ebarone Posted January 12, 2009 Posted January 12, 2009 (edited) Hi everyone, longtime lurker here Over the last month or so I've been getting the itch to really max out my system. I gave it all the bells and whistles I wanted, but now I'm into the overclocking of it all. My system is as follows: E8400 Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L 4GB Corsair Dominator DDR2-1066 2x Seagate HDDs in raid0, via a PCI-E raid card Xigmatek HDT-S1283 cpu cooler Antec SpotCool fan CoolerMaster Stacker 810 with all cables neatly tucked away I've been tweaking and testing and right now I found the limit of my system to be ~465MHz FSB. However, I've seen lots of other people with much higher FSBs than that on the same board with air cooling, and I was wondering... how big a difference would I see in my overclocking abilities if I was to buy an aftermarket NB chipset cooler? I will say that when I got this board, I removed the stock NB heatsink, lapped it because I was bored, and zip tied a 40mm fan to it, then put it back on with the Zalman STG1 goop. I've also got the NB voltage maxed in the bios. Also, I've had no temp problems, my Xigmatek keeps my 450MHz x9: 4.05GHz E8400 below 65C when running prime95. I know I'm reaching the limit on my processor, but having seen other peoples' results (claims of over 500), I'm not ready to believe I'm at my FSB limit. So the only thing I can think to do is buy an aftermarket NB cooler to help along my results, but I dont want to spend the money if you all dont think it'll help. Thanks for any suggestions/opinions -Edit- Spelling, and I just had another thought... at what point do you all think about putting on aftermarket MOSFET heatsinks?? Could that also be a problem for me? Edited January 12, 2009 by ebarone Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
malmsteenisgod Posted January 12, 2009 Posted January 12, 2009 It sounds like you've done a nice enough job with the NB heatsink. If your voltage is maxed on the NB and the temperature is fine then you won't get any better overclocking by putting a new heatsink on it. I would say those people hitting 500 FSB are using watercooling. We have some good watercooling and extreme cooling stickied posts around here, so check those out. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebarone Posted January 12, 2009 Posted January 12, 2009 Sounds very logical to me, thanks How do you go about checking the temperature of the NB? I've always just used HWMonitor (from the same site as CPU-Z) to look at the CPU/GPU temps, but never have I looked specifically for the NB temp. Is it the same as "system"? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
SpeedEuphoria Posted January 12, 2009 Posted January 12, 2009 (edited) People running 500+FSB or air are normally running on a lower multiplier like 8x500(4Ghz) especially on the C0 versions. Edited January 12, 2009 by SpeedEuphoria Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebarone Posted January 12, 2009 Posted January 12, 2009 Aye, I have no trouble lowering the multiplier or anything, I just want to try maxxing out my FSB, or at least doing better than 467. Once I find my actual max FSB, I'll then start trying to find the optimal combination of FSB and CPU. I say that because on my board, the only thing I can do as far as memory is use one of three multipliers: 2.0, 2.4, or 2.5. There would be no point to use a 500 FSB and x2 for memory and x8 for CPU, ya know? So I figure there will be some balancing to be done, but I just want to max that FSB, hence me considering the heatsink for it. What other ways are there for squeezing out performance from the FSB? I'm out of ideas =/ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
wevsspot Posted January 13, 2009 Posted January 13, 2009 ebarone, with the intel chipset and socket 775 platform the performance gains from pushing your FSB limits to the maximum are minimal. what you really need to look for is that FSB sweet spot that allows you use an appropriate cpu multiplier and memory divider that yields the best overall performance from your system. i always live by the golden rule that cpu clocks are king for day to day computing. i've played with several different boards based on the intel 775x/g, p35 and x38 boards from Abit, DFI and Gigabyte. and to the board the performance gains from trying to hit that magical 500fsb for 24/7 operation just didn't pan out. i'd agree with previous comments that you likely won't see much improvement in the fsb wall by just changing out the n/b cooler. as an example on three of the boards i've tested or written reviews on, two of the three didn't yield any fsb ceiling difference between air and water cooling of the nb. the only one that yielded a slight increase in fsb ceiling was the DFI infinity 975x/g board when water cooling the nb. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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