On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 19:01:49 -0700, "Ken Fox"
||This is not really the best ng for addressing OC issues, even though your
||board is an Asus P4P800 Deluxe, same as mine (and I'm overclocking also).
||The best ng on OC'ing is: alt.comp.hardware.overclocking
||
||From what I have read on the afforementioned ng, the 2.8C P4 is not the best
||chip in the Intel menagerie for overclocking; most serious overclockers seem
||to prefer the 2.4 and the 2.6 versions, with 2.4 having a slight edge. In
||part this has to do with the RAM, which presents its own set of issues.
||Either of these chips, 2.4 or 2.6, can get to 3.25GHz in most cases
||depending on the chip and depending on your cooling. The 2.8 chip is
||generally thought to have less overclocking potential, more in the range of
||maybe 10-15%. As I said earlier, you need also to think of the RAM. If you
||were able to overclock the cpu by 25 or 30%, there is little doubt that the
||RAM would not tolerate this so you would need to run the CPU at a higher FSB
||than the RAM, and all of this gets fairly complicated including when to
||decide that you could keep going with OC'ing the cpu but the result would be
||less performance because the RAM can't keep up. This takes time to
||understand the nuances of!
||
||It sounds as if you are trying to use the "AI-Intelligent Overclocking"
||function in the bios; simple answer is DON'T. You will get much better
||results by adjusting the stuff manually. The problems with overclocking are
||(1) heat, and (2), computational errors. Heat taken to extremes will roast
||your CPU and your memory. Also, if you aren't careful, you can run your
||peripherals such as Hard Disks, CDRs, etc., at too high a FSB speed which is
||an absolute no-no.
||
||My suggestions are that you join the overclockers newsgroup. One regular
||poster there, "Skid," is very helpful and seems to take a commonsense
||approach. There are others there also who are well worth reading just Skid
||is the most prolific poster of the group of people whose posts are worth
||reading. Also, you need to confirm that your memory (both on die, e.g.
||caches of the processor) and RAM, are running at your overclocked rate
||without errors. There is a free download, "memtest86.exe" that you can get
||that makes a bootable floppy. It will run forever if you let it do so. It
||counts passes of the test functions and after 1 pass you have excluded major
||errors, if you let it run for a few hours you will get 10-20 passes which
||should eliminate any significant errors if the passes are error-free. On
||the other hand, if you get lots of errors early on, then you know something
||is remiss, and you should stop and readjust even if the functioning seems
||ok.
||
||Overclocking is a fairly complex topic and it is not something that can be
||explained in one post. There are many factors to adjust including the
||voltage (both "Vcore," e.g. CPU voltage, the voltage of the RAM), the FSB
||frequency, the timings of the memory, etc. There are circumstances where
||you might decide to accept a lower level of overclock than you hoped for,
||such as what I've got, where the memory and the cpu are running 1:1 but at
||FSB=220 (10% overclock but no memory delay). Each cpu, each stick of RAM,
||are different and you won't know what you can get until you test what you
||have bought.
||
||I'm surprised that you could get 20% overclocking on the "Intelligent
||Overclocker" function of the Bios. I bet that if you look more closely with
||a program like "CPU-Z" (also a free download) that the CPU:RAM ratio is not
||1:1 but rather something like 3:2 which might obliterate a lot of the
||benefit you think you are getting.
||
||You need to get plugged in with the overclockers newsgroup and start out
||slowly at first until you know what you are doing.
||
||Good luck,
||
||ken
||
Excellent post Ken and I wanted to thank you for sharing. I've just
built a new rig with a 2.6C proc, Asus P4C800-E Deluxe, and 1 Ghz of
Corsair XMS 3200 RAM. Been thinking of oc'ing but this thing is so
fast I just can't justify the hassle. This post has convinced me to
hold off until the rig 'needs' to be overclocked.
Pluvious
