re-built computer and have it actually work. Great job!

Enojy.

jmx
 
Originally posted by jmxcpter
You say you're not a power user eh? From what I know, video editing is about as taxing as anything on a CPU. With the soft menu and one of those oh-so-overclockable Athlons, why not get a few extra free clock cycles? If it runs stabily, what's the harm?
jmx
Click to expand...

Sounds like some nice computers you have/had there. A 3DFX in a P133 was high end back then.

I'm a big Asus fan these days. I tried to build computers using cheaper mobos but kept losing IDE controllers and the like in a few months.

Video editing was the primary reason for building a new machine. I'll probably play around with overclocking if I start taxing the machine. As it stands, it's so much faster running my standard apps, a few more clock cycles probably wouldn't be noticed. I need to go to SCSI drives to really take advantage of the speed I have (SCSI isn't getting any cheaper either).

Chris
 
Originally posted by jmxcpter
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My P4c 2.4 ghz seems to be running stabily at 3.12ghz!!!
jmx
Click to expand...

Are you sure it's stable? If you want to check it out, download Prime95 from www.mersenne.org and do a stress test for at least a couple of hours. Check the temperature of the CPU to make sure it stops rising after a few minutes. If you get 0 errors after the stress test, you have a stable system.
 
The problem with Prime is using it to define "stable" goes against 99% of all normal users. If I run Prime long enough on my systems I can get it to fail. But my system will not crash through games, outlook, web browsing, mp3's etc. If your system works and seldomly crashes or randomly reboots, it is "stable".
 
Originally posted by sygyzy
The problem with Prime is using it to define "stable" goes against 99% of all normal users. If I run Prime long enough on my systems I can get it to fail. But my system will not crash through games, outlook, web browsing, mp3's etc. If your system works and seldomly crashes or randomly reboots, it is "stable".
Click to expand...

You are right ... and wrong. Prime will stress the CPU and will use the cache intensively, it will test some of the memory. That's all. When it finds errors, it means one or more of the following:

1. Too high CPU and case temperature. Too weak CPU heatsink and case (outflow) fan. Too much dust inside the computer. badly designed case without front intake, meaning your fans will just turn arround hot air.
2. Faulty CPU (this is very very rare).
3. Faulty memory. This occurs very often with cheap noname memory when you overclock using FSB and you push the latency timings too far.
4. Bad instable power supply. When the core voltage drops, given that the absorbed power by the CPU is the same, the intensity rises and so does the temperature.


I use Prime95 since 2001 or so. The only time it reported errors was when I overclocked my old Duron 800 at 936MHz without installing a proper heatsink. Now I have a 1.3GHz Duron (not worth overclocking... :D) that can run Prime95 24/7 with 0 errors.
If all you whant is a computer that allows you to play several hours a day without crushing too often, you don't need to check it with Prime95. If you are maniac about having a stable computer, do it.
 
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