Post Your Overclock!

skunksmash said:

dont get me wrong, some of what you've said has merit....but its a little off for you to completely disregard ''prime'' as a viable app, its a tried & tested method.... proven to determine ALL OC's stability.

i personally dont use prime, i use Orthos...... this app is UBER intensive on ''priority 8 / blend & stress''

IMO, all in all....taking your rig to the brink of destruction, is not necessary for the majority of clockers....

I don't totally disregard Prime95 as a test at all. I used it everytime I start the OC process on any box. I used it as a base tool to determine if a particular CPU/FSB/MEMORY/Voltage setting merits further testing. I have just proven to myself that alone it does not ensure stability. No matter what it reports it simply does not use 100 percent of your CPU resources. But it is a good tool to find a starting point.

In final testing I MAX out all my subsystems at the same time to maximize heat and power consumption. My standard is that your machine should be able to run at 100 percent load accross all systems at once indefinately. 100 percent. Then you know your box is solid.

ALL PC's should be able to run at 100 percent...100 percent of the time. Other wise they are not designed correctly.

Overclocking is really just exploreing the margins or buffer built into design spec by manufacturers to ensure that the PC's can run under 100 percent load. I see no reason to lower the standard of reliability or performance to over-clock.

Once again in my mind its not "good enough", standard is 100 percent or failure.

Here are my results

What's Overclocking and how do you do it?

Overclocking is taking a CPU that is designed to run at one speed (say 2.5ghz) and instead try to make it run at 3.4ghz. It's to boost performance and to get higher performance out of lower end processors. There are many ways to do it, but generally speaking it involved increasing front side bus speeds and increasing voltages on the motherboard to support the higher speeds. Pushing hardware faster causes more heat and heat causes problems. So, it's imperative to work at cooling the chip as much as you can. Not all CPU's are great overclockers...and no two overclock exactly the same. Generally you can overclock motherboards from systems you build yourself, while pre-built systems like Dells and HP's often cannot be overclocked as these functions of the motherboard are locked out to prevent users from dabbling and breaking the machine causing a warranty issue.

For me, I overclocked an Intel Q9550 CPU ($209 at the time) from 2.83Ghz to 3.2ghz. The Q9650 which is the same chip but running at 3.0ghz is $325 today....and mine is running a bit faster than that. So, all in all, not a bad bump in performance. Although I rarely do anything with the machine which would really demonstrate a noticeable improvement either. :)

pparks1 said:

Overclocking is taking a CPU that is designed to run at one speed (say 2.5ghz) and instead try to make it run at 3.4ghz. It's to boost performance and to get higher performance out of lower end processors. There are many ways to do it, but generally speaking it involved increasing front side bus speeds and increasing voltages on the motherboard to support the higher speeds. Pushing hardware faster causes more heat and heat causes problems. So, it's imperative to work at cooling the chip as much as you can. Not all CPU's are great overclockers...and no two overclock exactly the same. Generally you can overclock motherboards from systems you build yourself, while pre-built systems like Dells and HP's often cannot be overclocked as these functions of the motherboard are locked out to prevent users from dabbling and breaking the machine causing a warranty issue.

For me, I overclocked an Intel Q9550 CPU ($209 at the time) from 2.83Ghz to 3.2ghz. The Q9650 which is the same chip but running at 3.0ghz is $325 today....and mine is running a bit faster than that. So, all in all, not a bad bump in performance. Although I rarely do anything with the machine which would really demonstrate a noticeable improvement either. :)

Very interesting, alas I have a HP and I shan't bother then.
Thank you for an informative response.

Nokternol said:

skunksmash said:

I have battle tested my OC at 100 percent load of all of all system drawing nearly 730 watts at the wall plug for hours! To do this I had to limit my OC to 3.8 Running only that weak sister of a test Prime 95 I could OC to 4.2 and still control heat.

How did you "Battle Test" your Overclock??

I had my CPU at 3.6Ghz (x4 940) for about 6 months based on it passing Prime and Orthos however when I tested it with AMD Overdrive a few months back it fell over in minutes.

This has resulted in my system being completely reset to stock. I will not keep the OC if it is unstable in anyway. Don't want it popping in the middle of a game.

I am well versed in the practices of overclocking however I do have the problem of not being able to find a proper torture program. Passmark's "Burn-in Test" is a nice all-round test but too light for testing an OC. "Heavyload" is a freeware tool I used which errored after 45 mins with an out of memory error due to the file size it got up to working with on my HDD.

I would appreciate any advice that can be provided on Torturing apps (Windows 7 tested) that would allow me to begin to push my core again.

I will be implementing a custom water loop very soon and want to return my clocks to their oc'd state but as previously stated I will not run them unstable.

Thank you in advance

Edit: I downloaded LinPack to look at it but it appears to be an Intel created Benchmark and not sure if the thread commands would be safe to run on my Phenom II

I am at a loss to advise you on AMD chips. I USE Prime 95 Linpac OCCT furmark and other back ground apps first by themselves then in combination to blast my OC. But I have always used INTEL chips.