New system – how far can I push it?

[neverfail]

Hello DFI Gurus / DFI community,

 

This is my first post - just before I carry on, may I congratulate DFI on the quality of their products and this open forum for enthusiasts. Well done!

 

Anyhow, I am a DFI rookie and just built myself a new system (see signature).

 

I have spent the last couple of weeks by reading through numerous posts and judging how wise my choice of components was. I have reached a conclusion that I am probably OK with all the components to start climbing the Overclocking Mountain, apart from CPU cooler, which I think is not so brilliant if not a little awkward. I do not really want to use water-cooling yet; whatever the alternative, it will need to be air-cooling.

 

I use my PC to play chess on the Internet against other machines; therefore I have very little if no need at all for 3D performance – all I am after is to be able to fine-tune my machine to achieve maximum possible clock speed and memory bandwidth. It will also need to be stable at full steam for at least 8 hours – last tournament I played in took 5 calendar days @ 12 hours per day (although with 15-20 minute breaks).

 

So, just before I will start to spend 4-10 days of my time and execute 500 re-boots to find the “sweet spot” [thanks to AngryGames] and risk burning £550-worth of CPU, I wanted to ask the experts, who may already be familiar or already use hardware that is exact to mine, the following two questions:

 

- How far do you think I can push my kit in terms of MHz and memory speed?

- What kind of air-cooling should I use to get there?

 

Many thanks in advance to those of you who will answer.

 

Regards

[Raphie]

In general (though i advise you to go through the guides) you should be able to set your HTT (FSB) from 200 > 250 while leaving your CPU multiplier and HTT multiplier alone. you would probably need to increase your CPU voltage a bit to around 1.4v in order to run this stable.

 

When commiting the time you can probably go a lot beyond this, but never forget to tests your settings with Prime95 (dual core load) and SuperPI (good for initial "ballpark" testing)

 

All questions that my post might raise with you are answered in the stickies. :shake:

[neverfail]

All questions that my post might raise with you are answered in the stickies. :shake:

 

Well, many thanks for this, I can confirm have spent a lot of time looing at stickies...

 

A kind of answer I hoped for, however, was something along the lines of:

 

"hi mate, I/we already own/built/tested a kit with components like yours and we pushed it to to run stable at GHz with cooler, before going for water cooling. We ran your TCCD sticks at DDR , and our BIOS settings were , but take these as a guideline as it may not work for you. Good luck..."

 

so that I can rely on someone's wisdom and know when to stop before it's too late...

[ICON57]

if you look in the over clocking data base you might find the answer u r lookin for, nice lookin rig btw.

[neverfail]

Ok guys, I learned a valuable lesson: Athlon X2 dual-core are pants in the proximity of 300 MHz FSB - they do not like FSB that high and therefore are not stable.

 

Also, whatever the cause, my OCZ DDR600 sticks have malfunctioned and started to give Prime95 errors at DDR600 on one core, then on both, then at DDR400 and then died altogether.

 

So I am selling my X2 on eBay and bought myself a nice Opteron 144 for £100 and OCZ OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Platinum Revision 2 memory whilst DDR600 sticks are on their RMA way to OCZ.

 

I overclocked these two to 300 MHz FSB to get 300x9=2.7GHz almost 12 hours of Prime95 stable - will make a posting to our Overclocking Database.

 

Now waiting for a pair of 175 Opterons and all the bits to build an identical second rig and overclock them to 2.8GHz at 280x10 to begin with.

 

So my advise to you, dual core fans, is: either dump your X2s or forget about running these at 300 MHz FSB before something goes wrong in a very expensive way... :angel: