Any gamers or bored nerds on here who like overclocking?
I've got a AMD 9950 BE stock speed 2.6ghz up to 3.1ghz

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at a reasonable 41°C, which aint too bad considering ambient is around 25 °C.

Anyone else?

I only OC during gaming, but am not much of a PC gamer. not at all, just oc to kick my pc in the nuts ^^. X360 all the way !!

I had it perm oc'd but since defaulted it as i have no ethical/outright need/use for doing so.

I got my 2.4ghz quad core (64bit q6600) i think up to 3.2Ghz stable at 39'C... 3.4Ghz bails out on intense games such as nfs undercover.
Got my ram up to 1:1 ratio (almost) considering its ddr2, but it wont run in dual channel, unless i put 4 sticks instead of the two (4gb) :S

Hth

e2a my chipset is very susceptible to oc'ing. Before i did so i read many positive outcomes with it

Mine is overclocked at 3.6 dual quad core for burning mostly, temps at 46 degrees. Running windows 64bit.

I've got an E8500 Core2Duo (3.16Ghz) which I can run at 4.2GHz just on the crappy OEM cooler that came with the chip - I only messed around trying to find it's limits for a while though, as it's plenty fast enough as it is - in fact day to day I let it use the low power C states and let it undervolt/underclock when it's not busy. It only uses around 5 Watts at idle.

I've also got an ATI 4850 512MB GFX card that I overclock for some games (Crysis etc.) from 600/1000 to 730/1100 - it also underclocks itself when in 2D mode to 500/750 although I'm about to flash a custom BIOS I made up that should allow it to underclock to 250/300 and also undervolt by .5V or so.

You writing an ati gfx bios? Is it based on opensource? Thats incredible amount of knowledge right there! Focus this on the x360, think ya can take a look maybe someday? As fas as the dvd hack goes thats fine ixtremed i suppose, just homebrew left...its done, just not as simple as plug and play etc etc. (kernel downgrading,linux..) the more minds on it, better the outcome. Im not tech savvage but when the bridges are laid i tend to walk it through

I miss my custom halo 2 maps. I removed campaign and had a boatload added into the iso still have that disc

Cheers!

I'm afraid that I'm not quite l33t enough to write my own GFX card BIOS - all I did was disassemble an existing one and mod it to my requirements. The hardest part about it was that they've started not encrypting the BIOSes, but putting weird checksums and check bits into them, so you have to be careful to recalculate these and plut them in the right place if you've made any modifications.

I just wish that I had a good, known working PCI GFX card in my spares box (or even one built-in to the motherboard - I used to have loads of S3 Virge Trio/DX/GX ones, I don't know what I did with them - god, I'm feeling old...) so that I could use that while I re-flash the BIOS just in case I brick it.

I only use Win (XP.Pro.32/Vi$ta.Ultimate.64/Win7.Ultimate.64.RC) for gaming - I use Linux/BSD (Debian/Ubuntu/Arch/BSD/Open Solaris) for everything else.

Sweet, do u use a gui in your linux build? As far as i go with linux is having shell prompt to my (once freebsd) now centos, linux box somewhere in washington for my cpanel and whm shit that said i linxd up an old ipod thats now dead too a battery failure (baught it in malaysia so apple generally fucked me on them recalls).

You mean md5 checksums? I use to compare those to see if my ix'd 360 games where really stealthed, back then stealth was optional so scene rls's werent alwais ix'd simply raw.. Since my xbrick died to heat failure ive got a new box, as soon as i update the liteon il be buying games off reputable online source instead. 1 game was painstakingly an hour to burn but three to down over gnews...

What do ya think to win7? Your not really a win fan but all the more reason to ask?
Cheers!

OCing is overrated.

Yeah - I use GNOME, KDE, Openbox, Fluxbox, Enlightenment - different ones on different boxes - I like to use Terminator as my GUI CLI app.


No - they'd be easy to deal with - they're using some kind of proprietory obscured algorithm to do it - I'm not quite sure who or what they think they're protecting by doing this in their newer GFX card BIOSes.


It's OK - quite usable really. It's only Vista SP3 though, no matter what they try and make out to people, and it may have been tweaked to be more responsive than Vi$ta, but it's still got a really wide arse like Vi$ta has - it still needs at least 1GB to run comfortably in.


Maybe with newer processors, but try telling that to a 486-DX33 running at 50Mhz.

I used to overclock my computers as a matter of course. My first PC was a 150MHz Cyrex set at 166.

But these days I don't typically bother simply because it's just not enough reward for the hassle. If you have to dial up the voltage you're pretty much guaranteeing a shorter CPU life, and if you're not you're probably not getting enough extra speed to be worth the trouble. In my experience my processor just isn't the bottleneck frequently enough for me to spend time messing with it.


Now when I finally decide to pull the trigger on a water cooled Uber PC... hell yeah, I'm overclocking that puppy within an inch of it's life.

I'm an old overclocker, had watercooling too, for years. I'm a bit out of the loop with modern bits as my current pc (athlon xp-m socket a) has been so good i've not needed to upgrade it other than hard drives.. but i'll be getting a PhenomII, watercooled soon... used consoles for gaming the last few years, but consoles are too expensive now so i'm back to pc gaming.

anyone thinking of watercooling, don't buy an all in one kit, they're invariably crap. make your own setup using the proper parts - most of my original w/c loop from the early days (first used on a thunderbird athlon 850) is still in use and will only be changed with the next rig because i need a new waterblock to fit the new chip and graphics, my pump is way over its MTBF hours, and i'm moving from 2 car heater matrices to a top of the line XSPC 120.3 rad.

thinking about silver plating the new cpu & gpu blocks.. cool experiment and it's got to be worth a degree or two

e2a: saying that overclocking reduces component life is a very common (and mildly annoying after you've heard it for the 47 billionth time) misconception. Component life is governed by heat. If one stays sensible with the voltage, and keeps the temperatures down, overclocking will not shorten the useful life of a CPU. You can kill a component by going too far on the voltage no matter how much you cool it, but kept sensible this will not happen.

Chip 1: 1.4ghz Athlon XP-M1600 Thoroughbred B. Absolutely standard, but running 72*c at load on a crappy heatsink in a crappy case - component life - 2 years of reasonable use

every 7*c you remove from that temperature doubles said component's theoretical lifespan - this is why my XP-M (Chip 2) is up from 1.4ghz @ 1.350v to 2.74ghz @ 1.8v on air (it was at 3.1ghz 2.0v on water - max that chip can handle is 2.3v) has been on 24/7 since the day i built it 4.5, nearly 5 years ago, and spent the first 2-2.5 years of its life at constant 100% load, but never went above 40c on water, 47c on air but yet still works fine.

I like it that PC overclocking using water cooling shares a lot of the same parts as growing hydro.

If i overclocked my system i would need to water cool it, im running a stock 3.2 P4 which with a mahoosive heatsink fan only just keeps it in a decent temp range.

Just out of interest but slightly off topic what thermal paste you guys using? been trying out one called freeze and its quality.

Volc

I use Arctic Silver 5 or Ceramique.


e2a: I wouldn't bother trying to OC a P4 - they were never the most efficient CPUs to begin with.

efficient no but its quick, built it on a shoestring and it plays COD perfectly happy so im happy

Volc

I use arctic silver 5. It was the best when i bought my last tubes of hs paste, and AFAIK it still is.

Clean the heatsink base and chip core with iso alcohol (99+% pure) i use ipa170. press your finger through a bit of clingfilm so your finger end is clinged in one layer. put a tiny amount of AS5 on the chip core as per instructions and rub it around till it's not much thicker than a haze.

I'll point out i am constantly earthed at this point, the psu is the first thing that goes in my pc, and i have a kettle lead i made up where only the earth cable is connected, or indeed has pins.. then i use an anti-static wrist band to the pc chassis. dunno how bad clingfilm is for static but i presume it's bad and take the precaution.

early "northwood" P4s were good chips, but the later "Prescott" P4s were outrageous heaters. We used to call them "PresHOT" Had one meself for a while back when i needed serious cpu horsepower - i ran both p4 and my amd at the same time.. the P4 could noticably heat up my large room when i had the windows wide open so i could smoke in there with nice fresh air, in febuary, up north.. buy a pc, get a space heater, free! i had the P4 on air too so i never overclocked it much, it was already taking loads of power which is why i got rid of it and kept the AMD.

Good, good chips though them P4s, i sold mine to my mate who is a heavy user, and he loves it.. not a patch on modern stuff but still very capable.

Bought a 8400 and some kingston 1066 ram the other day, whacked it in, straight to 4.2 ghz and running solid, very impressed with it. Gonna try for more when i get chance.

Is it hard to do? got any guides on how to do it?