Overclockers illness... What should I do?

I believe I have an illness here. Maybe I can get some advice from some of you.

I've been overclocking my CPU's since my Pentium 166 days. Over the summer I upgraded to the nForce2 platform and got a shiny new 2100+ T-Bred B to play around with. Well it turns out that I didn't get a great stepping. I can run at 2300mhz but it takes a whopping 1.925 volts. That's a lot for a CPU that runs stock at 1.60. And that's only Prime95 stable for 2 hours or so. It seems that I simply have a not so great CPU. 2200mhz is just fine at 1.775v.

Anyway, I have this uncontrollable urge to buy a new CPU, simply to overclock it further. Now I know for the time being that 2200mhz is more than capable. My computing experience really has nothing to do with need, but I digress.

What shall I do? Should I give into the urge and purchase a guaranteed stepping 1800 or 1700? Should I take my chances on a Barton 2500 from Newegg?

Or should I spend the money on something else, like a hard drive to expand my 30GB limit?

What would you all do in my situation? A new hard drive or even a new video card would be more practical. But geeze, overclocking is fun. And the 2.5ghz barrier is calling out to me! Oh what ever shall I do!!!

is 30 gb enough for you??

if it is then go ahead and grab another cpu..
if you have local stores that let you check steppings that could be quite fun..

but if you're set on getting a barton then newegg is a good choice since they sell alot of them and their steppings are quite upto date

cherryp00t said:

is 30 gb enough for you??

if it is then go ahead and grab another cpu..
if you have local stores that let you check steppings that could be quite fun..

but if you're set on getting a barton then newegg is a good choice since they sell alot of them and their steppings are quite upto date

Click to expand...

Well it seems I have a great overclocking CPU on the way. I had a bit of confusion with excaliberpc in which they had cancelled my order for an 1800 per my request, yet I didn't want it cancelled. I had decided not to order it again and see how I felt today. Well the company actually called me! They just wanted to check to see what was going on as I hadn't re-ordered the product. After offering to place the order for me, and ship it out an hour later no less, I was sold.

It's not everyday that you find an online store(besides Newegg) that doesn't show utter indifference to their customers. So I take this as a sign from God. I predict 2.6ghz on air. lol

BTW, 30GB is plenty for me.

It's nice to dream.

All T-Bred A's average 2.0 GHz
All T-Bred B's and Bartons average 2.3 GHz.

2.4 GHz is an achievement out of reach for many, but not impossible.
Remember this is 3x00+ PR ratings we're talking about, anything higher, like 2.5 GHz requires extreme luck and choice system components like expensive quality Power Supply, etc.

yeah, but better than spending 400+ dollars on a 3.0 pentium alone

um.. no, Pentium 2.4c is $169 not $400 and it overclocks more than the 2500+ Barton. It's not a better value than the $85 Barton but it overclocks more for $169.

It may o/c more than a 2500+ but not a 1700+... 3.0-3.2ghz seems to pretty average for a 2.4c just like a 2.4-2.45 is average for a good 1700+ .. both a 1ghz o/c... and same performance.

c627627 said:

um.. no, Pentium 2.4c is $169 not $400 and it overclocks more than the 2500+ Barton. It's not a better value than the $85 Barton but it overclocks more for $169.

Click to expand...

2.45 GHz is a lot closer to rarity than it is to average. You specifically used the word 'average' even though you put 'good' in front of 1700+.

No we are not better than Intel. It may be crazy to spend twice the $ for gains that are not worth the double expense but if a loaded 2.4c Intel system (let's call it unknown system A) was priced the same as a loaded 1700+ or 2500+ AMD system (let's call it unknown system B),

(priced the same mind you!)

There is no way anyone with any remote experience in OCing would choose unknown system B.

This why there are Intel-AMD flame wars. Some of AMD fans seem to think 2.4c can be taken on. It's crazy to spend twice the $ on it yes, but it can't be taken on when it's loaded.

Yes, it is nice to dream. I had the extra money and wanted to have fun overclocking. We'll see, especially when winter comes around. I'm buying a clothes dryer this week so I'll get some extra dryer ducting to route cold air over my CPU.

Geeze, I really think overclocking is a disease. This is so silly. But I have decided to embrace my problem as part of who I am rather than deny it and live in misery.

Instead of just pushing CPU MHz, why not considering this:

Get a $20 RAID card (e.g. from Silicon Image), or if you have a motherboard with built-in RAID or SATA RAID (SATA needs a pair of converter to work w/ traditional parallel IDE drives), hook up two hard drives (preferably those w/ 8 MB cache, HD w/ 2 MB cache should be OK too) and set up RAID 0, you should be able to actually see and feel a big improvement from daily usage. Files (especially big one) would be open up much faster, applications would be launched faster and run smoother, ...

One would not see and feel a difference when clocking a CPU from 2.2/2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz, but the improvement felt by adding a RAID 0 is like changing a CPU from 1 GHz to 2 GHz.

PS: when using RAID 0, make sure backing the file systems. A hard drive failure or broken RAID stripe will cause loss of all data in both drives.

Quote for dreamer.

Wait a little bit then try to get the most recently manufactured 2500+s if you can. This is why:

Originally posted by Gautam:
The 3200+ is most likely superior to all other AMD processors.
One person on these forums got one, and got up to 2.5ghz at the default of 1.65v. I have never seen any other processor perform that well in my life. The best 1700+'s do 2.5ghz with low 1.8v's. One thing that must be kept in mind is that if AMD's lower Bartons can do so well, the higher ones could very well do better.

Seeing a 3200+ doing 2.5ghz with default voltage is incredible, no other AMD processor could pull that off on air. That strongly indicates to me that the 3200+'s are of better wafer quality, and are getting progressively better. The 2500+'s are always a couple of steps behind them, and also getting better. But never as good as the 3200+.

Click to expand...

There is now even talk of 1.5 volt DLV4D Bartons here:
http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=230266

Those things are bound to go higher than anything previously seen imho.

Jumping on the predictions wagon, I see a time in Q1 2004 when we'll see newly made Athlon XP Bartons do 2.7 GHz.

Hey hitechjb1, I partion my HD and keep Windows on one partition then Drive Image it onto another for easy restoration.

I suppose that can't be done with RAID, can it?

c627627 said:

Hey hitechjb1, I partion my HD and keep Windows on one partition then Drive Image it onto another for easy restoration.

I suppose that can't be done with RAID, can it?

Click to expand...

After setting up a RAID over two (or more) hard drives, one will see the RAID as if it is a single hard drive with twice the disk space (assuming RAID 0 with two drives).

So all the single hard drive properties such as partition, file systems (FAT32, NTFS, linux FS, ...), partition magic images or ghost images, resizing/moving/copying partitions, ..., etc etc will carry seemlessly to the RAID setup.

Just like partition is lower level than file systems, RAID stripe is lower level (closer to hardware) than partition, so anything that works in terms of partitions should carry over to RAID.

[thread hijack in progress]
Let's forget partitions to illustrate my q better:

Two hard drives no partitions.

You can only Drive image entire HD into large files if you drive image contents of one and save those contents in a file that has to be located on another drive.

When you hook those two hard drives up in raid, two hard drives become one, thereby making it impossible to Drive Image onto anything else other than CDRs.

True/False?

c627627 said:

[thread hijack in progress]
Let's forget partitions to illustrate my q better:

Two hard drives no partitions.

You can only Drive image entire HD into large files if you drive image contents of one and save those contents in a file that has to be located on another drive.

When you hook those two hard drives up in raid, two hard drives become one, thereby making it impossible to Drive Image onto anything else other than CDRs.

True/False?

Click to expand...

1. You would need a third HD for such backup using drive image or ghost, if there is only one partition in the RAID. HD are cheap now, I got a 160 G 8 MB for under $100.

2. Mutliple partitions P1, P2, ..., Pn in RAID (which is made up of two HD). Drive image of patition Pi into Pj where i and j are different partitions, i, j = 1, 2, ..., n. Would also work for partition copy.

I have been doing either 1 or 2.

I would not just have one partition in a single HD or RAID with sufficient size (say > 20 GB). A single sector failure will cause the failure of the whole partition, hence the lose of data of whole HD, until repair and backup.