Modest OC of E8500

[cadder]

I ordered a new CAD workstation for my office, ordered through the local supplier that our company uses.

After reading here, I specified the following:
Case: Antec 300
CPU: E8500
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R
CPU cooler: ZALMAN CNPS9700
Memory: Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5
Hard drive 0: WD Velociraptor 300Gb
Hard drive 1: 1Tb Seagate or whatever
Video: ATI FireGL V3600
DVD RW drive: whatever
OS: WinXP

I have not oc'd anything in a long time, but I've been reading here for awhile. I spec'd the E8500 because I thought an ultimate goal of 3.8GHz was good for a business machine that runs 24/7, and I could do that with a bus speed of 400MHz and run the memory right at its rated speed too. I almost went with the E8600 but I thought 3.8 would be fast enough and would save a little money that I could use elsewhere in the system.

Our supplier isn't into oc'ing, so he built it and delivered it running at stock speeds. I got it set up today and made sure everything was working, then ran some tests. I got superpi1.5 1M time of 14.8 sec.

I upped the bus to 366 and tried it, changing the memory to run at 1:1 and changing the PCI bus to 100. I left the CPU voltage set to auto. I didn't want to sit here in my office all day running Prime95 but I let it run the longest loop in SuperPi. Temps stayed at 40, never changed. Voltage was reported at 1.25v.

I upped the bus to 400 and tried it, meeting the target CPU speed of 3.8GHz. Voltage still reports as 1.25v. SuperPi 1M gives 12.4 sec. Temps stayed at 40.

I'm not sure if I've covered all of the bases WRT BIOS settings, or if I'm reading the temperatures properly. I went back after I did the screenshot and ran realtemp while doing more superpi testing. Realtemp reports temps of 35.

Since I'm a beginner here, set me straight wherever I might be off a little.

 

[flyin15sec]

Your OC seems fine. All it needs is the extended stability testing. You don't want to have a crash while you're in the middle of working. That motherboard supports native 1600FSB so on auto setting it should compensate fine with the other voltages.

My opinion is, use the old computer until you get this one working near 100% stable first. Alot of time is wasted on testing the new system, so you might as well fire up the old computer.

***Just want to add, your motherboard is actually overcompensating cpu voltage. It is at 1.31v. You might be able to detune that down a bit to like 1.28v. Always test after you make changes.

 

[kamkal]

seems like you have got it

just test for stability like flyin said

orthos, prime95, etc etc, leave it running overnight or something

i have an e8400 @ similar voltage 1.272 at 425 fsb so you should be fine
your cpu is newer and binned as e8500 so you should be able to lower your voltage slightly and keep it stable

best way is test, if it is stable for a few hours, try lowering the voltage one step and try again, and repeat until it can no longer do the tests and then bump voltage to last stable state, excel is your best friend here in writing down voltages and all that fun stuff