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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"
Idiot would do that to this sort of NEW, EXPENSIVE hardware?
Would you overclock a Z-Series IBM server? Would you overclock a 20 4-way xeons in a cluster?
Give it a while. Its not like the MOST OF US will need that speed...
Hell, I use a 1 GHz machine and develop on a 500 MHz machine. Yeah, 500 MHz because many users are still stuck on 300's and 450's.
yet another liquid cooling story is on the way!
Hardly anyone doing professional work on a machine will overclock it. Generally it just makes your system unstable and prone to crashing and making murphey's law become a reality on your precious data. Overclocking IMHO is more for gamers that want to take out as much juice as possible from their processors, and even so, it won't make that much of a difference. Generally its just for bragging rights.
I've already overclocked my 64 to a 96. W00T!
Overclocking is not something that is generally done professionally; it is a hobby, simply to show off and make one feel important. The same is true of 'tricking out' a motor vehicle, or modding a PC case, or the entire industry of do-it-yourself interior decoration.
When rendering, and presumably other activities that might theoretically benefit from increased performance from overclocking such as data analysis and science simulations, your are often leaving the computers working overnight or over the weekend, and the last things that you want are crashes or visual errors due to unstable hardware. Sometimes I even underclock my rendering system, for it is far better for a render to take a few extra hours or days than to have the whole render wasted because somethign went wrong with your elite hacked overclocking with ten percent enhanced performance.
Overclocking also reduces the life of the components, noticeably when they are rendering at full capacity nearly 24/7 for most of the year.
There are certainly professionals that overclock, but they have either carefully weighed the cost benefit ratios and decided on the most logical course of action, or have had a series major setbacks and mistakes and are desperate to finish before the deadline next monday; the boss will not be happy when he finds out that another project is late because of your bumbling incompetency, Jones, so you had better move right in to your cubical for the next week, or you will find yourself moving right out, permanently. You can have that little wife of yours bring you meals; I certainly would not mind having her around the office. Maybe she will finally see reason and bail out on that train wreck of a career that you are conducting, and set her sights up closer to where her standards should be. And if not, she will still be something nice to look at. Tell her to wear something that will cheer you up...Man, this is going to be a Hell of a week. Now get back to work, Jones.
If it ain't broke... overclock it?
keep on because of a rumor that after the 4GHz barrier you can create a tear in the time-space continium... :)
Gives you another few months, you start thinking about that shiney new GPU CPU and stuff and salivating, but you know it's going to drop to .3 of the price in 2 months.
So you overclock. If you bought the low end last generation you can keep going WAY LONGER!.
I had a 9000 pro and was able to overclock to survive DOOM 3 and CS source... didn't need a 9600 pro or XT and wasn't tempted until the 600gt showed up... now I'm good for a few more generations unless it's another really awsome one (like the 9700 pro).
As someone who does real-time generative audio/video processing, I have to say that oftentimes what a 2GHz machine cannot run comfortably, a 2.5GHz machine can do satisfactorily. 12FPS may not be good enough, but 15FPS may be passible. People often dismiss overclocking as something just for gamers, but in reality, it can be useful to anyone doing processor-intensive, real-time processing. I feel that some of the anti-overclocking opinions here are a bit unjustified, and more of a knee-jerk response to a loosely correlated l33t culture. The only games I play are Clan Lord and Civilization III... hardly a reason to overclock. However, for video processing, I need all the power I can get despite my modest budget.
LOL.
The kind of person who, 10 years from now, when he gets his amazing new 200,000 GHz 512 bit processor with a terabyte of RAM, will say, "How do I overclock it?"
Overclocking on the Pentium I was fun. CPU speeds were still far far away from the GHz levels and in school, it had amazing brag value. Never matter that the recursion programs we wrote in TurboC (it was way back ... I was a kid) never seemed to compile any faster.
c hmarks/super_pi/did calculate PI to 512K decimals in 49 seconds (It was 52 seconds earlier). Didnt make much of a difference to anything else that I use. (Am an MBA now ... what i use is powerpoint and outlook ... I sold out!!)
... the results are just incremental, but they do give the kicks. Very zen!
Overclocked my HP Athlon 2.2GHz upto 2.5 Ghz. Noteable difference? Well, super pi http://www.computerbase.de/downloads/software/ben
The fact remains that overclocking is not a performance enhancement
Remember the "Turbo" button on the machines those days?
I was just happy that I could plonk a NEC V20 in my IBM XT - going from a 4.77 MHz 8088 to a whopping 8 MHz!
Question: If you frigging overclockers are so frigging smart, why don't you design faster chips?
Answer: It's bleeding hard work.
What the hell does this have to do with anything?
Most chips are just higher-clocked versions of earlier bretheren. There are occasionally different cores, but the difference between Chip A @ 2.5GHz and Chip A @ 2.8GHz generally has nothing to do with differences in the design, and everything to do with pricing.
Of course the real laugher is what the overclockers do with their "extra" cycles. Nothing useful, let me assure you.
Are you going to assure me that when, many years ago, I overclocked a 300MHz chip to 450MHz, the >50% improvement in compile times wasn't "useful"? How about the fact that I saved about $300 overclocking a cheap chip instead of buying a faster-labeled one? Did that not actually happen? I remember it so clearly, too.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I don't see why this is so fantastically irritating to you. Does it bother you when someone has a ferrari that they just drive to work or an SUV that they just drive to soccer practice? You know, it really bothers me that you have a kitchen and don't bother to cook up gourmet 5 star meals.
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
You're about two years out-of-date. Socket 939 and 754 processors with the same performance rating are now more or less the same price. (If you ignore the non-64-bit Sempron line)
Motherboards for both come at a range of prices, but tend to be in the standard $80-120 range. 754 ones may tend to be slightly less, but not significantly.
Opteron processors and early Athlon 64 FX processors (which were basically rebranded Opterons) run on Socket 940 and require ECC RAM; this is natural as they're targetted at the server market. No other Athlon 64 processors carry this requirement.
Basically, if you're looking to get a half-way decent AMD computer nowadays, there's no real reason not to get a Socket 939 processor with a PCIe motherboard; it's faster, more future-proof, and doesn't really cost any more.
Turn the power supply on.
Honestly, every one i've seen is so insanly overpowered, it isn't even funny...
On top of that, people will try to overclock a cpu when the problem lies elsewhere... RAM, drives, etc.
An 4Ghz 64-bit cpu is nearly worthless if you mate it with 64 megs of ram and a 3600 RPM laptop drive...
Well yeah, AMD's new "Cool and Quiet" feature, much like Intel's speedstep will lower your CPU frequency and voltage, thus lowering temperatures, and allow lowering the speed of the CPU heatsink fan.
:D
But the benefits of this technology are not to extend processor life, or primarily to decrease power consumption.
Its to make your PC run quieter, most overclockers running air cooled CPU heatsinks don't really care about the noise though, and the ones that do, splurge on watercooling systems.
I've heard (and owned) many a system which sounded like aircraft taking off when they were running (which was all the time.) Small price to pay for "free speed"
One of the first things you're supposed to do when attempting an overclock on an Athlon 64 CPU is to disable "Cool and Quiet" which by default (at least for my Asus A8V Deluxe Rev.2) off.
Why would anyone need a car that travels at greater than 60 MPH?
Because the speed limit is 70 MPH?
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
I'm beginning to wonder if the pendulum has swung to making underclocking the smarter move. Certainly I've never had as stable, cold and quiet a machine as when "Cool 'n' Quiet" (on my MSI NForce 4) is kicking in (dynamically lowering the multiplier). You might say I should have bought a slower cheaper machine in the first place but just sometimes (DAW stuff, those VSTis can be hungry beasts) I need the grunt, but not all the time.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
lifetime?? the average lifetime is well beyond the time the chip is worth anything.
*Few people get lucky because they need to mark some chips at lower speed than they are truly capable and they keep certain margins on the chip timings to ensure it works.* quite a lot of people "get lucky" as you put it. on a64's you often see 300-400mhz overclocks, that's not much unless you look into the cpu prices and how they hike up at those 300-400mhz. and those run whatever test you want for 24/7.. i got a k6-2 300 that has run at 450mhz for something like 6 years or whatever year they were introduced.
overclocking is not worth it usually when you buy the machine.. but ironically.. INCREASES THE LIFETIME as you can use the chip some time longer to play games etc, comfortably.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I think you've just described underclocking.
Try putting the clocks on top of the case.
Does it bother you when someone has a ferrari that they just drive to work or an SUV that they just drive to soccer practice?
:P
Yes, it fucking well does - that's environmentally irresponsible.
Yes, it would hugely annoy me and I would most definately make a point of it.
Really bad analogy
toresbe
Your time is worth money, too.
That is something I never understood. Why would I want to waste a day making my computer work just as good as something i could have bought for $200 more?