New OC'er needing some advice

[dracosveen]

Hi All,

I am new here so am hoping not to commit forum suicide. I have spent about 4 hours reading and searching on here to make sure that I don't post on something that already has a current thread. I couldn't find anything but please feel free to point me to a thread that is already discussing my particular issue if there is one.

Right to the nitty gritty. Basically the situation I am in now is my own fault. I have upgraded my rig looking for better FPS and performance by throwing hardware at the problem. After reading some posts on various forums I thought that I would try overclocking as an alternative and possibly a pointer to a solution.

I am a gamer. There is only 1 game I play. World of Warcraft. So besides email, browsing and updating my monthly budget in excel, World of Warcraft is what I use my machine for.

I recently had the misfortune of been the victem of a lightning strike to my telephone cable. This as basically fried some components which were then to be replaced by insurance. I decided that it was time to upgrade and went ahead and got a GTX260 to replace my GTX8800, a newer mother board that can run DDR2-800 ram. These upgrades unfortunately didn't help as I cn set my graphics settings at ULTRA or at the lowest and still get 18 FPS in raids.

So then I started reading, as I should have done in the first place and one of the things that I read was that WoW is a CPU limited game meaning that the faster your CPU the better the game runs. I have to admit thinking back at this point, that WoW did run better on my P4 3ghz with a MX440 card, compared to now. So....whats better than a Core2DUO? Well a Core2QUAD ofcourse. So I ordered myself one. Once again I should have read before shelling out the bucks.

Right so now you know what has led me to where I am now. So while waiting for the C2Q I ordered, I looked into overclocking to see if having a faster CPU would really make the difference cos quite frankly going from an 8800GTX to a GTX260 and not seeing an improvement was bringing me close to tears.

My first overclock was attempted on the following rig:
E6600 C2D 2.4ghz
KingMAX DDR2-800 2gb x 2
ECS G31T-M7 mobo....(OMG I know its crap.....now)
Geforce GTX260
Gigabyte G-Power cooler
Thermaltale X-Series case with several fans

This was a very short foray into overclocking cos that board does nothing. So while waiting for the C2Q to arrive, I bought a new motherboard and replaced the ECS with an ASUS P5Q SE2 Turbo. The reason I bought this board is because it looked to me, the nooob overclocker, like a board I could use to overclock various chips and ram and not break the bank. I think at this point I should mention that I live in South Africa. We are usually 3 - 5 years behind the rest of the world. An exaggeration I know but you get my drift, so I have to make do with what I can afford.

Right so I popped in the mother board and started reading on overclocking here. The only thing I did was change the Ai Tuner to manual and then upped the FSB to 333 (leaving everything else on auto) which for the E6600 at x9 was slightly over 3ghz. I tried going to 3.15ghz (according to another post I found) but got an error in Prime95 on one of the cores so backed it down to 333 again. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, this did make a marked improvement in WoW for me. In high density areas with medium settings I am now getting 50FPS upwards which is a 100% improvement. In raids I am seeing maybe a 50% improvement, however we have crap internet in SA so I can't be sure.

Ok so questions part 1:
1) Could I have overclocked the E6600 past 3.15ghz if I had played with the vcore, NB and DRAM voltages and timings? (At this point I had not gone into this site indepth)

So now enter the C2Q Q8300 2.5ghz. Popped this in and booted WoW and unfortunately really couldn't see an improvement. Also I reran some SuperPI tests and found that the Q8300 was performing on par with the overclocked E6600, meaning I was getting very similar execution times back.

This is when I started to really get into this website and the forums and read up....which in hind sight is what I should have done right in the beginning. So now I have manually tweaked my ram timings to 5-5-5-18 (which is stock for them I believe), PCIE = 100mhz, NB strap = 333mhz, DRAM Freq. = 667 and I left all the voltages on auto as I am not clued up as what to do their. I upped the Q8300 FSB to 374, which is 2.8ghz (7.5x) and it was running stable with prime95 and none of the cores going over 47 degrees Celsius.

Questions part 2:
1) What is a stable speed that I should aim for on the Q8300 in my particular scenario?
2) How would I go about getting to it? I think this would need a better explanation of how to determine the best voltage to use. I did go through the C2D/C2Q overclockers guide on this site but it is from 2007. Is it still valid?
3) Did I just waste my money by buying a C2Q to try and get a performance improvement in WoW when I should have infact bought a C2D 3ghz and overclocked it?

I do realize that some of this post of mine is jumbled and maybe not strictly in the correct place so I do apologise for that. Any advice or suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Many Thanx
Draco

 

[I.M.O.G.]

The section of our guide for your CPU under "BIOS Settings" has great detail for how to get more, and I see you've already looked at it which is great. You can read more there about voltages, but basically, you can feed your chip a little extra voltage than it really needs to find a good overclock, then once you are happy with the speed you can read the section on reducing your voltages to the minimum needed in order to run the speed you are at:
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=515316

1. Stable is different for different people, finding maximum stable for your system and processor is part of finding a good overclock for yourself. The advice above may help.

2. Again, refer to the advice above.

3. Not sure about WoW specifically, but typically a faster core frequency is better than more cores for gaming.

 

[dracosveen]

Hi,

Thanx for the comeback. I actually didn't know there is a BIOS Settings section. I will go and have a look there because I feel the need for a better understanding of the settings that I am playing with.

Thought I would check back here though. I have bumped the FSB up to 400 which is supposed to be 3ghz. Seems stable so far but looking through the different apps, I have some questions and so here are some pics.

So as you can see, overclocked and running full tilt with Prime, but now I go to the Memory tab in CPU-Z.

I definitely set my DRAM-Freq to 667, but on the memory tab as shown above, the freq is shown as 400 and the FSBRAM is 1:1. Is this CPU-Z that has a bug or is there something that I am not aware of?

Then we look at the SPD tab:

Here it shows 3 different frequencies with the timing for each. Is it possible that because I set the timing to 5-5-5-18 and the freq to 667 that there is a mix up now somewhere because the timing for 667 is shown as 4-4-4-12 in CPU-Z?

Or am I totally going down the wrong path here? Reading back, I think I just confused myself. DDR2-800 = 400mhz and DDR2-667 = 333mhz. My mobo doesn't support DDR2-533 which would by 266mhz so I am very confused now.

Maybe I should just go and buy a P4 again.

 

[117425]

if your looking to improve performance for a game like warcraft you don't realy need an extreme rig, maby focus on upgrading your internet provider and type. Cable is still prett good, if you ask me i think its better than ADSL2+
the other things like graphics won't effect your performance so much, maby the cpu will have a fair impact. however you shouldn't need anything greater than a pentium duel core.
as far as my recs for cpu overclocking i say focus on your bus speed and work it with your cpu multiplier...and just ajust volts as you NEED to

dude your bus is pretty high if its not locked maby consider turning the bus back down and changing the mult instead

WELCOME TO THE FORUM

 

[dracosveen]

Did I mention I live in South Africa?

Well here is the deep dark south of the world, the best internet connection that I can get is a 1 - 4 mbps ADSL2. It is usually ok as I get around the 200ms latency which is on average similar to what most in Europe get.....unless you are sitting right next to a WoW datacenter. So getting a better connection is not an option.

However I fail to see how a faster connection would affect the amount of frames rendered?

As to your other statement about my FSB been way to high. It is at 400 now with the multi at 7.5. Unfortunately the multi can only be changed from 6.5 through to 7.5 so I can't bring the FSB back.

As a side note, would Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz 6MB 1333Mhz FSB LGA775 be a better chip for gaming than the Q8300 that I have? Based on the Should I get a Quad or Duo discussion I think that the c2d is the better option and the one I listed is about the best I can buy in my price range. Only thing that I see is that it is 45nm. From what I have read that is not very overclockable?

 

[I.M.O.G.]

OP: Give it some more time and someone will be around to give you better advice whose familiar with WoW as well as overclocking your chip. Fridays can be a bit slow as people go outside to play.

if your looking to improve performance for a game like warcraft you don't realy need an extreme rig, maby focus on upgrading your internet provider and type. Cable is still prett good, if you ask me i think its better than ADSL2+
the other things like graphics won't effect your performance so much, maby the cpu will have a fair impact. however you shouldn't need anything greater than a pentium duel core.
as far as my recs for cpu overclocking i say focus on your bus speed and work it with your cpu multiplier...and just ajust volts as you NEED to

dude your bus is pretty high if its not locked maby consider turning the bus back down and changing the mult instead

WELCOME TO THE FORUM

That's not exactly true during raids, and its well understood by a lot of intense WoW players that when there's a lot of things going on in the screen you can see slowdowns. I don't know enough to say more than that, but I've read from people I trust that WoW can be rather demanding.

 

[117425]

OP:That's not exactly true during raids, and its well understood by a lot of intense WoW players that when there's a lot of things going on in the screen you can see slowdowns. I don't know enough to say more than that, but I've read from people I trust that WoW can be rather demanding.

realy? i would not have though wow to be a demanding game on your PC, at least not beyond the need for a higher end pentium duel core with a little overclocking but then ive never realy played the game myself.
thanks for the correction