Question Do you think I can overclock this Celeron G3900?

[damric]

2.8GHz seems kind of slow to me.

 

[Alabalcho]

Knowing the way CPUs are manufactured, I'd expect nothing significant to be achieved. You probably know that the label on the CPU is imprinted long after the tests, so if that CPU was not good for Pentium / Core iX, then it becomes Celeron.

You also need a motherboard able to overclock these. ANd since Celerons are installed usually on prebuilt OEM desktops, their BIOS is quite limited. And if you think of buyng one - spend a little bit more on a decent CPU.

 

[damric]

Knowing the way CPUs are manufactured, I'd expect nothing significant to be achieved. You probably know that the label on the CPU is imprinted long after the tests, so if that CPU was not good for Pentium / Core iX, then it becomes Celeron.

You also need a motherboard able to overclock these. ANd since Celerons are installed usually on prebuilt OEM desktops, their BIOS is quite limited. And if you think of buyng one - spend a little bit more on a decent CPU.

I am delighted for your participation, but you didn't answer the question or vote in the poll, lol.

 

[Alabalcho]

The only Celeron worth overclocking was the first one, 300A part, in slot packaging

 

[damric]

The only Celeron worth overclocking was the first one, 300A part, in slot packaging

Define "worth overclocking".

At any rate, we will see what I can do with this cheap little bug of a chip in the coming week 🆒

 

[damric]

Part 1) Stock settings. OMG this little turd is slow, even after turning off power saving states to force 2800MHz all the time. I mean slow, like this thing is darn near 100% on both cores just trying to download a few benchmarks. I couldn't get the CPU-Z bench to even run without locking up, but I did manage a Cinebench R15 run, a 3DMark Physics, and AIDA cache/memory bench, though they were painful to watch. Overall Windows responsiveness is painfully slow (for me) while using this pig at stock.

That 3DMark Physics on the i3 seems low, but I think power saving was set to balanced with all of the C states enabled when that was first run a few years back.

 

[Alabalcho]

Define "worth overclocking".

Getting more than 40% gain in loads that matter. Anything else is just to brag with your buddies.

 

[damric]

Getting more than 40% gain in loads that matter. Anything else is just to brag with your buddies.

Ok stay tuned. We already pulled over 50% scaling this evening in my laboratory. Will post the screenies tomorrow. We haven't even broke 1.25v or 42°C yet, so there's still meat on the bone too.

 

[nicholas70]

I say it can be overclocked. Now if it is worth the effort to overclock it is another question entirely, and I'd be inclined to say it is not worth the hassle.

 

[damric]

I say it can be overclocked. Now if it is worth the effort to overclock it is another question entirely, and I'd be inclined to say it is not worth the hassle.

Hassle? This stuff is fun!

 

[damric]

Part 2) It overclocks!

That is a 50% Overclock on a locked CPU.

The first thing I noticed, even at just +15%, was that Windows was very snappy.

Performance scaling:

Fire Strike Physics: +57%
Cinebench R15 Single Core: +62%
Cinebench R15 Multi-core: +70%

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I have not raised vcore above yet, not have I fine-tuned memory frequency and timings yet.

 

[kerangovender]

Possibly yes because today there are motherboards that can support overclocking,take a look at this

An overclocked Skylake G3900 Celeron dual-core build - by VL (Now 4K!)

Ok, I know I've mentioned this in CPUs, as to the overclocking results. But I thought that I would post the build here for informative purposes. ASRock B150 K4/Hyper ATX mobo ($115, mp3superstore on ebay) Intel G3900 Skylake Celeron dual-core 2.8Ghz CPU ($43, Antonline on ebay) Intel...

forums.anandtech.com

 

[AllanGH]

At least you're having fun with it....

 

[damric]

4500MHz for a +61% overclock, and stopping here for today since things are finally starting to heat up to above 60 degrees C with the additional voltage added.

Still getting higher than linear performance scaling.

 

[Alabalcho]

4500MHz for a +61% overclock...

You missed the second part of my sentence - "for loads that matter". First, GHz itself talks nothing about performance, and second, Cinabench is just that - a bench mark. Can you get faster encoding, of a video file 40% faster? Can you zip 10gb 40% faster? Anything else is just what yo're having - fun. And there's nothing wrong here, either

 

[TJ Hooker]

You missed the second part of my sentence - "for loads that matter". First, GHz itself talks nothing about performance, and second, Cinabench is just that - a bench mark. Can you get faster encoding, of a video file 40% faster? Can you zip 10gb 40% faster? Anything else is just what yo're having - fun. And there's nothing wrong here, either

It's a Skylake part, so it'll have roughly the same instructions per clock as any other skylake/kaby lake/coffee lake CPU. Although it'd likely be significantly slower in any application that supports AVX acceleration.

 

[damric]

You missed the second part of my sentence - "for loads that matter". First, GHz itself talks nothing about performance, and second, Cinabench is just that - a bench mark. Can you get faster encoding, of a video file 40% faster? Can you zip 10gb 40% faster? Anything else is just what yo're having - fun. And there's nothing wrong here, either

I'm willing to bet that it does encode over 40% faster than at stock.

I challenge you to your own challenge. Can you overclock your CPU to get 40% more performance?

 

[damric]

Per Request: Video Decoding

I only ran it to 50% overclock on that run.

Performance scaling: +65%.

Next?

 

[nicholas70]

I wouldn't think most cpu overclocks could push a 40% improvement. I'd be willing to bet the avg OC improvement is more often 20-25%. I also thought the weakest part of a celeron was the low cache size which I would think would act as a bottleneck of sorts as you try to push higher clocks.

 

[damric]

I wouldn't think most cpu overclocks could push a 40% improvement. I'd be willing to bet the avg OC improvement is more often 20-25%. I also thought the weakest part of a celeron was the low cache size which I would think would act as a bottleneck of sorts as you try to push higher clocks.

The higher tier CPUs are already binned to close to the edge of stability. This Celeron model must have been binned for thermal envelope rather than performance, leaving very much headroom for overclocking. Yes, L3 cache is 2MB smaller than the rest of the product line, but tuning RAM for low latency can help offset that, as you can see.