Increasing voltage doesnt help overclock

[TheAntiDoctor]

Hi Everyone,

I recently had a bit of trouble with my laptop so unfortunately I had to go and buy a budget desktop. Shopped around quite a bit and for under £150 picked up the following:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor
Thermaltake Armour Case
4x1GB OCZ DDR2 RAM
LanParty NF590 Motherboard
512MB 8800 GTS Graphics Card
Win 8 Pro

Being a bit of geek, I decided I would have a go at overclocking as before all I have owned previously are locked, Intel processors. So overclocking went well, had some difficulties to begin with, but soon enough I had it stable from 2.6GHz to 3.05GHz.

This I achieved by loosening up the RAM timings to 200MHz, lowering the HTT Multiplier on both the south and north bridges to x3, using my stock CPU multiplier x13 and increasing the HTT frequency on my southbridge to 236.

Beyond that HTT frequency Windows was unstable - it failed to boot at 240. So then I tried, for the first time to up the voltages to try and stabilize the overclock. The LanParty motherboard gives you an absoloute myriad of options for increasing the voltage on a whole variety of devices. I went for the CPU vid core as I assumed that is the main core and played around. The voltage on default is auto. This is scaled to the CPU speed to around 1.32V at my 3GHz setup. So I increase my voltage, no difference. All the way from 1.32V up to 1.45 and it has absolutely no effect on stability. I pumped over an extra volt into that thing and I couldn't even get it to post at 240 multiplier, please does anyone have any ideas?? I mean I know this is a good overclock, but I would have thought that the large increase in voltage would have made a bit of a difference?!

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[4Ryan6]

Just what do you expect to get from a budget desktop?

Any overclock at all won't gain you much of anything regarding performance, it's really a waste of your time.

Just be satisfied with what you have, and the next time buy something really overclockable.

 

[TheAntiDoctor]

Thanks for taking the time to reply Ryan,

I purchased this desktop as a backup, and I knew I was going in with a budget so I'm not expecting miracles. However I thought I'd use this as a bit of an educational experiment to test some of the basic principles of overclocking. One of which is that increasing the core voltage should help stabilize an overclock - the subject of my original post.

With regards to the performance increase: this processor and mobo has a well-documented history of overclocking success so I don't think my hardware is unsuited to overclocking, although ofc I'm never going to reach the performance levels of recent machines. I am running Novabench (mainly because it is quick to run) to gauge general performance before and after overclock and actually there has been quite a significant improvement in performance. Before overclocking I had a score of 494, after overclocking this went up to 524, a performance increase of 15%.

With regards to wasting my time, surely this is one of the best uses of overclocking? Taking a budget desktop and making it into something better, something that gives you a performance boost that you can actually notice. There is definitely a personal satisfaction to derived from pushing an i5-3750K to 4.5GHz, but the current, practical benefits? Almost none.

 

[whooleo]

What do you expect from a 90nm Windsor core? 3GHz to 3.4GHz was max for the Windsor and Brisbane cores however some Brisbane cores can get a little bit higher but that's offset by half the cache amount.

P.S. You shouldn't be overclocking the HT link to the northbridge it makes things unstable fast and gives you no benefit, instead find the max frequency of the chip without OCing the HT CPU NB/memory controller link then go for OCing the HT CPU NB link (NOT the HT link to the northbridge). OCing the HT CPU NB bus isn't as important as raw CPU clock speed.

 

[Murissokah]

Hello Doc,

I was surprised by your statement of a well documented history of overclocking. I remember back in the day I chose a Pentium D805 over the X2 specifically because reviewers were having a lot of trouble pushing a decent overclock on it. Maybe overclocking knowledge improved from that time.

As for the matter at hand, my first thought would be that you have hit a wall on your motherboard's BUS. Even though the internal frequencies on the CPU, Northbridge and Southbridge can be managed through lowering the multipler, the BUS itself is running at the increased HTT frequency and can be increased no further.

If you are really dead set on overclocking further, I would look around any settings regarding the HTT voltage.

That would be my understanding of the HTT bus, which may obviously be flawed.

 

[Murissokah]

P.S. You shouldn't be overclocking the HT link to the northbridge it makes things unstable fast and gives you no benefit, instead find the max frequency of the chip without OCing the HT CPU NB/memory controller link then go for OCing the HT CPU NB link (NOT the HT link to the northbridge). OCing the HT CPU NB bus isn't as important as raw CPU clock speed.

How would he overclock without increasing the BUS frequency, given this is a multipler-locked CPU?

 

[whooleo]

How would he overclock without increasing the BUS frequency, given this is a multipler-locked CPU?

The particular bus frequency that's in AMD mobos (starts at 200MHz) is what controls the overclocking however it's pretty arbitrary because there are only two ACTUAL buses in AMD K8+ designs and both are HT buses so it's not really related to anything except that it's tied to the HT buses so when this arbitrary bus is OCed so are the HT buses.

It basically allows overclocking of the CPU without overclocking the HT buses if you lower their respective multipliers.

 

[TheAntiDoctor]

Hello Doc,

I was surprised by your statement of a well documented history of overclocking. I remember back in the day I chose a Pentium D805 over the X2 specifically because reviewers were having a lot of trouble pushing a decent overclock on it. Maybe overclocking knowledge improved from that time.

As for the matter at hand, my first thought would be that you have hit a wall on your motherboard's BUS. Even though the internal frequencies on the CPU, Northbridge and Southbridge can be managed through lowering the multipler, the BUS itself is running at the increased HTT frequency and can be increased no further.

If you are really dead set on overclocking further, I would look around any settings regarding the HTT voltage.

That would be my understanding of the HTT bus, which may obviously be flawed.

Hi Murissokah,

Perhaps my statement about the overclocking success of my CPU was a little hasty, I am not completely sure that it is well-known for overclocking, but I have seen some CPUZ verifications that show the CPU up to 3.3 - 3.GHz, unfortunately I can't find the exact pages. The LanParty motherboard on the other hand is definitely well known for being specially designed for enthusiasts and overclockers

Thanks so very much for your help, I really, really appreciate it! I will have a look into your suggestions; thanks also for the explanation, I now understand a bit better about what might be happening. It's really nice of you to have actually answered my question - people like you will keep me coming back to this forum

 

[TheAntiDoctor]

The particular bus frequency that's in AMD mobos (starts at 200MHz) is what controls the overclocking however it's pretty arbitrary because there are only two ACTUAL buses in AMD K8+ designs and both are HT buses so it's not really related to anything except that it's tied to the HT buses so when this arbitrary bus is OCed so are the HT buses.

It basically allows overclocking of the CPU without overclocking the HT buses if you lower their respective multipliers.

Hi whooleo,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my original post. With regards to your earlier question about what I expect, I refer you to my reply to the very first guy's post.

Thanks for sharing some of your knowledge of the AMD K8+ designs, it's clear you know what you're talking about. However, I'm slightly confused by you talking about AMD mobos and its relevance to my question as I am using a LanParty mobo and an AMD CPU...

I know what I'm trying to do is difficult - I wouldn't be posting on here otherwise and I am fairly new to overclocking as I previously stated

 

[whooleo]

Hi whooleo,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my original post. With regards to your earlier question about what I expect, I refer you to my reply to the very first guy's post.

Thanks for sharing some of your knowledge of the AMD K8+ designs, it's clear you know what you're talking about. However, I'm slightly confused by you talking about AMD mobos and its relevance to my question as I am using a LanParty mobo and an AMD CPU...

I know what I'm trying to do is difficult - I wouldn't be posting on here otherwise and I am fairly new to overclocking as I previously stated

In order to get to a higher frequency just up the 200MHz base clock and lower your RAM multiplier and BOTH HT link multipliers and keep them as close to stock as possible (DO NOT OC THE HT BUS LEADING TO THE NORTHBRIDGE). After you've found your max core clock then you can try for the CPU NB HT bus but it's not that important.

What I mean by AMD mobos is all socket AM2, AM2+, AM3, etc. mobos.

 

[4Ryan6]

I missed the fact you have a DFI M/B in your machine, you do realize DFI is no longer in business?

I remember the DFI Lanparty days!

In it's day DFI was a good company not really sure what happened to them, they went out of the picture some time around the loss of EPOX, but anyway below is a link that might help you.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/957/dfi_lanparty_ut_nf590_sli_m2r_g_motherboard/index5.html