Noob Overclocking Question

[siggsy]

Hi guys/gals,

Can anybody help me with a idiots guide to getting the best out of my pc? The specs are as follows;

AMD 64 X2 3800+ (Toledo)
DFI Lanparty NF4 SLi-D S939
2X PC3200 2-3-2-5 (Dual Channel) - G.Skill
74 Gig Raptor
Gainward Ultra 7800GTX
485W Enermax Noisetaker PSU
Zalman Full Copper CPU fan

I've read a few forums such as DFI-Street.com but I really cant get my head around much of it. I play mostly games such as BF2/COD2.

If anybody has experience at teaching idiots this sort of thing or has successfully OC'd a pc like this, please reply.

Cheers,
Siggsy

 

[luminaris]

Here's a great little guide I read that really explains overclocking and how to do it. Make sure you read the whole thing because all of it provides good information. You have a good board to overclock with. That 3800 is really not known for serious overclocking so i'm not sure how far you can push it. Just take it one step at a time.


http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Guides/OCguide/

 

[siggsy]

Thanks for your quick reply. I've read the article and things are starting to make more sense.

I guess I'm just too chicken to try my own things at the moment. Don't want to fry anything. Some sites that I've looked at mention lowering the speed of the ram to make the oc'd cpu more stable but I feel that this might ruin my current BF2 loading speeds. What do you think?

Is it really worth doing this for a slight increase in processor speed or do you think with my setup you can increase the processor as well as the ram speed?

Any help would be appreciated. Anybody with this sort of setup that has oc'd and seen gains in BF2 performance?

 

[SuperFly03]

I used to be a noob with AMD OC'ing but then i read the sticky post on DFI-Street forums, now I'm really getting a handle on OC'ing those bad boys.

Go into the DFI Street Forums, then find the overclocking section then choose the AMD link. In the stickies will be a thread called Definitive AMD64 overclocking guide. Read ALL of it, thats how I learned 1/2 of what I know about OC'ing the AMD64's.

I'm getting more and more ambitious. My current goal is 3000Mhz on a venice core, STABLE. I've managed just north of 2800Mhz and its not quite stable. The stability boils down to Data Drive Strength and Data Strength options, at least on my Expert Board. Its an expercise in patience and frustration, but keep at it.

let us know

 

[dvdpiddy]

don't call your self an idiot your a noob you have the right to not be as knoweledgable as the rest of us geez i hate when noobs call them selves stupid it reminds of many bad memory's (lanparty 03)

 

[siggsy]

don't call your self an idiot your a noob you have the right to not be as knoweledgable as the rest of us geez i hate when noobs call them selves stupid it reminds of many bad memory's (lanparty 03)

Ooopsss sorry - your right, I'm no idiot but you guys make it sound so easy. I feel like I want to play in the bios but I also don't want to ruin my hardware. Just a kick up the backside and some encouragement maybe all I need

The only reason I was thinking of overclocking was to increase overall performance ingame but if it's not going to improve then I might reconsider doing it. :/

 

[dvdpiddy]

don't call your self an idiot your a noob you have the right to not be as knoweledgable as the rest of us geez i hate when noobs call them selves stupid it reminds of many bad memory's (lanparty 03)

Ooopsss sorry - your right, I'm no idiot but you guys make it sound so easy. I feel like I want to play in the bios but I also don't want to ruin my hardware. Just a kick up the backside and some encouragement maybe all I need

The only reason I was thinking of overclocking was to increase overall performance ingame but if it's not going to improve then I might reconsider doing it. :/ siggsy listen everyone here was a noob once in their life geez and not everyone can admit it look at some lanparty's these l337 bastards say they were never noobs they just cant admit that long ago they sucked at the thing they are good at now!

 

[CtrlAltDel]

I feel like I want to play in the bios but I also don't want to ruin my hardware.

I'm not the ultimate guru of overclocking, but by reading gazillion tutorials I managed to get my P4 2.8 running at ~3.5 (if that's good or not, someone may tell). Something that I learned, you need to be patient. Trial and error... And the patience is needed because you will do all the changes in veery small steps. This way if something goes wrong you won't fry anything permanently. Just one step backwards and that's it. Or then try to squeeze something more elsewhere.

If you smash all the numbers to max (especially volts) you may break something, but I think it is quite unlikely even in that case. Someone correct me if necessary.

Also, you were worried about lowering speed of ram. If you browse through those tutorials, you may notice that even if you lower the ram speed from bios, you are not actually lowering the real speed (at least not that much) if you increase your bus speeds (which you do if you want higher cpu clockspeed).

 

[chuckshissle]

Well the best way to learn like others have said is through trial and error.

But I don't really believe in it. I prefered someone to teach me how to do it back when I started doing overclocking.

 

[evanofsky]

Actually, it's pretty hard to completely fry your compy beyond recovery. At least on ASUS boards, they shut down before heating up to fast. Usually, the worst that can happen is your computer randomly freezes/shuts down during gameplay. Then you know you're too overclocked.

So, roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty in the BIOS!

 

[judey]

while you're playing with your timings, order yourself another raptor drive and setup RAID 0.

 

[SuperFly03]

while you're playing with your timings, order yourself another raptor drive and setup RAID 0.

I wish I had the cash for 2x 150GB raptors.... lol

I just recently got deep into overclocking, and now I'm reasonable good at it. You have to be willing to fail and learn from it, because its damn sure going to happen. I'veb een tweaking my system for 2 days and haven't gotten it stable for more than anhour. But, thats better than the 3 minutes it used to stay stable for.

 

[dvdpiddy]

while you're playing with your timings, order yourself another raptor drive and setup RAID 0.

I wish I had the cash for 2x 150GB raptors.... lol

I just recently got deep into overclocking, and now I'm reasonable good at it. You have to be willing to fail and learn from it, because its damn sure going to happen. I'veb een tweaking my system for 2 days and haven't gotten it stable for more than anhour. But, thats better than the 3 minutes it used to stay stable for. me 2 imagine the load times on bf2 with that instead of 30 seconds maybe 20 or even 15!

 

[siggsy]

Reference the 2 raptors in a raid, currently my budget is a bit stretched because what you see in my spec, I had to buy 2 of everything lol - My wife thought it only fair to upgrade her pc at the same time.

I had a go last night using DFI's auto adjustment by increasing the cpu frequency which in turn changes the ram frequency and just increased the Mhz from 2009.3 ave. per core to 2200 ave. per core and things were fine ( temps had hardly increased and I adjusted the vcore as well) apart from loading up BF2 and entering a server it crashed the game back to desktop. I'm just wondering if it would be worth reinstalling the game at these settings. Currently I put everything back to stock and it all works fine again. Either that or I won't use the auto adjustment and just increase the cpu frequency but leave the ram alone.

What do you guys think? I will have patience and keep playing about in the bios but I was wondering if my experiences are normal?

 

[CtrlAltDel]

I'm just wondering if it would be worth reinstalling the game at these settings.

No, does not make any difference.

To get the best results, OC manually using BIOS. Automatic settings or whatever Windows tools won't give that good results. And by doing everything manually, you definitely know what has been changed.

You had now some changes, which did not work. Do the changes manually, but don't put the values that high? It may be the case that your CPU is able to handle those numbers, but your RAM is not. I would try lowering RAM speed. Also, download some benchmark tool like 3Dmark06 / 05 or similar. They tend to be very GPU intensive, i.e. your graphics card has a big impact on the results. But if you're gaming, that's how it will be anyway. With those tools you can verify if it is better to increase CPU speed, lower RAM speed or whatever. Otherwise sounds normal.

 

[siggsy]

Ok, thanks I'll do that. I remember doing a 3dmark05 test when I first got the system (although since then it's been deleted off my pc) and my mark was just short of 8000 at stock. I'll change a few settings and try it again.

 

[towely]

If anybody has experience at teaching idiots...

Cheers,
Siggsy

Your level of self-awareness is remarkable. Most idiots are too stupid to comprehend their own idiocy.

 

[krazyIvan]

The MOST IMPORTANT thing to remember about 64's is that all system timings’ are derived from the CPU clock, i.e. CPU, HTT Bus, Memory, even PCI/e.

And all those other system resources have some type of Multiplier/Divider associated with them that takes the original 200MHz CPU frequency (The Master clock if you will) and makes it;
2000MHz CPU (200MHz X 10 CPU Mult) or
2000MHz in the case of the HTT Bus (its really 200MHz X 5 HTT Mult =1000MHz, the HTT uses one clock cycle to both transmit and receive), or
400MHz in the case of Memory (its really 200MHz, but DDR uses both the leading and trailing edges of a single clock pulse to operate at twice the speed). In the case of memory a divider is used to generate the memory clock, ie.
1:1 = 200MHz(400MHz theoretically),
5:6 = 117MHz(333MHZ, that’s 200 X 0.83)...
The other buses are usually locked in Nf4 MB's, but don’t have to be, so make sure your bio's is set to LOCK the PCI Bus.

So when you raise the CPU master frequency, you also raise the HTT and Memory as well. So you need lower the Memory frequency as well as the HTT. To do that you need to be familiar with your Bios setting in-regards to Memory, which can be quite confusing.
I would recommend looking for a sticky in the forum that talk about memory timing and what they do.

My guess is you will have a setting that allows you to select AUTO or MANUAL memory timing and either allow setting a specific memory timing i.e. 400, 333, 266… or it will be a divider as indicated above. You need to set it to 333MHz or 5:6.

Your HTT will also have an AUTO/MANUAL selection with a X5, X4, X3... for the manual setting.
That will alow you to increase your CPU frequency w/o making the memory/HTT unstable.

Voltages also play into OCing, VCC is your CPU voltage and its default is probably 1.30V. You can probably get more from your OCing if you raise the VCC to 1.4V.