Gaming With AGP Graphics: Overclock That CPU!

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[citation][nom]spwalker[/nom]@Cleeve Sorry man...[/citation]

Apology accepted!


[citation][nom]spwalker[/nom]I Have Athlon II X2 and tested it @1.90 Ghz and @3.45 Ghz to show you how it scales it Far Cry 2 @1280/1024 low.[/citation]

Hmmm. Yeah, well, the thing about that is, the Athlon II and the Athlon 64 X2 are very different CPUs.

Thanks for coming out though. Interesting numbers!

Irrelevant, but interesting.


[citation][nom]spwalker[/nom]I'm familiar with PCs and as I said I'd erase that article ASAP. [/citation]

Heheh. you don't seem all that familiar with PCs if you automatically assume that the Athlon II scales identically compared to the Athlon 64 X2 without evidence of any kind... did you figure they were identical because they both have the word 'Athlon' in them? :lol:

Looks like the article will be staying up as-is, to your misinformed chagrin.

 


It would appear so. And it makes sense, if you consider that a specific game might require a certain level of CPU performance to overcome a bottleneck to operate a feature, but then that specific feature's processing needs are met at a certain level of performance, requiring no more cycles from the CPU.

After this point - if the processing requirement has been met by the CPU, the bottleneck can shift to other parts of the PC -- for instance, the graphics subsystem.
 
Well, after a lengthy trial-and-error test-fest, I managed to squeeze the last performance drop out of my Athlon X2 3800+ (yup, the same chip used in this article, on the same socket).

Now, a precision: When I built this machine a long time ago (end of 2005), I wanted it to be silent, and long-lasting: so, I left AGP behind (and went with PCIe), and got an aftermarket cooler. Last year, I changed the video card (a passively cooled Geforce 6600 not GT) for a Radeon HD 4850 (it was on sale). So yes, the CPU is the bottleneck (I intend to keep the CG for a while, as far as I know a 4850 is still considered a pretty nifty GPU nowadays).

This machine started with a single 1 Gb DDR stick; a second was then added (I had planned from day one to make use of dual channel and extend the machine during its lifetime).

Originally, the motherboard was a built-for-overclocking Micro-ATX Gigabyte board - which was unfortunately pulled due to high failure rates (mine failed, and couldn't be replaced), thus I ended up with an OC-unfriendly Asus model. This leads us to the time I needed to really squeeze the juice out of this machine.

First, first-gen HD4850 with single slot coolers are HOT. They run very HOT and will make your whole case a giant pressure cooker. First step was thus:

- reorganize small tower's content to facilitate airflow (it had changed since the previous card was passively cooled)

- dismantle, clean, re-seat CPU cooler with fresh thermal grease (after 3 years, previous grease had cooked off a bit and formed cracks)

After a while (and my GPU's warranty expired), it got an overhaul: Zalman VF1000 cooler+coolers on VRM and RAM chips, and a hacked BIOS for much lower idle frequencies. Temperatures dropped a whole 40°C on idle and on load (from 80/90°C originally to 45/55°C now) - at the same time, it got much quieter. I was thus free to start and tinker with the CPU (less hot air in the case). So, I entered the BIOS again after years of neglect.

- check that CPU still can handle the maximum bus speed the motherboard allows me (240 MHz), without vcore modifications (the motherboard's BIOS won't allow manual vcore adjustments).

- manually adjust RAM speeds to handle modified ratios (limited to 183 MHz, RAM still runs at 200 MHz)

- re-burn CPU and test RAM (run parallel instances of SuperPI each set to a single core, compile Linux kernel) to ensure that CPU+RAM subsystems run stable and didn't heat up too much (they didn't: CPU reached 55°C, core temps went up to 75°C; only 5°C more than without OC)

- slap forehead because plugging in an USB HiSpeed device caused system hangs blame fell on HyperTransport: reduce speed from 800 (1000 effective) MHz to 600 (750 effective). Problem solved. No performance impact.

- start game testing with a nice, long WoW game running under Wine (latest Catalyst 9.8 solved all remaining graphics bugs on AMD hardware). Get system hangs or app crashes (leading to hang) after only a few minutes of gaming.

- throw all above accomplishmets out of the window, start tinkering with CPU and RAM clocks and timings: WoW on Wine will still crash on the smallest hint of an overclock.

- slap forehead again: perform a complete CMOS reset (jumper), apply biggest CPU overclock, reset RAM and HT timings to above safe values, and go on a 3-hours WoW raid without a hitch.

The extra 400 MHz out of that X2 3800+ did yield 15-20% more performance (I still get a 100% CPU load on a core in busy Dalaran; too bad WoW isn't multithreaded). Now it may keep for a few extra months - and by then I'll get myself a Phenom II.
 
Mitch Gratz on you 20% performance increase. Good to see others posting here and getting positive results by bumping there cpu. I simply just used OC program and bump my FSB. I did fail to state that I am using a engineering sample P4 Nortwood and so results for others maybe diffrent. My bad.
 
@JohnnyLucky: well, that was the point of my exercise (and of the OP), squeezing out as much as possible from my oldie system as I could. And since my system has currently NO graphics bottleneck (I won't delude myself into thinking that my CPU can in any way saturate a Radeon HD 4850), raising the CPU's clock speed will provide almost linear performance improvements.

In fact, the only benchmarks I tried that didn't get a 20% improvement with my 20% clock increase were those relying upon memory throughput.

But, bear one thing in mind, that this article shows: on time-scaled performance requirements, a 30% clock rate increase (from 2.00 GHz to 2.6 GHz), which does represent a 20-30% "brute" performance increase of the CPU+RAM subsystem, can yield a 100% performance increase in games - as in, if the CPU is fast enough to provide results before they are required for the action (kick a box with physics vector x.y.z/x1.y1.z1, power 230, before next frame has to be rendered), then the graphics card can render one, two, three frames in advance - instead of stalling and waiting for the delayed CPU job.

Now, the threshold isn't the same for every game; but, it seems that for K8 cores, said threshold is under 2.6 GHz for current generation games.

And if my own tests are any indication, raising an X2 3800+ (you know, the entry level dual core of 2005, before the X2 3600+ came out) from its base 2.00 GHz clock to 2.4 GHz is rather easy, with instant gratification.

Interestingly, due to the overclock taking place without a voltage increase, and without increasing the rest of the system's clocks, power consumption doesn't rise much above that of a X2 4600+ (same L2 cache as the X2 3800+, 2.4 GHz; only at idle it goes down to 1.00 GHz instead of 1.2 GHz for an OC'ed X2 3800+ - yup, I managed to keep CnQ working); indeed, it may even have gone down, since the performance of the whole thing convinced me that one of the fans I had installed in my case was actually useless, I now have one less 8 cm, 1,600 rpm fan running.

And yet temperatures dropped a few °C. Airflows really are tricky things.

But then, I think I did enough for power saving at idle when I hacked my 4850's VBIOS to use 160/500 MHz GPU/RAM frequencies instead of 500/700 MHz. The pair of watts the extra 200 MHz my CPU consume at idle are much lower than what I saved from that. I'd probably accomplish more with a PSU swap (mine is also 4 years old, albeit it is a high quality one) for an 80+ model, actually.

If I cranked the remaining fans' speed even lower (actually, the only thing I could do now to reduce fan speed is unplugging them: my CPU fan gives me errors at boot because it turns too slowly, my GPU fan's speed controller is already at minimum), I'd start hearing the hard disk drive idling. Not too bad for a 4 yo system (apart from GPU and HD, which are much more recent), don't you think?
 
It's well known fact that AGP power requirments is well below that required for newer PCIe cards. The fact that I am able to run 2.4ghz proc @3.8ghz and safe OC on Radeon 3650 agp and use a 300w PSU is pretty energy effecient. My old school gaming rig is the equivalant of a 200w light bulb. (Minus Monitor)I was going to relegate this PC to HTPC duties after a new build. But this article sparked my intrest of the possiblities of keeping it around for 2nd PC for Lan gaming. I am waiting to see if there is a part 3 article. Article where an old school gaming box has been pushed to it's limit's and then toss in a modern AGP card. Hopefully it will include AMD and Intel procs.
 
Why this article did not include a P4 proc is beyond me. Most AMD folks have already upgraded because AMD products cost much less to build. Going to a complete Icore 7 build far more expensive. Even w/IC7 920 still proc alone $280 bucks (newegg) and for comparison sake AMD Phenom II X4 945 $170 bucks (newegg). Going from a Intel socket 478 to LGA 1366 vs AMD socket AM2 to AM3. Intel build comes out to twice the cost. Hence it would make since that there is more socket 478 systems still in service. Making this more so plausible for old P4 system be used along with AMD 6000+ since the topic is "Gaming w/agp graphics". Why would we want to game w/agp graphics? Ans, to save on the cost of a new build and to get by w/our current box until prices come down. Hence building a new Intel rig is twice the cost should unclude socket 478 processor for viability sake.
 
I hear Taps playing in the background. AGP is finally dead, she had a great run but now she old and it is time to bury her. Sigh but life has to go on.
 
The problem with P4 builds is that not all P4s overclock as well as oldie 90µm K8 - and were not even dual cores.

Thing is, an X2 3800+, a pretty representative of early dual cores, runs at 2.00 GHz while it is theoretically able to reach 3.00 GHz on air (I did say, in theory: not all of them will reach that clock speed), a bit like the Celeron 300A could theoretically run at 500 MHz. More often than not, it couldn't: but 450 MHz was certainly easy enough.

Same with these K8s, which sold very well: if, in practice, they can't reach 3.00 GHz, it's almost an afterthought to clock them at 2.4 or 2.6 - or more if your motherboard supports overclocking even marginally better than mine does (I do know that a low price mobo I tried could raise the CPU's external frequency from 200 to 275 and remain rock stable). And this kind of CPU speed is just what is needed to run current titles if not beautifully, at least comfortably - provided the GPU can take the load.

Back to P4s: they are single core CPUs. Current games enjoy dual cores, or if they don't, you need to crank the core's speed REALLY high. As in, a P4 would need to reach above 4 GHz to match an X2 3800+'s overclocked value. However, not many P4's of the time can reach this kind of temperature on air - or, you need a cooler that'd cost the same as a new motherboard.

So, the only 'P4-like' architecture that'd be worth it today, would be the Pentium D: dual core, also able to reach 4 GHz on air... But many chips already shipped with above 3 GHz speed: the OC delta this would provide is rather feeble, the heat dissipation would require a not-so-little cooler too, so that leaves only a few models: The Pentium D 820 comes to mind. But, in the latter's case, whoever bought one probably already overclocked it - and I'm not even sure you'd find one with an AGP interface, so why bother?

The point of this article was to find out what the oldest, but still 'structurally valid' build could yield as extra performance: socket 939 was very short lived, only bore 90µm chips, but it could also get either AGP or PCIe GPUs, was designed for dual core and fast RAM access (dual channel) and the most sold chips on it could overclock by 10 to 25% without too much of a hassle. And the article proved it: even a 4 years old chip, overclocked with a mid-range GPU, can run current games in an enjoyable, if not top notch, way.
 
nice job guys... but i have to add there are some opteron cpus which can do little better than that. i got myself opteron 185 2.6 @2.96 on dfi nvidia nforce4 mobo with the 3850 512mb factory overclocked. seems to have much better results (faster memory does matter here too!!!)
 
I have an agp system with an E6600 overclocked to 2.7GHZ and a Power color 3850 overclocked to 3870 (gpu only) speeds. I know 3dmark 06 is just a bench, but I scored right at 10800 with this setup. I tried the same setup with a 3870 pcie and scored a only a little more.

AGP wasn't dead until the 4800 series came out. A 3870 wouldn't be bandwidth limited by AGP at all.

BTW, I played Crysis on XP with the very high hack and it played just fine at 1280x1024.
 
I had to revert my CPU to normal clock speeds: my motherboard couldn't take the strain of the overclock. Drat!

Why am I sure it's the mobo? Well, because if I run CPU-only benches they can run for hours on end, if I run disk-only benches it's very stable, GPU-only benches get boring (you can watch a revolving hairy doughnut only that long), but if I try to run the whole thing productively (like, backup a DVD to Xvid or play a nice game of WoW), I get a hang after half an hour. Yes, I also tried Memtest86+, and my RAM passed.

I guess the mobo can't take the higher power demands; my PSU may also be at fault here, too.
 
People are also forgetting that many of the latest and greatest games available suck or are remakes with reduced replay ability giving them short lifespans. I've got 4 machines in a permanent LAN setup (Athlon/Intel 3000+ CPUs, 6800GT/X800 AGP, 1/2GB RAM etc.) which I play games like Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, Dungeon Siege 1/2, Titan Quest + Exp., Diablo 1/2 + Exp. (and of course all the older quality RTS), also some classic FPS like Half-Life Series, Tom Clancy Series, Battlefield Series, AvP Series, NOLF Series, Unreal Series (as well as games like Counter-Strike, Quake 1/2/3, Duke Nukem 3D, Doom 1/2/3). As you can see the list is very extensive and I'll maintain these systems for as long as I can keep getting parts if something fails. I also have a modern system to play games online like DOW2. It is obvious that if the current system you have allows you to enjoy your gaming it is still viable.
 
Why so much AGP bashing, Apparently there's alot of gungho PCi-e people out here that dont really know how well AGP can still hold up.

I personally own the HIS Radeon HD 4670 1gb ddr3 AGP card and with my dual cored AMD cranked to 3.4ghz I can run most modern games at atleast mid settings even well into 1280x1024+ res. Now of course the best AGP card will get waxed buy a Medium High+ Pci-e Card. but you cant completely throw out agp yet, its still holding its own
 
Always a good read on the continued relevance of the agp slot.Thankyou for the informative and engaging article.
Notes on my desktop: CrysisWH built-in overlay reports fps 26(18..29)Dx9 32bit,Mem=931mb, Dlights=(2/2/2).Thats on the "ambush" mission.
Farcry2 runs just fine as well as FEAR, CoDWaW-MW-MW2. Other games that are fine: Fallout3 and NV, FS2004. FSX is about the only thing that causes major struggles, I get about 14-24fps.
My cpu; I have downvolted from 1.5v to 1.45 with RM CPU Clock Utility, and with Clockgen using pll 950405 I set fsb to 216 for a reported 2596ish cpu speed.

My ole rig: WinXp-sp3-x86, Msi K8TNeo-V v1.0, Amd64 3700+ 2.4(thats a single core socket 754), PIB stock CpuCooler, 2g of Kingston ValueRam, Sapphire HD3850-512mb-256bit-Agp (running Sapphire 11-10 agp hotfix drivers for now), Antec Neo-Eco 620c Psu.

I am slowly buying hardware for a ?new build"; presently have the Gigabyte 790fxtaUD5, Amd PhenomII x2 555be, Zaward Vapor120 cpu cooler. When (if ever) I find an affordable HD5870 pci-e 512mb/256bit or HD6850 1g/256bit I'll purchase it and the neccessary ram.Already though my "new" stuff is close to obsolete.
 
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