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07/01/2006 18:18:57
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InsaneManiac
Rampage
Joined: 04/27/2006 07:23:22
Messages: 159
Location: San Diego, California
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I am an avid reader of computer technology. I'm always on the move to learn something new. Since a lot of people like to overclock and tweak, I figured that the information might be useful for some people who are interested in this sort of thing. I also am posting a few hardware guides. A lot of this information should only be used as an outline. Anything you decide to do with your computer is your own responsibility and I am not responsible for anything that happens if you mess up somewhere. These guides and articles are for general use. They will not give you word for word on what you are supposed to do. I take no credit for this information. All credit goes to the original authors and owners of this work. IThe information came from PC Pitstop Forums, Firingsquad Forums, Tomshardware, OC Forums, and TweakGuides.
OC Forums PSU Buyer's Guide & How To
Firing Squad Hardware Guide
TomsHardware VGA Charts
Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide
ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide]ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide
Tweak Guides, Tweaking Companion
PC Pitstop Useful OC Help and Diagnostic Utilities
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"Kindness from the Heart is Compassion from the Soul." -Unknown-
A proud member of the VGVN.
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07/01/2006 19:49:18
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Spacey
Wicked Sick!
Joined: 01/07/2005 21:28:14
Messages: 589
Location: Da'Burgh (Pittsburgh) PA
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As an computer engineer, who knows how the smoke is put into the chips to make them work (my studies covered everything from making the silicon to writing the OS), I want to stress something very, very important.
COOLING SHOULD BE YOUR #1 CONCERN
In all those classes, I know that power dissapation is proportional in some fashion to the frequency. If you look at the very technical documents for the components on your system, you will find that most of the heavy power usage chips actually have a curve which looks something like a U. If you take the clock frequency too low, the power dissapation will increase to the point where your chip will literally sizzle, pop, and next thing you know, you have that sickening smell of well cooked silicon and bakellite. The same thing goes for higher clock rates as well, though the transition is often slightly more gradual. So for example, the MC68020 processor, which was used in the early Mac computers along with lots of Sun servers could never have a clock rate of less than 4MHz, and the top end supported clock frequency, which depended on the chip, might
be 25MHz. So if you ran it at 3.95MHz or 25.1MHz...Pop! POP! Sizzle! SIZZLE!
Now, with modern chips, these frequencies are significantly higher, but the problem still exists. For example, my system, with a AMD Athlon 2500 Barton CPU, runs an external clock of 333MHz, which is multiplied to roughly 1834MHz . But because of the way they make and mark the chips (they make a batch, test some samples at a set of clock speeds, and mark it according to the highest the chip runs at while not exceeding certain specs such as temp, current, etc.), the chip I have might be able to handle being run 5% faster, or only 1% faster. Indeed, it is even possible to find chips which cannot support the marked speed (such as I have a P100 chip which runs fine as a P90, but that extra 9MHz to put it at what was called a P100 resulted in lots of errors), but tigher QA processes make this a rare case today. Go above speed, and you get errors or worse.
What is worse? Well, remember I said that if you run outside of that "window" of clock frequencies, the chips would get hotter and potentially fry. Well, you really do not know where that is. Worse, there is a second law which applies to this whole picture. Thanks to lots of complicated physics, and lots of measurements and statistical analysis which takes a full year to study in detail while working on your MS, we know that for every 10 degC, the lifetime of electronic components will be cut in half. This means that a chip which has a MTBF (mean time between failures, which measures the average lifetime of something such as a CPU chip, phone, hard disk, etc.) could be reduced from around 20000 hours to 10000 hours, and you stand a 50-50 chance of having to replace that component in 2.5 years instead of 5, on average. I don't know about you, but I do not have the money to buy a new CPU every year or two. And, it is not just the CPU, but the video card, the RAM, the various PCI cards, etc.
Now, you could decide to put in all sorts of fancy cooling. But the folks like AMD figure that if the cooling fan or something similar fails, you should be able to survive a minimal amount of time before shutting down. They figure generally long enough to realize you have a problem, save your work, and shutdown the system. But with these fancy cooling rigs, you can actually make things worse than with the regular heat sinks. With them, there is still some cooling without the fan. In the case of these fancy heat exchange blocks and such, if the heat does not get moved out of it to the nice big heat sink elsewhere, it builds up in that chip much, MUCH faster. So, if there is a failure in the middle of the night while you are downloading that huge file...well, about 10-30 minutes later...bye bye system. Worse, in failing, these chips can do odd things, pull the voltages of your power supply out of spec, and next thing you know, it is not only your CPU, but your $300 graphics card, your $200 of hard drives, your $200 or RAM, and all sorts of other expensive goodies which are toast. Indeed, I know of several people who have had this happen, and it all occurred in less than 5 minutes on their systems!
Your power supply should be your #2 concern
Now, here is something else to consider. Remember that complicated physics I mentioned? Well, as you increase your clock speed, and get the increases in temperature (which is wasted power), the demands on your power supply go up. So, while your system may function fine with a 400W power supply when running at the normal clock speeds, you may need a 500W, 550W or even larger supply when you overclock. If not, then your voltages will start doing funny things, which just exacerbates the whole temperature problem. Worse, it means that your power supply is more likely to fail. And if it fails, you could be looking at the same problems of having to replace almost everything in your system.
So, to sum it all up... over-clocker beware! and before you overclock, read, read some more, and read even more after that.
BTW... I have helped design all sorts of systems, including some which run up at 5GHz or more, pushing components to their absolute limits. But when it comes to my PC,
I do not overclock.
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*BEL*_e (spacey), BEL Clan General -- You Frag em, I'll Slag em!
LA -- *BEL*_e (level 283 - Extreme AM), LW -- *BEL*_o (level 26) MM - ?? ( *BEL*_Rolaids ?? *BEL*DrWho??, Engineer... *BEL*BS_E_E [BSEE '89, Ohio U] (level 22)
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07/01/2006 20:46:50
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InsaneManiac
Rampage
Joined: 04/27/2006 07:23:22
Messages: 159
Location: San Diego, California
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When Intel released Intel's Netburst, they made it so they could push the Extreme Edition Pentium 4's up to 3.7 GHZ. Not all Pentium 4's can pull that off though. When you raised the speed on the Pentium 4's their temperature and power requirements would jump. So in other words as you started to overclock the processor would use more power and would get really hot. They probably would take the record in history as one of the hottest runnning processors around. What's amazing though is a guy in Japan pushed his Pentium 4 all the way to some 7GHZ . But the only way he could do that was submerge everything in liquid nitrogen. The Conroe does look like to be promising. It seems that with the Conroe there have been tons of records broken. I'm not sure on the details, but I heard a rumor that a guy pushed the Conroe up to 5 GHZ on air cooling alone. I doubt it's true though.
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"Kindness from the Heart is Compassion from the Soul." -Unknown-
A proud member of the VGVN.
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07/02/2006 18:55:54
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DrkSlayer
Killing Spree
Joined: 02/06/2005 00:17:50
Messages: 83
Location: Quantam reality
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I agree with spacey, I have a AMD 64 oc'ed like a mother... yes, even have the case badge to mention it, and heat is number 1. I was working on my sister's old comp a few years ago and forgot to plug in the CPU fan... um, yea, took me about 10 seconds to realize what I did and smell it frying; instantly pulled the power cord out. Amazingly enough it still worked after that. Mine's water cooled which can be unfaithful, but check your board specs, newer models have heat sensors under the chips so if it reaches a set temp then it will auto shut down. If you go H2O, I recommend an inline flow control monitor. *Remember, if its winter and your house is colder when you oc, think about the summer when ambient temp's are higher. Air cooling can only cool to the room temp, I don't care how many RPM's your fan is, doesn't matter if the room is 100 degrees. I'm using visual temp monitoring, get either hardware or software. You can get a temp display with software if your board has the sensors on it. Hardware displays are great and make your rig look pretty cool. They have built in alarms, colors and usually fan controls and their own physical thermometer. If you increase FSB then you'll have to increase the voltage at some point to keep going... I'd check some oc'ing forums to see how far others pushed your model before you fry yours striving for that one more clock tick. BIOS flashing to the most recent version is a must. You might have to mess with your memory timing's too, tRas and all to give the FSB enough latency if your ram is a little slack. Good oc requires good ram.
Secondly about the PSU, if your going hard core, go for a name brand dual 12v rail PSU. Ignore the mentioned wattage on cheap things, some how they're allowed to say whatever they want without it being true.. you need clean juice and a lot of it. You'll regret that extra $30 you saved when....oops followed by #$%$^, #%&?/<&**, and even @%#<+$^#?{%^#$%&^#$^.
3rd, gotta add this, case cooling is a must. In my pre modding/knowing what the heck I'm doing days, I drilled holes in the side of the case. Get that hot air out of there!
If you have any questions PM me and I'll tell you what I can to help out. Good luck and hopefully no black screen reboots... pray you get a beep or two at least. Remember, they have MHZ ratings for a reason.
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07/03/2006 11:34:57
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Grizzled_Imposter
Wicked Sick!
Joined: 02/20/2006 15:59:35
Messages: 713
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Just to add to the posts above. Look and research your total system specifications. This can be very important because if you overclock one component, and the other components are already bottlenecked somewhere, you will never see the improvement.
I am not a computer Guru, a professional or even someone who took classes in college, but the equivelent of the above is to revv up your car engine when you arent even in gear, its loud, and may even be cool, but you are not going anywhere!
The first time you fry a component is very sad. If you don't have a replacement or the money for one, this is a real big turnoff.
That said, I love to overclock machines, research the board and chip revisions and see just what kind of real world differences I can get out of them.
My best stable long running overclock: Celeron 900mhz cost $25 ocd to 1815mhz, ran it hard for 3 and a half years before buying my current computer.
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Core 2 DUO @ 4.1Ghz Grizzled_AM AM 43
Nvidia 9800 1g Grizzled_EMT. MM 85
4gb mem Grizzled_LW WM 87
Grizzled_EN EN 64
A drop of knowledge is more powerful than a sea of force~ unknown |
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07/03/2006 13:21:21
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dip42
Unstoppable
Joined: 04/25/2005 17:06:20
Messages: 344
Location: N.J.
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Spacey wrote:
Worse, it means that your power supply is more likely to fail. And if it fails, you could be looking at the same problems of having to replace almost everything in your system..
That is so true. My power supply died about 2 months ago and i had to replace my mother board , power supply and i got a new fan to keep cool, and a power button just incase.. Although i dont know how it happened i got it all free .. One thing dell is good for
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