o/c windows 7

[jasin]

Something like a zalman 9500 or a zalman cnps10x with some artic silver 5 would be much better.

 

[jasin]

The Noctua NH-D14 would be a very good choice too.

 

[fastslvblkcar]

what do you mean not a good setup? areyou just talking about the heatsink?

 

[Mellon Head]

I think what's being said here is that your not exactly o/cing in the best way. Overclocking is an experimental process that can be difficult and time consuming to do properly. It also has to be done carefully.

Your 965 is made to o/c, for sure, but you have to do it smart, or you'll just wreck your hardware prematurely. Here are a few simple tips that I've picked up from overclocking my rig:

1. Buy the best cooler you can afford. Never use a stock HS, except for mild overclocks.
2. Use good thermal paste, like Arctic Silver 5, on your cooler.
3. Increase the Vcore and Northbridge voltages to the MINIMUM amount needed for your overclock to be stable.
4. Use a decent temp monitoring program like CoreTemp or Speedfan to monitor those temps.
5. Be realistic in your expectations. A 20% overclock is quite respectable for us normal humans. If you wanna go crazy with that 965 and get to 4.5 or something, then yes, you will need water cooling or something more drastic.

It sounds by your comments and questions, that you are new to o/cing, or don't really understand it all that well. I don't mean to be rude, and I'm not trying to criticize, but you really should do a lot of research before o/cing. Just because it's a BE chip doesn't mean you can just crank it up and go zoom without being careful. If you read the fine print, even AMD says not to o/c their BE chips.

It's like anything else. If you really aren't sure, then find out and make sure before you do it, so you don't do it wrong. Phenoms are expensive.

 

[mpcrsc562]

I think what's being said here is that your not exactly o/cing in the best way. Overclocking is an experimental process that can be difficult and time consuming to do properly. It also has to be done carefully.

Your 965 is made to o/c, for sure, but you have to do it smart, or you'll just wreck your hardware prematurely. Here are a few simple tips that I've picked up from overclocking my rig:

1. Buy the best cooler you can afford. Never use a stock HS, except for mild overclocks.
2. Use good thermal paste, like Arctic Silver 5, on your cooler.
3. Increase the Vcore and Northbridge voltages to the MINIMUM amount needed for your overclock to be stable.
4. Use a decent temp monitoring program like CoreTemp or Speedfan to monitor those temps.
5. Be realistic in your expectations. A 20% overclock is quite respectable for us normal humans. If you wanna go crazy with that 965 and get to 4.5 or something, then yes, you will need water cooling or something more drastic.

It sounds by your comments and questions, that you are new to o/cing, or don't really understand it all that well. I don't mean to be rude, and I'm not trying to criticize, but you really should do a lot of research before o/cing. Just because it's a BE chip doesn't mean you can just crank it up and go zoom without being careful. If you read the fine print, even AMD says not to o/c their BE chips.

It's like anything else. If you really aren't sure, then find out and make sure before you do it, so you don't do it wrong. Phenoms are expensive.

These are very good comments from Mellon Head (and from everyone else too)!
I'd like to add something: I have a Black Edition processor too. It looks good on the specs to see that your processor is at 4.5GHz or something, but realistically, when I overclocked my processor, whatever frequency I could get it to run stable without cranking up the voltage, that was good enough for me. So, my overclocks on this processor have always been at 3.3 to 3.4GHz. I've read many stories of people pushing this chip to frequencies higher than that on stock voltage, but every motherboard, every processor, every other piece of hardware in your system will get different results from the next person. The overall thing that everyone has stated within this thread, is you need to rid the processor of heat in the quickest, most efficient manner if you are going to overclock.

There are other variances to consider as well: where is your PC located? How hot does the room get in the summer? How good is your ram--not only do you risk frying components if you crank up voltages, but if your ram ain't up to snuff, you'll start to get corruption error messages.

Probably more, but a lot to think about.

Lastly, a comment and my opinion: I don't overclock mine anymore. Why? Three giga-hertz serves me well. Overclocking, basically, is to get more performance from a chip that may not be all that great at its stock config. Yours is a stock 3.4 GHz--that's plenty fast for pretty much any and all applications you can throw at it. You already have a Corvette... If you want something grander than that, get a Core i7 Extreme--just my opinion.

 

[fastslvblkcar]

thanks for thehelp guys really appreciate it i now have a new cooler on the way and when payday rolls around a new video card i bought the CNPS10X QUIET it got some pretty good review on cooling and noise. haven't decided for sure on which video card. i also have some ddr2 1066 on the way. thanks for the help again!

 

[mpcrsc562]

thanks for thehelp guys really appreciate it i now have a new cooler on the way and when payday rolls around a new video card i bought the CNPS10X QUIET it got some pretty good review on cooling and noise. haven't decided for sure on which video card. i also have some ddr2 1066 on the way. thanks for the help again!

Looking at your edit, your stock speed would serve you well for you video encoding/recoding. You can take advantage of GPU accelerated encoding/recoding with ATI or nVidia.

 

[fastslvblkcar]

looks like ati is probably the way to go

 

[CommonTater]

what do you mean not a good setup? areyou just talking about the heatsink?

I'd say it's a pretty good setup, based on your specs.

But it's not a very good setup for overclocking. As I mentioned before there are demons to tackle, heat being the worst. A stock cooler is intended to operate the CPU correctly within published specs which is where joe average is going to run his computer. Overclocking is an entirely different story.

As has been pointed out, it may be fun to play with but in the real world it really doesn't amount to a big hill of beans difference in anything... Your hard disk (the biggest bottleneck in most systems) isn't going to go any faster and neither is your network connection (the second biggest bottleneck) so any gains you make are going to be modest at best.

For all practical uses any CPU over 1.5ghz is fast enough for the average user. Increases in speed less than 1.5:1 (eg 3ghz vs 2gh) usually go unnoticed, except on benchmarks and stress tests, which have very little to do with real world computing.

Believe me a minor increase in your WEI number is, for most purposes quite meaningless.

 

[mpcrsc562]

looks like ati is probably the way to go

That's personal preference--read up.
[Not wanting this thread to go somewhere it's not supposed to, cause I can do it real quick ] ... But that is nVidia's big push for their Fermi architecture: GPGPU. In other words, applications that use the GPU for computing. So, ATI has Avivo Video Converter and I don't know by name the product(s) nVidia is promoting with their technology. But to sum it all up: Your CPU is fast enough to handle anything you can throw at it. And for your interest in video encoding/recoding, you'd be better served with a graphics card and an application that can accelerate the video encoding/recoding--in my opinion, that is.

 

[Mellon Head]

... Lastly, a comment and my opinion: I don't overclock mine anymore. Why? Three giga-hertz serves me well. Overclocking, basically, is to get more performance from a chip that may not be all that great at its stock config. Yours is a stock 3.4 GHz--that's plenty fast for pretty much any and all applications you can throw at it. You already have a Corvette... If you want something grander than that, get a Core i7 Extreme--just my opinion.

I'd say it's a pretty good setup, based on your specs.

But it's not a very good setup for overclocking. As I mentioned before there are demons to tackle, heat being the worst. A stock cooler is intended to operate the CPU correctly within published specs which is where joe average is going to run his computer. Overclocking is an entirely different story.

As has been pointed out, it may be fun to play with but in the real world it really doesn't amount to a big hill of beans difference in anything... Your hard disk (the biggest bottleneck in most systems) isn't going to go any faster and neither is your network connection (the second biggest bottleneck) so any gains you make are going to be modest at best.

For all practical uses any CPU over 1.5ghz is fast enough for the average user. Increases in speed less than 1.5:1 (eg 3ghz vs 2gh) usually go unnoticed, except on benchmarks and stress tests, which have very little to do with real world computing.

Believe me a minor increase in your WEI number is, for most purposes quite meaningless.

I agree with the points above, and I agree that the OP doesn't really need to overclock. The system's specs are very respectable already.

As far as the performance difference discussion, I differ slightly on that one. I'm only speaking from personal experience, but in my o/c, I noticed a significant performance increase over stock. The reason is that I don't have a Black Edition, so no unlocked multiplier. I o/c'ed my rig by jacking the front side bus, and buying faster memory and running it slower than spec. (This is actually a better way to o/c, IMHO) I use 1066 RAM, but it runs at 972. Everything is accelerated. The CPU, NB, and RAM, and it is a significant improvement over stock in many (not all) applications.

I have a 965 BE at work, and my personal rig outdoes it with almost everything, at the same clock speed. (My work PC will stay at stock for obvious reasons.) I'm very happy with what I was able to do. I really wanted a 965 BE, but couldn't convince the wife to spend the extra cash at the time, so the 920 was on sale - end of story - I got what I got, and it worked out great.

But like I said above. I did it carefully, and cautiously, and I really did my research before monkeying around with it. I also knew when to stop, and when the extra speed isn't needed, like CommonTater says.

 

[fastslvblkcar]

well i upgraded from a 5200+ brisbanedual core to this cpu and upgraded the mobo to be able to run this chip. i ws on an msi k9ngm2 board. so it'sneedless to say that it was a huge step up. i do notice a little faster converting at3.9g vs 3.4. i have tuned the cpu downto 3.6 for now till i get my cooler and ram then i was wanting to see what it could do then turn it back some. like said before i am new to the o/c sceneand trying to learn some better ways to o/c more effectivley.

 

[Mellon Head]

If you'd like to learn more about o/cing, it might be wise to visit a website where o/c enthusiasts post. There are a couple of different ones on the 'net that are pretty good, with solid info, and people who want to help. Much like it is here.

But remember, take what you read with a grain of salt, and get multiple opinions on the subject before following some possibly stupid advice. That also applies what I have said in this thread. What worked for me may not work for you.

Cheers.

 

[karlsnooks]

Follow Mellon Head's advice. His advice is excellent and well-written.

I'm an Electrical Engineer who worked for semi-conductor companies (amongst other things and other companies) and his advice is very sound.

 

[CommonTater]

As far as the performance difference discussion, I differ slightly on that one. I'm only speaking from personal experience, but in my o/c, I noticed a significant performance increase over stock.

I'm sure you did... and I found the way you did it quite interesting...

But, you were looking for differences. Tha average consumer wouldn't notice unless you pointed it out to them... thus the 1.5:1 observation.

I've built a bagfull of computers in my day (probably over 300 by now) and the one thing I've noticed is that so long as the customer isn't sitting there waiting and becoming impatient, speed differences don't really impress them very much.

You are right, there is a difference... but I don't think it's as obvious to someone else as it might be to you or I.

 

[Wishmaster]

I would have to agree with most others here. In fact, Overclocking is IMHO, more of a hobby than it is anything else. I do it just because i enjoy it. Not really that it helps such a great deal in real world use.

I have actually done a bit of testing w/CPU speed & RAM Speed with mine for the sole purpose of video encoding.
Mainly 720P and 1080P material which is much more CPU intensive than DVD encoding.

What I had found was, faster CPU core speeds as well as faster RAM speed with lower timings was more beneficial.

But how much more beneficial? You'd be surprised.
Running a test with my machine at stock 3.0Ghz Quad and Cas 4 800Mhz RAM & again OCd at 3.8Ghz and cas 5 DDR2 1000 speeds:

I found that generally speaking,
A typical Encode of 1080 source scaled ---> 720P at reasonable bitrates (approx 5800) was about 12seconds faster per 4min clip.

My math isn't a strong point, but that equates to approx. a 5min 15sec savings for a typical 1hr 45min. film. Something like that.
It might be worth mentioning, in my encoding i use x264 (MeGUI) with Palcebo settings Large motion search vectors etc, so it does take awhile regardless of speed.

So is it faster? Yes.
Is it worth it? Really depends on the user.
The difference truly isnt much.

In fact Ive been thinking bout just running mine at stock for awhile.

I always used to think CPU speed was the largest factor for video encoding. And while thats true to an extent, I would venture to say so long as you have a modern encoder, amount of CPU cores/threads matter much more.

 

[CommonTater]

I would have to agree with most others here. In fact, Overclocking is IMHO, more of a hobby than it is anything else.

Exactly... It's the "hot rodder" mentality transplanted from cars to computers. All that extra horsepower, all the expense and painstaking work... just to get to the speed limit faster.

 

[Mellon Head]

You are right, there is a difference... but I don't think it's as obvious to someone else as it might be to you or I.

Very true, sir. After about 2 GHz, or so, I don't think that someone who isn't looking for the differences, or benchmarking would really be able to tell.

Exactly... It's the "hot rodder" mentality transplanted from cars to computers. All that extra horsepower, all the expense and painstaking work... just to get to the speed limit faster.

Ha ha. Bingo. I had to give up my old Mustang.

 

[jasin]

I think what's being said here is that your not exactly o/cing in the best way.

Exactly right.

 

[jasin]

what do you mean not a good setup? areyou just talking about the heatsink?

I'd say it's a pretty good setup, based on your specs.

I was referring to the cooling when I said his setup was not good. I thought I made that clear though. I did, after all, mention several heatsink and fan combos that would work much better.