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AMD Optimal BIOS settings + Overclocking Guide
JMke writes "Here's a step by step guide on how to get the most out of your AMD setup. Overclocking tips and BIOS tweak settings discussed, as well as an overview of the more popular overclocking tools. Start your overclocking here!" Lots of good info here for getting the last bit of performance out of your system while also watching out for dangers that could fry your processor.
From the article: NEVER LET IT GET ABOVE 55C IN MY OPINION ON AIRCOOLING
When I had the stock heatsink/fan on my 1800+, it would IDLE at over 55C, and peak at around 63C under a full load. I never had any problems. Are overclocked CPUs more sensitive to heat, or is this just a "to be safe" recommendation? AMD says they're good up to 85C.
The biggest thing I've always found with overclocking (both Intel & AMD) is that 'YMMV' (your mileage may vary). I've talked to people who say they run their systems at 20% more speed than they should be doing, yet one of my systems constantly locks up even if midly overclocked. Increasingly I wonder, given the current prices for this kind of technology, whether overclocking is a bit pointless. Do I spend $100 extra or do I spend 12 hours mucking with my BIOS? You decide!
Overclocking also seems so 1990s now, most people I speak to who rate themselves equal to my own geekdom are in to case modding and quiet PCs... concepts which I find much more interesting than getting 5% extra FPS in Quake.
while also watching out for dangers that could fry your processor.
With all of the offshore outsourcing going on, we geeks need as much practice frying things as possible. =)
From the article:
Tom's Harware loves doing stunts like this. They've run processors without coolers just to see what happens, and they investigated problems with the early AMD thermal diodes. Check it out
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If your answer is Microsoft, you obviously didn't understand the question.
Seriously who doesn't know how to set there BIOS's settings?
My 96 year old grandmother uttered the other day that she was not perfectly confident with setting the DRAM burst timings on her nforce2 board. I pointed her to this site and now she is happy, because she could squeeze 2 fps more out of her box and can thereby delay the "necessary" upgrade for another 3 months. Silly old granny and the fps madness...
No overclocking is considered rock solid before you have compiled a complete gentoo on your OC CPU.
I have had problems with stability with the 2600+ so I would not recommend going that route.
It's pretty much what I did when I bought my new system a few months ago (Barton 2500+, 8RDA+ mobo). Their recommendations match the experience I had. I used (and deleted, stupid stupid me) a spreadsheet to track my changes as I stepped through FSB, multiplier, voltage and memory settings until I found my maximum performance.
Then I backed off by about 10%. I'm more interested in overall reliability and longevity than maximum performance, since I want this system to last for at least three years as my primary.
-Thomas
I would go with the 2500+ barton. They didn't overclock very well when they first came out but they have improved lately. The 1700+ and 2100+ are also very good overclockers. They don't have the extra cache like the bartons but most applications show very little performance improvement with the extra cache.
Fry the processor??? How about fry the egg on the processor!
-- Alchohol is a hard drug. Cannabis is a soft drug.
I for one don't need the horsepower of a top-end CPU. I have a KT266a-based board (max FSB=133/266) and I put an Athlon-xp 2500/333 into it.
My CPU is underclocked from 1.83G to 1.46G, it dissipates about 45W, which is about the same as a G4, and HALF what a modern P4 drops. It's stable as all hell and I'm very happy with the speed.
I do the same thing to my G3/450, I use it as a fileserver so the 450MHz is totally wasted. I turned it down to 300MHz with less than 2% 'real world' performance difference from the client machines. It also generates less heat and uses less power now.
Any of you living on your own and paying electric bills would be well-served by underclocking, as the VAST majority of our CPU cycles go to waste anyway.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
What if you get a $100 processor (barton 2600+) spend $50 on cooling (Slk 947 U plus fan) and overclock it to the performance of a $250 (barton 3200+) processor with no problems? The same can be said of video cards. It seems that cooling has a higher ROI than just buying the better chip.
Photos.
look for lm sensors. I'm afraid you'll have trouble setting it up on Knoppix if you have some not-very-standard sensor hardware - in that case it often requires patching and recompiling kernel.
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Believe it or not, one of the most common problems with frying a processor is applying way too much thermal grease to the core. Some people get crazy with this when attempting to overclock. It only takes a couple of drops, not a layer of grease to do the job. In fact, too much grease does the exact opposite and acts as an insultor which causes the processor to fry even faster.
The disc is the slowest point, add plenty of RAM as buffer, but nothing makes up for having a fast disc.
15,000 rpm, 3.6ms access time, 8Mb onboard buffer. And an HBA to match.
I find it ironic that people buy cheap systems with slow discs, slow network and insufficient RAM and then try to make it faster by overclocking the CPU.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Pan fried is an excellent way to cook your processor. After 24 hours in buttermilk, lightly coat it with some chili powder, granualted garlic and onion, a nice coating of flour, then into a cast iron skillet with a quarter inch of crisco at 325 degrees. About 10 minutes on each side, depending on the size of the CPU die should make for a tender and tasty meal. I like some mashed potatoes and gravy, and coleslaw on the side, with a pilsner to wash it all down.
The 2500+.
It's a Barton running at 1.83 Ghz.
The 2600+ is a T-Bred, clocked at 2.08 Ghz.
It seems the Bartons can overclock to about the same clockspeed as the T-Breds. However the Bartons have 512KB l2 cache, whereas the T-Bred is only 256, so at the same clock speed the Barton is generally much faster.
So the 2500 is cheaper and usually ends up being faster than the 2600.
Because once the application is loaded from hd to ram it's the cpu & ram speed that matters, not the hd speed.
Let's not forget that very few apps even need fast load speeds, even games don't need it. A modern IDE hard drive offers 50+ mB/sec speeds, that's fast enough to load even the largest games quickly, only when video editing would faster speeds be desireable. And hard drives are not like CPUs, their are no hard drives that offer double or triple the transfer rate of the inexpensive drives, your fastest 15k rpm drive might offer 20mB/sec more, which isn't worth the extra $200 and 80+ gig sacrifice to many people, especially when that money could be better spent on faster cpus, video cards or memory.
A fast cpu plus lots of ram paired with a slow hd is like a speed reader who took a few minutes to find the book vs a "metally challenged" person who found the book immediately. Which would you rather be?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
15,000 rpm, eh? Bet it sounds like a jet taking off. Honestly, yes, the disk is the slowest thing in your system. In most of my usage, however, I don't use the disk very much. What do you need it for? Well, there's launching programs, loading the binary into memory. I do that about once and then leave the programs running all day. I'm satisfied with the launch times, especially given how easily and quickly I can switch between processes that are already in memory.
What else is there? Every now and then you need to load or save a data file. If you are doing multimedia where you have a lot of raw data to read and write off the disk, having a super fast one would doubtless make a huge difference in performance (provided the system bus could handle it, but that's another matter). But not for me, my files aren't very big and I don't perform these operations nearly enough to care.
Now, what would make my system appear much slower would be if I had less RAM, causing virtual memory (swapping fast RAM to much slower disk) to be necessary. That would really make things grind to a halt. Yes, I'm trying to make a point here. Maybe for you that 15,000rpm disk is important enough to be able to justify the cost, but the first performance upgrade most users are going to need and will be able to see immediate results from is adding another stick or two of RAM. It's cheaper too!
I think for most people a disk that fast is overkill, just trying to shave a second or two (maybe a lot less) off an infrequently performed operation. Sure, it feels faster using it, and maybe that improves your mood or something, but perceptions aside, it really isn't that much faster. It would be nice if you had a computer that could do everything you could ever require of it all at once, instantly, but back in reality you have to ask yourself how much of a premium you are willing to pay for a tiny pinch of time.
The only people who would find this article noteworthy are people with AMD processors on Abit motherboards (only company with the softmenu bios option to my knowledge) that have the via KT266a or KT333 chipsets.
Many of these bios settings are based on these boards in particular, most of the time other motherboards don't have these settings, or they're called something else. It's a shame the article is written for Abit boards, because generally if you've gone out of your way to buy one, you already know a bit about overclocking.
There is some info here if you've got an Nforce2 board, but some of it is wrong. The article says to run memory at 166mhz, but these boards can run at 200 (or higher).
Overclocking is stupid. Especially since it started costing more than buying a faster CPU.
...So the processor becomes so amazingly pissed from all the inflammatory insults that it refuses to continue doing work?
The article starts with the note that you should keep your cpu temp below 55'C (42'C w/water cooling) when overclocking. WTF--k are they talking about? Im running an AMD 2500 that I got about a year ago and it runs HOT! like high 60's low 70's according to ASUS probe v.2.21.05 (obviously on an Asus mobo) with no overclocking... Im running the OEM cooler. When I play a top FPS game like MOHAA it hits 80'C! I wrote AMD about it and they said its within the operating range..(95'C I believe) Its nice now that winter is aproaching, I dont have to run the heat but during the summer, I really should have vented it out the window..
I dont do meaning of life questions.