Overclocking the e6500

[acdcninja]

hi guys, my dad has a pentium e6500 45nm wolfdale cpu which he picked up last week for 80 bucks. not a bad upgrade from his old shitty celeron e1200 lol. hes has 2gb of 667mhz ram in dual channel and a brand new ati hd 5770 which i bought for him for fathers day. playing crysis on it on gamer spec at 1400 x 900 runs great, apart from every 10 - 20 seconds it significantly slows down when something explodes or enemys start shooting at him, it dosnt last long, usually about 1- 2 seconds and then it runs smooth again. my question is, is his cpu bottlenecking his graphics card, because im pretty sure a hd 5770 should handle gamer spec fine. or should he be more concerned about his ram. is 2gb enough? and im not so sure 667mhz is fast enough either. would he be better off buying 4gb of 1066mhz ddr2 ram or overclocking his cpu, what would relieve this bottleneck best, and how should he go about overclocking. thanks in advance

 

[jsc]

What kind of motherboard? That makes a big difference in overclocking because it seems like all of the BIOS's are different.

First: memory - DDR2-667 matches a 333 MHz FSB frequency. An E6500 runs at 2.93 GHz (266 MHz X 11). That means that anything up to 3.63 GHz will not be limited by the memory. DDR2-800 RAM will take you to 4.4 GHz which you will not be able to reach. So DDR2-1066 RAM would be wasted.

For overclocking, you should do some homework. There is so much trail-and-error testing involved that you just cannot cookbook it. Even with similar components, everybody's results will be different.

This should be your first stop.
Core2 Overclocking Guide (generic)
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/259899-11-core-overclocking-guide

Next stop should be a guide for your particular motherboard. Google is your friend.

If you have a Gigabyte motherboard, this is very good:
Shadow's Gigabyte motherboard OC guide:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-245679_11_0.html
It's for an EP35-DS3L but all the Gigabyte Core2 BIOS's are similar.

Go through the guides. Then take your core voltage off Auto and set your memory voltage to factory recommended values. Change the System Memory Multiplier (or whatever your BIOS calls it) from AUTO to 2.00, 2.00B, or 2.00D - whichever you need to set the Memory Frequency to twice the FSB. Then when you increase the FSB, the memory clock will rise in in proportion with it. At an FSB of 266 MHz, your memory clock should be at 533 MHz.

Download CPU-Z to check your FSB:RAM ratio. It should be a 1:1 ratio.

By the time you increase the FSB frequency to 333 MHz, your memory should be running at DDR2-667 speeds.

If you need to push your memory farther, increase the RAM voltage. Just do not exceed 2.2 volts.

Don't exceed a core voltage of 1.45 volts. And keep your core temps under 70 C.

Remember, YMMV.

 

[acdcninja]

thanks for the reply, really helpful info. ok so are you saying that his ram isnt bottlenecking his graphics card, and that the best option is overclocking? he has an Asus P5KPL-CM motherboard, i understand the basics of overclocking and theory, i myself have an oc'd i7 on an evga board, but the bios on the asus is somewhat confusing, i dont understand how to lock down your ram, the lowest setting i can choose is 667, and from what i understand increasing the fsb would take the ram up out of specification. is that right?