- Joined
- Nov 10, 2006
- Location
- Southeast Texas
First post.
Cool site, great forum!
The last computer I built was an Intel P III 500mhz back in 1999. Used it for a few years until it crapped out on me. I used my tax return this year to build my current rig back in May. I'd been out of the computer industry loop for a few years.
I ended up building the rig in my sig. Knowing what I know now, I would do things differently.
1. Different case. While I love some features of the aluminum X-Navigator, it's way over-the-top as far as looks go. I usually go for the "subtle elegance" idea over bling, but for some reason I chose this one. I do love the cooling, however.
2. More GPU! I naively thought the 6800XT would be a match for the 3700+. but it's not. My gaming bottleneck is the video card, and that's something I have to remedy.
Anyway, about the overclocking. I'd never overclocked a computer before. Heard about it, but that's all. I used my CPU at stock speeds for about a month before I decided to speed it up, and I found several resources online to help me out. Problem is, none of them were written for a complete novice. By increasing my proc from 200 to 220 I was able to achieve a stable 2.420, but ANYTHING higher would crash. A friend recomended this forum, and in about five minutes I found an online calculator for overclocking Athlon 64s in one of the stickies up there. Sweet! Everything made sense once I was able to see how changes to one aspect of the righ affected other aspects. I realized that my overclockiing bottleneck was not the CPU itself, but the fact that I was running my HTT way above it's 1000 mhz rate. After making a few calculations and a few notes, I went to BIOS and made some changes.
Now I had it at 2.640, stable. Tested it with all-night (9 hours or so) CPU Burn In, multiple simultaneous virus scans, 3dMark06, long periods of Seti@Home, and plenty of Quake 4. Not a single hiccup. Then I did some more research here, and found that many people were going even higher with the 3700+.
So I went to 2.750, a full 25% increase over stock. Still stable. Then I went to 2.860. Stable! My final score? 2.904, rock solid.
My settings: 264x11=2904. LDT @ x4. RAM running at DDR 333 (don't know exactly what divider this is, as my mobo doesn't present it that way). Vcore is set a 1.4125v. RAM voltage is set at AUTO. Oh, and I'm running the stock heatsink. With ambient temperature @ 75F, CPU runs 46C at load.
I'm pleased, to say the least. Especially so, considering that I didn't bother to find the limits of my CPU or my RAM prior to overclocking. I'm running a 3700+ 32% faster than stock at 2.9 ghz, on the stock heatsink and healthy temperatures. If I were to really dig deep, I imagine I could go a little higher, especially if I stepped up to some really high-quality DDR500.
I don't know the stepping of my proc, and I really don't feel like going through the hassle of removing the heatsink and AS5 to find out. Apparently, it's one of the good ones. I got it from NewEgg in May.
Questions? Comments? Advice?
Cool site, great forum!
The last computer I built was an Intel P III 500mhz back in 1999. Used it for a few years until it crapped out on me. I used my tax return this year to build my current rig back in May. I'd been out of the computer industry loop for a few years.
I ended up building the rig in my sig. Knowing what I know now, I would do things differently.
1. Different case. While I love some features of the aluminum X-Navigator, it's way over-the-top as far as looks go. I usually go for the "subtle elegance" idea over bling, but for some reason I chose this one. I do love the cooling, however.
2. More GPU! I naively thought the 6800XT would be a match for the 3700+. but it's not. My gaming bottleneck is the video card, and that's something I have to remedy.
Anyway, about the overclocking. I'd never overclocked a computer before. Heard about it, but that's all. I used my CPU at stock speeds for about a month before I decided to speed it up, and I found several resources online to help me out. Problem is, none of them were written for a complete novice. By increasing my proc from 200 to 220 I was able to achieve a stable 2.420, but ANYTHING higher would crash. A friend recomended this forum, and in about five minutes I found an online calculator for overclocking Athlon 64s in one of the stickies up there. Sweet! Everything made sense once I was able to see how changes to one aspect of the righ affected other aspects. I realized that my overclockiing bottleneck was not the CPU itself, but the fact that I was running my HTT way above it's 1000 mhz rate. After making a few calculations and a few notes, I went to BIOS and made some changes.
Now I had it at 2.640, stable. Tested it with all-night (9 hours or so) CPU Burn In, multiple simultaneous virus scans, 3dMark06, long periods of Seti@Home, and plenty of Quake 4. Not a single hiccup. Then I did some more research here, and found that many people were going even higher with the 3700+.
So I went to 2.750, a full 25% increase over stock. Still stable. Then I went to 2.860. Stable! My final score? 2.904, rock solid.
My settings: 264x11=2904. LDT @ x4. RAM running at DDR 333 (don't know exactly what divider this is, as my mobo doesn't present it that way). Vcore is set a 1.4125v. RAM voltage is set at AUTO. Oh, and I'm running the stock heatsink. With ambient temperature @ 75F, CPU runs 46C at load.
I'm pleased, to say the least. Especially so, considering that I didn't bother to find the limits of my CPU or my RAM prior to overclocking. I'm running a 3700+ 32% faster than stock at 2.9 ghz, on the stock heatsink and healthy temperatures. If I were to really dig deep, I imagine I could go a little higher, especially if I stepped up to some really high-quality DDR500.
I don't know the stepping of my proc, and I really don't feel like going through the hassle of removing the heatsink and AS5 to find out. Apparently, it's one of the good ones. I got it from NewEgg in May.
Questions? Comments? Advice?
