Max overclocking for a x2 3800

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
M

Marauder

Distinguished
Dec 15, 2005
87
0
18,630
I am currently in the market for a new computer and i am seriously concidering the x2 3800, and if advised the am2 x2 3800. Althought the am2's, according the the article and benchmarks here on THG dont really show that great of an improvement for performance.

I have heard of people OCing their x2 3800's to around 2.7ghz but do not know the other hardware they have included in this. Would appreciate someone explaining what kind of ram, mobo and psu would be ideal for this venture. I have previously tried to OC my 64 3000+ with little success due to restraints in the RAM.

Any input and help would be much appreciated since I value the opinions here more than any other place. Thanks.
 
Around 2.7GHz seems like the limit for air; you might not even be able to acheive that. I think the world record for the X2 3800+ is about 3.5GHz, but that's with liquid nitrogen or other extreme cooling.
 
Two ways to look at this.... If price is a major consideration x2 3800 is what you should look at. If not then the am2. I hate to recommend am2 because the write ups on them are not that good and you pay more. On the other hand, with am2's new mobo's comming out, you have a more prolific upgrade path for the future.

Me it will be that x2 4200. This L2 caches are bigger, giving smoother and faster computing.....or at least more problem free computing.

I know that amd will be putting out newer and better changes, so if I had the money I would go with am2 just because of the upgradabilty.

Also take a look at conroe, I haven't looked at the prices but I hear the performance is wonderful.
 
Also with the am2 the frequencies for memory are higher. So with future upgrades you will see the differance. Currently you wont. Again if money is not a constraint I would buy 'paired' sticks of ram from Corsair, OCZ, Geil, most of the major brands are good. But you need to buy the sticks that are 'paired' meaning they are manufactured to provide exact timings together. I know thats not too technical, but its what I know. Also it is wise to check with the mobo manufacturer what brands of memory are supported in there product. I like the previous post giving you a good system and mobo. Just remember, check with mobo manufr then chk those brands for 'paired' sticks of memory (no matter what size). In the long run you will have more problem free performance.
 
I have a X2 3800 & it's running at 2.6Ghz. I use a thermaltake bigwater SE watercooler which cost only £60. It worked at 2.7Ghz but temps were too high (btw I'm running at 34c when idle & 52c with both cores at 100%)

it's in an Arock DualSata939 board, very cheap board .. but a very good one, 74gig raptor 10k drive, 300gig maxtor, ati 850XT.

BF2 running at 1280x1024 with 6xAA ... runs super smooth .....

I did have a single core 3000 939 chip in here before the X2... & it ran fine.... but the X2 blows it away ... simple thing like alt+tabbing out of BF2 would take up to a minute ... it now takes less than 5 seconds...

either the AM2 or normal would be fine ... but for a wee bit of future proofing I'd go from the AM2...
 
I have a X2 3800 & it's running at 2.6Ghz. I use a thermaltake bigwater SE watercooler which cost only £60. It worked at 2.7Ghz but temps were too high (btw I'm running at 34c when idle & 52c with both cores at 100%)

it's in an Arock DualSata939 board, very cheap board .. but a very good one, 74gig raptor 10k drive, 300gig maxtor, ati 850XT.

BF2 running at 1280x1024 with 6xAA ... runs super smooth .....

I did have a single core 3000 939 chip in here before the X2... & it ran fine.... but the X2 blows it away ... simple thing like alt+tabbing out of BF2 would take up to a minute ... it now takes less than 5 seconds...

either the AM2 or normal would be fine ... but for a wee bit of future proofing I'd go from the AM2...
Click to expand...

I meant to add.. I have 4x512Meg Corsair value ram & a nobrand 550W PSU ...
 
OK since I wold be able to for sure oc to around 2.4Ghz, would it be advisable to pay the extra cash for the 1mb cache? I've heard that the high cache levels doesnt really help in daily applications.

I dont really have the extra cash to spend on the new am2 CPUs, especially when there is no advantage in owning one right now. I don't plan on upgrading again for another couple of years....hopefully..... we all know the temptations of upgrading (I currently own a 64 3000+ 6800 gt and 1gig pc4000 which works just fine heh).


When it comes to ram though Degziebob I am going to go with 1 gig sticks and max out the 4 gigs on the mobo so that I can run a ramdisk for loading up BF2 lightning fast. (friend of mine does it and its turning me on)

I have never installed a water cooler, so if I were to go with air cooled system whast would be the best buy right now? I currently have a zalman and think that it kicks ass, but things might have changed.
 
...to me the 1meg cache doesn't make sense, if you look at all the bench marks a X2 3800 overclocked to 2.4Ghz as as fast as the 4400 with 1meg cache .... so save yourself the money. I think the Zalman will be fine as long as you don't mind the noise... I only went for the water cooler for low noise... My system is very very quiet ....

As for memory 4x1gig sticks is fine..... So how does the BF2 ram disk work? going from 1gig to 2gig made a huge difference in load times & to be honest it only takes <1 minute to loads between maps....usually quicker.

I suppose if you installed it on one of those PCI cards that can take up to 4Gig that would be kinda cool :)
 
To do a ramdisk I'm pretty sure it just takes a program called RamDisk to be running in windows. You can then designate what you would like to use for the ramdisk and what to load into the RAM. This is just my rough non experienced understanding of it. But I do know that you dont need a pci card with ram, it can use your system ram on the mobo.
 
I never really thought about that as BF2 for me uses about 1.3Gig of ram out of my 2Gig ... & an install of BF2 is around 3 gig or so ..... so I'd need more than 4gig of ram :)

there is a PCI card you can buy that you can put in up to 4gig of ram & it functions just like a harddrive .... now that would be nice!
 
To do a ramdisk I'm pretty sure it just takes a program called RamDisk to be running in windows. You can then designate what you would like to use for the ramdisk and what to load into the RAM. This is just my rough non experienced understanding of it. But I do know that you dont need a pci card with ram, it can use your system ram on the mobo.
Click to expand...


Better idea!

Get a Dual, Quad or 8-way Opteron with a lot of RAM and you can use it as a giant RAM disk.

It will be a LOT faster than those memory drives that use SATA or PATA IDE.
 
yeah ... but you'd want the best ram for your pc & then you'd need a 64bit OS .. for me that would be XP 64.... which I don't run. All moot anyway as in a couple of years you'll be buying 16gig memory drives that knock the socks off harddrives .. & they'll plug into normal sata/ide ports.... it's the way to go!

I've got a raptor 74gig drive anyway .... for my OS & BF2 ....
 
yeah ... but you'd want the best ram for your pc & then you'd need a 64bit OS .. for me that would be XP 64.... which I don't run. All moot anyway as in a couple of years you'll be buying 16gig memory drives that knock the socks off harddrives .. & they'll plug into normal sata/ide ports.... it's the way to go!

I've got a raptor 74gig drive anyway .... for my OS & BF2 ....
Click to expand...


Yes, but your Raptor can't get 4GB/sec
 
To do a ramdisk I'm pretty sure it just takes a program called RamDisk to be running in windows. You can then designate what you would like to use for the ramdisk and what to load into the RAM. This is just my rough non experienced understanding of it. But I do know that you dont need a pci card with ram, it can use your system ram on the mobo.
Click to expand...


Better idea!

Get a Dual, Quad or 8-way Opteron with a lot of RAM and you can use it as a giant RAM disk.

It will be a LOT faster than those memory drives that use SATA or PATA IDE.


I thought that the max RAM win XP 32 bit can recognise is 3.5gb?
 
To do a ramdisk I'm pretty sure it just takes a program called RamDisk to be running in windows. You can then designate what you would like to use for the ramdisk and what to load into the RAM. This is just my rough non experienced understanding of it. But I do know that you dont need a pci card with ram, it can use your system ram on the mobo.
Click to expand...


Better idea!

Get a Dual, Quad or 8-way Opteron with a lot of RAM and you can use it as a giant RAM disk.

It will be a LOT faster than those memory drives that use SATA or PATA IDE.


I thought that the max RAM win XP 32 bit can recognise is 3.5gb?



Effectively yes. XP64 can see more.

Linux, BSD and Unix can see all of it no problem :-D
 
Yeah only problem is that I am Linux/Unix newbie so I wouldn't/couldn't install it even if i wanted to :)

Althought once vista is released, and if I decide to move over to it, then I could start using more.
 
yeah ... but you'd want the best ram for your pc & then you'd need a 64bit OS .. for me that would be XP 64.... which I don't run. All moot anyway as in a couple of years you'll be buying 16gig memory drives that knock the socks off harddrives .. & they'll plug into normal sata/ide ports.... it's the way to go!

I've got a raptor 74gig drive anyway .... for my OS & BF2 ....
Click to expand...


Yes, but your Raptor can't get 4GB/sec

Tomshardware/anandtech did a review on the i-ram vs a raptor.... BF2 loaded a level using the raptor in about 36 seconds vs the i-ram drive in about 27 .... faster ... but I would expect it be be like lightning.... real life just doesn't translate tho'
 
yeah ... but you'd want the best ram for your pc & then you'd need a 64bit OS .. for me that would be XP 64.... which I don't run. All moot anyway as in a couple of years you'll be buying 16gig memory drives that knock the socks off harddrives .. & they'll plug into normal sata/ide ports.... it's the way to go!

I've got a raptor 74gig drive anyway .... for my OS & BF2 ....
Click to expand...


Yes, but your Raptor can't get 4GB/sec

Tomshardware/anandtech did a review on the i-ram vs a raptor.... BF2 loaded a level using the raptor in about 36 seconds vs the i-ram drive in about 27 .... faster ... but I would expect it be be like lightning.... real life just doesn't translate tho'




A RAM Drive out of system RAM will be orders of magnitude faster and cost about the same.
 
Its because the iram is still using a hard drive interface... Even high speed SATA... whatever we're calling it this week, tops out at 300MB/s limiting bandwidth... plus, wouldn't the signaling frequencies negate some of the latency benefits of using RAM?

Edit: I just realized that this discussion is WAY off topic. The reason I looked at this thread is because I have an X2 3800 and was curious about how much others had OC'd.

-mcg
 
Oh oh, a thread for me to show off my processor :

On stock voltage (1.35V) my socket 939 3800 X2 revision BH-E4 processor does 2.7GHz easy. My temps are 52'C 100% load and 40'C idle with an arctic cooling freezer 64 pro. Before you leap out in horror at those temps, with stock cooling at 1.3375V at 2GHz I was getting 55'C load. I think my processor just naturally runs hot. My RAM is corsair 2Gb xms platinum DDR400 2-3-3-6, it's currently running at 450MHz at 2.5-3-3-7.

Here's some of the settings I've noted that are 24 hour, prime 95, x2 stable.

Speed(GHz) Voltage(V) Load Temp('C)
2.78 1.4 53
2.4 1.2 52
2.615 1.275 52
 
From what I have been reading about overclockable AMD cpu's.... they generally run hotter than those that don't at stock vcore. You probably have an abnormal 3800, what does it say your core is in CPU Z? Your 3800 sounds just like my 165 CCBBE which hits 3.2Ghz, albeit unstable.... around 3.1 stable. Most 3800's will hit 2.5-2.6 from what I have read and my experience.
 
Errrm, all 939 3800 x2s are manchester cores. It could well be that I have an abnormal core. I don't really care too much as A64 max temperature says my processor can go to 67'C and I think you'll find my processor will easily live for 5 years even if it were at 60'C. Besides, even when I raise the Vcore out of normal operating perameters it doesn't seem to make much of a difference to the cpu temperature. Give and take I suppose.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom