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I"M IN A PICKLE OF A DILLY!

Tags:
  • Motherboards
  • Overclocking
  • Windows XP
Last response: in Motherboards
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December 19, 2003 1:34:21 PM

Hey sorry for the gay subject title but it got you to read my question. I bought a Athlon XP barton 2800+ .. I was told that you can not overclock it.. DAMN!.. i've already bought it from new egg. Now i'm told that the barton 2500+ can be easily made faster than a 2800+ .... Anyone have the correct info on that.. or am i S.O.L?

More about : pickle dilly

December 19, 2003 1:53:07 PM

You <i>CAN</i> overclock it :smile: ...

Assuming that multipliers are unlocked on both chips, you'll find that most 2800+ and 2500+ chips have the same 'ceiling' for overclocking. Which might be, say, 2.4Ghz. So you see it's simply a better deal to get the 2500+, as it costs less and can almost certainly attain the same speed.

If the multipliers are locked on both chips though, it's much easier to reach a 200Mhz Bus speed with the 2500+, as that won't mean the actual chip speed going over the 'ceiling' so quickly.

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<font color=red>The preceding text is assembled from information stored in an unreliable organic storage medium. As such it may be innacurate, incomplete, or completely wrong</font color=red> :wink: <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by ChipDeath on 12/19/03 03:54 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
December 19, 2003 2:04:21 PM

It's kinda like engines. You can build a 1.6 Litre engine which will give a certain amount of power.

You want to produce 2 cars, a 'boring' one, and a 'sports' one. So rather than produce a whole new engine, you can simply tune the hell out of the same engine to increase the power output.

This is what the chip manufacturers do. They produce a new CPU core, but they need to sell to many different market sectors. So they 'down-bin' some of the cores to sell as cheaper, slower chips, and sell some as faster, more expensive ones. These settings are just minor modifications to some of the circuitry on the chip, but don't have to affect the core itself.

Often, at the start of a core's life, they'll test them, and due to [very minor] differences between each individual core, some will be able to run faster than others, so they'll use the 'failed' cores to sell as the slower speed ones. But usually after they've refined parts of the process, most of the cores are very close in terms of quality, so they have to sell some cores as far slower than they're capable of. The 'Barton' core Athlons are like this, as are the Pentium 4 'C' series (and others of course).

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<font color=red>The preceding text is assembled from information stored in an unreliable organic storage medium. As such it may be innacurate, incomplete, or completely wrong</font color=red> :wink:
December 19, 2003 2:24:15 PM

On the subject of the 2500+ being easier to overclock:

All CPUs can 'work' at much faster speeds than the memory, hard disks, and the rest of the system. so there are 2 things that affect the actual performance:

The <b>FSB</b> (or Front Side Bus). This is the bus which the cpu communicates with the chipset and usually the memory runs at the same speed as this bus.
The <b>Multiplier</b> this is the number which the CPU uses to determine it's <i>actual</i> speed. A CPU internally runs at whatever this is times the speed of the FSB. so a CPU with a FSB @ 100Mhz and a multiplier of 10 will run at 1000Mhz (1Ghz).

Intel has never allowed the multiplier to be changed for their chips. AMD did for a while, but the indications are now that they are 'locking' the multipliers on new chips again.

An XP 2500+ runs with a FSB of 166 [.6666666etc] and a multiplier of 11, to run @~1833Mhz. So if your chip has a locked multiplier, then simply increasing the FSB to 200 will give you 2200Mhz, which is the same speed as the XP3200+.
Now the 2800+ also runs with a FSB of 166, but it's multiplier is 12.5, to give ~2083Mhz, so if this chip also has a locked multiplier, increasing the FSB to 200 would give 2500Mhz, which is <i>probably</i> too fast for the chip to handle, and you'll need some special cooling for it even if it does (watercooling probably).

<i>That</i> is why the 2500+ is a much better choice for overclocking, as it give more 'room to play with'

If the multipliers are unlocked though, there's no real difference between them for overclocking, apart from the price :smile:

Hope this is of some help...

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<font color=red>The preceding text is assembled from information stored in an unreliable organic storage medium. As such it may be innacurate, incomplete, or completely wrong</font color=red> :wink:
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