Athlon 64 In-depth Overclocking Guide

jmke writes "Everything you ever wanted to know about Athlon 64 overclocking, and then some. If you are confused about HTT, LDT, memory dividers and relationship between these settings, then read on. This in-depth overclocking guide will show you how to get the maximum from your brand new Athlon 64 system"

Comments

Re:Seriously though

[Satertek]

Wrong. If done right, you can have a perfectly stable machine. It does take considerable time to get it just right, and there is always some risk, which is why "professials" do not overclock as commonly.

Re:OMG. What kind of....

[Alsee]

I think they know better than you what clock speeds their chips optimally run at. If your 1.8GHz Athlon wasn't likely to fail at 2.2GHz under normal conditions, they would have sold it as a 2.2GHz and made more profit on no more work.

Actually you're wrong.

Generally all of the chips in a single speed series come right off of the exact same assembly line, and each one is then tested for individual speed tolerances. This produces an erratic supply of lower speed tolerance chips. As the manufacturing process on a particular line ages it also tends to work out all of the bugs and the supply of low quality chips falls off. The market still demands a variety of price points to attract the maximum of low end buyers *and* to maximize profits from high end buyers. Therefore they ROUNTINELY grab "higher speed" chips to fill orders at the cheaper price points.

The longer a line has been out the more likely a mid or low end labeled chip is fully capable of handling the top rated speed, or even above.

Also they use fairly generous safety margins. Their CPUs get included in countless different mother boards with unpredictable variations and quirks. The voltage may be a little high or low, timings may vary, signal quality may vary, and most importantly different temperatures and cooling capabilites. Also they are supplying probably a hundred billion CPU-hours, they don't want to get a bad rep if even an insanely rare multiple-failure happens to hit a critical customer on a critical system. They use pretty generous safety margins.

Now if you're tuning a specific set of hardware with particular voltages and particular timings, and especially if you have a better than typical cooling system, then you can exactly tune the speed of the CPU. You don't need a huge saftey margin to cover huge uncertainties because there are no uncertainties. You can push the speed and maybe even the voltage a touch if you keep the CPU comfortably cool.

Also an overclocker is probably willing to accept actually running into a once-in-1000-hours system reset if it means he can get that much more speed out of it. That's not something you want to have happen on a mission critical business server, but it is an excellent tradeoff if it gets you 1000 hours of smoother gameplay.

Disclaimer: I have never actually overclocked myself (I've only tweeked BIOS timings), but I am about to buy a new computer and I am probably going to get a motherboard with enhanced overclocking capabilites. For just a few extra dollars and with a bit of serious geek-knowledge and and some (enjoyable) tuning and testing my system I can probably get a decent speed boost.

Not a bad tradeoff at all. Few 'hobby' activities provide such a direct tangible benefit. Even hardcore automotive 'horsepower overclockers' only see a benefit in rare race-type conditions and no benefit at all in day-to-day driving.

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