Guide: Overclocking AMD And Intel CPUs On A Budget

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]donutey[/nom]I've done it on a normal Q8200, with 1.3vCore and 1.3v Northbridge.The highest I've proven stable is 486FSB:http://www.overclock.net/5850797-post509.html[/citation]

486 is a remarkable result. Tom's Hardware's sample required over 1.50V VTT just to get to 400 MHz FSB...I believe it was closer to 1.55V. That's too much to recomend to people who actually want their systems to run a while.

 

[swt_2k]

WARNING

I read this article on 7/21/09 in the afternoon, by the end of the day my Phenom II X 2 550 3.1 GHz was fried @ 1.50 v. Do not try that suggested voltage...stay at 1.4 v. I could not afford to lose my CPU...but I did...don’t over clock unless you are clock dollars as well.

 

[KyleSTL]

WARNING

I read this article on 7/21/09 in the afternoon, by the end of the day my Phenom II X 2 550 3.1 GHz was fried @ 1.50 v. Do not try that suggested voltage...stay at 1.4 v. I could not afford to lose my CPU...but I did...don’t over clock unless you are clock dollars as well.

That sucks, normally Tom's tests at reasonable voltages unlike other review sites (I'm looking at you Xbit).

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]poxenium[/nom]”Motherboard MSI P45 Diamond LGA-1366, P45/ICH10R, BIOS 1.5 (10/10/2009)”MSI P45 Diamond is not LGA1366, but LGA775. LGA1366 is for Core i7 processors only, LGA1156 is for Core i5 and i7 (only dual channel DDR3-1333/1066). LGA775 is the old socket, for Celeron D, Celeron 4xx, Pentium Dual Core, Pentium 4, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad.[/citation]


people is this the only person, who saw the fault in this article accept voor the DDR3 bit. that only works with the new proccessors. it should be ddr2 as wel!!!

 

[schouwla]

Try this link for i7 overclocking with ASUS MBs

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20081220191040237&board_id=1&model=P6T+Deluxe&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

 

[donutey]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]486 is a remarkable result. Tom's Hardware's sample required over 1.50V VTT just to get to 400 MHz FSB...I believe it was closer to 1.55V. That's too much to recomend to people who actually want their systems to run a while.[/citation]

It's not remarkable, there are two other people in the comments who have gotten similar or higher overclocks. The main reason I haven't tried to validate a *higher* FSB is the temps start getting high (my ambient temp is pretty warm).

 

[Guest]

er....790fx w/ ddr3 is "budget"? maybe to a longtime intel'er, but greenjackets expect a bit more for the dollar don't they? considering the myriad 790gx solutions out there which boast impressive VRM cooling (which is nearly as important as NB/SB cooling for AMD), i'd say the gx is a far more prevalent "budget" solution...
now. i get that you're going for highest clocks and all, but at least in the case of the x2 550, i have to say you're practically overvolting for nothing. i personally own this processor. and the mobo in which it sits is the epitome of "budget" (foxconn a7gm-s, 780g, earliest revision. was cheap even by the earliest 780g standards! and technically doesn't even support the x2 550!)...and passed 24 hours prime stable, never breaking 50c, on air, at 200 x 19 (3.8ghz)...with stock voltage!!!
i stopped there, because as a "budget minded overclocker", i knew that part of my "budget" was the power savings, and the longevity of my components. and really, what is another 100-200mhz going to add to my real world computing experience? will i save 22 seconds on a 2 hour video encode, at the price of increased heat and decreased longevity? is the 22 seconds worth the extra few bucks on my power bill, or its tax on my power supply? and for that matter, is 200mhz more worth having either to buy a new power supply, or sacrifice a couple fans, or worse...hard drives?
i'm not the only one with an x2 550 to've reached such speeds on stock volts, either. i've even seen a few unlocked, running 3.8ghz stock volts on all 4 cores. granted, they had much nicer mobo's than mine, but their stories fit the "budget" concept of this article as well. though, to be honest, the examples of this i've seen have largely been 790gx, ddr2 based. one even, much as my own, isn't technically even supported by the mobo...
as to the intel side of things, i must chime in with the others and say q8200 fits this article only in budget, never in worthiness. if AMD was given a budget of $250 for it's quad representative, intel deserved at least as much. it strikes me that this choice was an attempt to dispel the forever growing belief that tom's has been intel-biased since the takeover, and while its charming to believe such a theory, it doesn't change the bare journalistic sloppiness, as even the blue fans have echoed their general distaste for the lowly q8200.

ages ago, it seems, i read my first tom's article...the title was something like "socket 7 - sound for years to come", or somesuch. remember when the blue and the green shared sockets?
how far we've come, friends...

now, criticisms aside...i do appreciate the effort and enthusiasm with which this article was written. i've long said that the term "enthusiast" should not apply only to the "top-shelf" overclockers, but to any and every one of us who pursues performance above and beyond what we paid for. "enthusiast" means "posessed by enthusiasm". we must all seek whatever knowledge we can discover, in an effort to feed our enthusiastic pursuit of greater performance...at as little cost to us as possible!
really, i do applaud this article, if not entirely for content, than entirely its enthusiasm...

 

[KyleSTL]

@ diablosinc: /rant

 

[Guest]

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 can still be bought new in stores at a similar price as the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition. Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD owner and fan , but make the competition fair (and it would have given a performance comparison stock/OC of two similarly priced cpu's.) I'm now sure what Q9550's are on the market atm, but i know that some series were exceptional OCers. (some weren't but still, it's a much better choice than the Q8200)

 

[kalmquist]

For a REALLY budget overclock, you don't spend $50 on cooling. The AMD Phenom II X2 550 and the AMD Phenom II X3 710 are reasonably close in performance. The X3 will win on benchmarks that can effectively use all three processors, and the X2 will win on the others. Their prices are also fairly close ($115 for the X2 and $100 for the X3 at Newegg). But a 27% overclock on the X3 is only 3.3 Ghz, which can be done with stock cooling/voltage. (I'm currently running with a 25% overclock at 0.025 volts below stock Vcore; I ran a 31% overclock at stock voltage for 12 hours under load with no problems.) To get the X2 overclocked to 3.94 Ghz, Tom's Hardware added the Fortress 120 cooler, which is another $50. So if you plan to overclock both chips, your choices are the X3 for $100 or the X2 for $165. Given that the X2 will outperform the X3 by less than 20% on single-threaded applications, and will be slower than the X3 on anything that can take advantage of three cores, the additional $65 for the X2 is hard to justify.

 

[Guest]

I just bought a new Q8200 along with an ASUS P5QL-PRO. I began overclocking and started getting errors in prime95 at 405MHZ bus speed. I backed up a little to 400MHZ and prime95 been running for more than 12 hours now without errors. I will let it run for at least another 12 hours.

The weird thing is that the voltage is still at 1.2v, but my CPU temp is rising up to 62 celcius, should I get a better fan?

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]bmatquad[/nom]I just bought a new Q8200 along with an ASUS P5QL-PRO. I began overclocking and started getting errors in prime95 at 405MHZ bus speed. I backed up a little to 400MHZ and prime95 been running for more than 12 hours now without errors. I will let it run for at least another 12 hours. The weird thing is that the voltage is still at 1.2v, but my CPU temp is rising up to 62 celcius, should I get a better fan?[/citation]

You should use a multi-threaded version of Prime95 just to make sure. Then you may find your temperatures go quite higher. You probably need a better CPU cooler.

 

[Guest]

I find this article misleading about the Q8200.
I bought mine 1 year ago. I was able to successfully get mine to 3.29GHZ stable for about a week. I backed it down to 3.25ghz and the bus at 465 from 471 The ram is set at 2.40b everything else is auto. I did bump up the vcore to 1.5000 but it made no difference. I have been seeing in various places the chip can get up 3.5 to 4.5. But I can't find there settings.

Q8200 @ 3.25GHz Stock cooler, temps at 39 to 46
corsair dominator 1066 @ 1116 5-5-5-15
Gigabyte EP45-UDP-3-L
Saphire 4890 at 975 1050

 

[sam_vdc]

Poor "Thomas" had no ideas of how to overclock Q8200

Proof 12hrs P95 sFFT...and notice how low the voltage shown in cpu-z
http://i49.tinypic.com/2rm6y4g.jpg

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]sam_vdc[/nom]Poor "Thomas" had no ideas of how to overclock Q8200Proof 12hrs P95 sFFT...and notice how low the voltage shown in cpu-zhttp://i49.tinypic.com/2rm6y4g.jpg[/citation]

"Poor Thomas" is the guy who gets 4 GHz or more fairly consitantly out of that core and happened to get a dud CPU. Most Q8200's are duds, this one was just a bigger dud than average. "Poor Thomas" also just wrote an SBM where a Core i7-860 came up around 700MHz short of his Core i7-870 due to a heat issue. That is to say, if you look at the dozens of processors "Poor Thomas" has overclocked, he's had only a few duds. I'd say that's a fairly solid record.