Let the vogue begin

[thedougster]

Right I have not long built my first system and touch wood it appears to have worked :nod:

 

Now I have never tried to overclock before and am looking to try.

 

I have searched the forum and have found loads of information as you can imagine. But i was looking to see if anyone who has a similar system to me could point me in the right direction of a post that I could read to start my overclocking. I don't know if there is a step by step guide or even a post that tells me how to get a start.

 

In anticipation I have downloaded some software that you guys have recommended (Prime95, 3Dmark06/05, cpuz, crystalcpu, smartcuard and everest)

[Voltes-5]

Here, start with this. It is dedicated to the 165. :cool:

 

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread...ght=opteron+165

[red930]

There's also a NF4 A64 Overclocking Guide that's really specific on where to start (I'm not completely sure if it's *all* applicable to an opty...)

[Burky]

The oc guide has everything you need to be able to overclock an opteron.

Read it carefully and apply.

 

DO NOT just copy someone else's voltage and htt settings when clocking your cpu, they will probably not work for you, and you may even end up either frying or overheating you cpu.

Read the guide thoroughly, make sure you understand all the ratios in there, and the cause and effect of each setting, so that when you tweak it, you know what will happen.

You need to start your own overclock from scratch, and go up in small increments, like 10mhz on the htt, and small voltage increments (like 0.025v) and then you will be safe.

[thedougster]

Thanks guys. Have started reading it and believe it or not I'm getting quite excited about trying it.

 

Have a couple of simple questions though?

 

1. How do you open more than 1 instance of Prime95? When one is open and I click the shortcut to open another it just stayed with the one open (hope that makes sense)

 

2. What torture test do you run to see if it is stable? I think there is 4 options and I don't know which one to use?

 

3. In Everest, under motherboard then CPU there is a report telling you the CPU utilization. It has core 1 and core 2 with the percentage of utilization. When I run Prime95 on core 2 it shows it utilizing that core (about 100%) however when i run it on core 1 it doesn't show any utilization as it stays at 0% even although i know it is utilizing it as i can look in task manager and it shows it at 100%. Do i need to do something in Everest to allow it to read from core 1?

 

 

 

Thanks for all the help guys

[SquattingDog]

Have a couple of simple questions though?

 

1. How do you open more than 1 instance of Prime95? When one is open and I click the shortcut to open another it just stayed with the one open (hope that makes sense)

 

Angry has a writeup on it somewhere here.

 

Basically do this:

 

Create two shortcuts to Prime (call one Prime95 core0, one prime95 core1 or whatever, so you remember which is which)

 

Now right-click on each on of the prime95 shortcuts and in one add "-A0" and in the other "-A1" after the " " surrounding the directory it is located in the TARGET section. Add those -A0 and -A1 with a space after the quotes, and DO NOT put quotation marks around them.

 

Now open both instances of Prime.

 

If you click the Advanced tab, you will see "Affinity" in the drop-down menu.

 

On one version of prime set it to core 0 and on the other one, core 1.

 

That will let you prime on both cores.

 

2. What torture test do you run to see if it is stable? I think there is 4 options and I don't know which one to use?

 

Under Options>Torture Test use Custom, and set it to 200mb of ram in each instance (if running 512mb and no other programs) or 400mb or ram in each instance for 1gb. I would presume 800mb and 1.6gb for 2gb and 4gb of ram respectively. Alternatively you could do blend tests on both, but for dual-core priming, I don't think (haven't tried it or proven it) that this is the best option, as one core will have more ram usage, and possibly less cpu...

 

3. In Everest, under motherboard then CPU there is a report telling you the CPU utilization. It has core 1 and core 2 with the percentage of utilization. When I run Prime95 on core 2 it shows it utilizing that core (about 100%) however when i run it on core 1 it doesn't show any utilization as it stays at 0% even although i know it is utilizing it as i can look in task manager and it shows it at 100%. Do i need to do something in Everest to allow it to read from core 1?

 

As for this I'm not sure. I don't use Everest for CPU usage. I use speedfan can be found here

 

And a lot of people use Smartguardian which can be found here

 

 

hopefully this helps somewhat

[thedougster]

Thanks for that SquattingDog.

 

Do I have to make the changes in my bios or can i do them in one of the applications I have downloaded?

 

Thinking it is best to stick to the bios myself but thought I better ask as maybe there is an easier way of doing it.