Overclock Maintenance Software

[OMGLAZERS]

After bouncing around a lot of forums and dealing with builds, temps and overclocking, I was wondering if anyone can recommend some good software I should look into when building a new computer.

This could range from burning-ins, temperature and statistics readouts, system stress tests, computer diagnostics, etc.

I just thought maybe people like me should know what we can do on the software side of the new build to help make sure out new investment isn't on the verge of overheating and exploding into a billion small pieces.

Alright, thanks to anyone who contributes!

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

I like Speedfan for monitoring temperatures. Sits in your taskbar, takes up next to no memory, and is considered to be fairly accurate. Every program will give temperatures with minor variance. The best indication is what your BIOS tells you, but that's sort of inaccessible from Windows.

For burn-in, SiSoft Sandra and Prime95 are the best. If your overclock can go for 8 hours or more in Prime95, you're good to go. For testing the overclock on your memory, get Memtest x86.

And for checking your CPU information from Windows, get CPU-Z. About the only thing it doesn't do right is show your voltage correctly, shows it much lower than what it's set in the BIOS. Best to manually set it in the BIOS, then write it down so you know what it is.

Good luck!

 

[bigsby]

+1 for speedfan and Prime95, though there's one thing you'll want to know about p95. After you install it, make a copy of your folder and put it somewhere else. When it's time to do stress tests, you open one of them up from the start menu, and the other from the folder, and put the affinity of them to 0 and 1, so that you get maximum... thing...

One thing I really love using which helps me overclock without restarting every little while, is a program called clockgen. It allowes you to change your clock speed without going into the bios.

By no means would you use this tool to do permanent overclocks, but you have that open and it'll tell you your clock speed for your ram/cpu/fsb, so you have that open, as well as dual prime and speedfan, and then you've got everything going. Every few minutes bring up your fsb a MHz, and then when Prime gets an error, bring it back a few MHz, and let it sit for an hour. Then restart and put those numbers in the bios and run Prime for 8 to 48 hours (I normally do it for about 12, overnight and a little bit more).

If you're doing Graphics card overclocking, then getting ATITool, regardless of if you have an ATI or NVidia card is a good thing to get, because even if you have an NVidia card, the "Scan for Artifacts" tool puts more stress on the graphics card than any other tool or game out there can.

If you have an Nvidia card, then you should get Riva Tuner (and you should probably read a bit about how to use it before you use it, because it's kinda hard to get started, took me a few weeks before I found where the overclocking section was, other than going through the reg). If you have an ATI card, then ATITool is all you need.

Getting 3DMark 06 is a good idea as well, as you can check the before and after scores, as well as scores with comparable systems to see if you've done something wrong (though I don't like how ORB doesn't sort through crossfire/SLI and non SLI/Crossfire). Some people like to use their 3dmark scores as an E-nis, but it only gives reference as to what real world preformance is compared to other systems.

One last thing is to get Memtest X86, get the ISO version and burn it onto CD, it is the handiest little tool out there. Whenever you overclock and you want to know if your ram is being pushed too hard (possibly after you've done most of your overclocking and am just finishing up by setting timings and stuff in the bios), then you just pop this disk in and wait an hour or less, it doesn't normally take long for it to find errors if there are any.

That's all I can think of right now, I might come back with more later on.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

It's best not to use software like ClockGen. It's much more dangerous than the BIOS. It's better to waste a few minutes on a reboot than to waste money on replacement parts.

Other than that, good advice.

 

[bigsby]

It's best not to use software like ClockGen. It's much more dangerous than the BIOS. It's better to waste a few minutes on a reboot than to waste money on replacement parts.

Other than that, good advice.

Though I have heard that software overclocking is not as stable as hardware overclocking, I have never heard of it being dangerous to use, unless you're trying to do permanent software overclocking, which is why I said to put it into the bios. I have used clockgen for a while, adn most of the people that I know that overclock use clockgen, and none of us has had any problems with clockgen, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Though there is a bit of difference between rebooting once or twice to change your fsb, and changing it every little while. The beauty behind clockgen is that you can change it one mhz at a time without having to reboot, so you can get the best stability without it taking days or weeks.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

Though there is a bit of difference between rebooting once or twice to change your fsb, and changing it every little while. The beauty behind clockgen is that you can change it one mhz at a time without having to reboot, so you can get the best stability without it taking days or weeks.

My take on it is if you want the highest stable speeds possible, a great reward, you should take the time on it to make sure you get it right without risking serious damage.

Sure, people will have good experiences with it. People also had good experiences with the pet rock. And look how they turned out

Clockgen's just never appealed to me. Besides, there's no guarantee that it will let you reach your maximum speed/stability ratio. Minor differences could account for a few MHz here, a few MHz there. If you depend on it to tell you your max, you might not reach it except through the hardcore overclocking in the BIOS.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[n0odle]

I perfer coretemp over Speedfan but that's just me.