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Overclocking Revisited.

ThaedThaed
edited May 2006 in Everything Else
This month in CPU magazine, they take a $130 Pentium D 805 and overclock it from 2.66 GHz to 4.05 GHz which makes it in most ways better than the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (3.73 GHz), a chip that costs more than $1000. No matter how you look at this, it's cool. You can take a cheap chip that you probably couldn't use for HD video editing and overclock it to a chip that could do HD video editing easily. As I recall, Rym's main objection to overclocking was that you go through a lot of hassle to just get a tiny performance increase. Here you get a massive, useful performance increase, save a lot of money and have fun in the process. What could be better?

Comments

  • JameskunJameskun
    edited May 2006
    The problem you still have is that you really never know what you are going to get. The chip makers try to have as few designs as possible, so a lot of the time there is no real difference between all the different speeds in a family of processors. They will program the chip to identify as a certain speed at the end of the line based on how the chips holds up in tests, and what types of chips they need to ship out. If you are lucky, you will get a chip that was capable of performing at the max speed, but is just underclocked due to demand. If you are unlucky, you will get a chip that was shipped at a low speed because it is unstable at higher speeds.

    That is quite a performance gain on that chip though, so I am guessing it falls into the 'lucky' category. It is cool if you can get that much performance, especially if you don't need to put some specialized cooling system to get it.
    Post edited by Jameskun on
  • ThaedThaed
    They used a Corsair Nautilus water cooler. If I had the time, I'd spec out the costs of everything they used on New Egg.
  • JameskunJameskun
    Ahh, so they did use a special cooling system. Personally, I would rather spend a bit more money on the processor itself then having to get a fancy cooling system. Hell, the best case would be something with only passive cooling. Less moving parts means less chance of catastrophic failures ^_^.
  • AprecheApreche
    Yeah, I've had too many fans fail on me as of late to rely on them. If my system was overclocked my chips would have fried. Luckily running at normal speed they just safely turned off.
  • GreatTeacherMacRossGreatTeacherMacRoss
    I agree, espescially since if your colling failed and you didn't notice, overclocking a chip that much could cause some serious damage.
  • glimpsterglimpster
    I've never taken a whack at overclocking the PentiumM in my laptop, but I have overclocked the GeForce 6800 in the machine. All I had to do was download and install a registry file and I had full access to overclocking it. I went from 280mhz to 370mhz on GPU clock speed, and 590mhz to 740mhz memory frequency. Wasn't bad, and it definitely sped things up.
  • ThaedThaed
    I pulled the trigger tonight on upgrading my computer with a rig that I'm going to overclock to 4.05 GHz.

    I blogged about it:
    http://thaed.wordpress.com/2006/05/21/computer-upgrade/

    I can't wait. :)
  • ThaedThaed
    For the latest progress on the upgrade:

    https://thaed.wordpress.com/2006/05/25/computer-upgrade-progress-report/
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