Athlon 64 In-depth Overclocking Guide 193
jmke writes "Everything you ever wanted to know about Athlon 64 overclocking, and then some. If you are confused about HTT, LDT, memory dividers and relationship between these settings, then read on. This in-depth overclocking guide will show you how to get the maximum from your brand new Athlon 64 system"
OMG. What kind of.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you overclock a Z-Series IBM server? Would you overclock a 20 4-way xeons in a cluster?
Give it a while. Its not like the MOST OF US will need that speed...
Hell, I use a 1 GHz machine and develop on a 500 MHz machine. Yeah, 500 MHz because many users are still stuck on 300's and 450's.
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:1, Redundant)
It's 4:50pm where I am as I type this so your argument is flawed....ha ha ha
Obviously, in order for one to argue such redundant crap as I have, you'll probably expect that I'll still be reading Slashdot at 1am tonight. After all, it's a Friday night.
You'd be right
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Example: I can't run in circles around a dancing monkey and say "I'm spinning around the monkey!" It doesn't make sense. But if I spin in circles AND stagger
More is never enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL.
The kind of person who, 10 years from now, when he gets his amazing new 200,000 GHz 512 bit processor with a terabyte of RAM, will say, "How do I overclock it?"
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, of course most wouldn't try to overclock an IBM server or clustered 20 4-way xeons. Why? Most people DO NOT OWN THOSE. That's corporate equipment. People can afford to play with $150 chips at home, and will.
Re:OMG. What kind of....Money does it take? (Score:3, Informative)
Motherboards for both come at a range of prices, but tend to be in the standard $80-120 range. 754 ones may tend to be slightly less, but not significantly.
Opteron processors and early Athlon 64 FX processors (which were basically rebranded Opterons) run on Socket 940 and require ECC RAM; this is natural as they're targetted at t
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2, Funny)
Based on your argument, what kind of idiot would overclock a Pentium 4? [google.com]
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2)
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:1)
Re: What kind of.... (Score:5, Funny)
When rendering, and presumably other activities that might theoretically benefit from increased performance from overclocking such as data analysis and science simulations, your are often leaving the computers working overnight or over the weekend, and the last things that you want are crashes or visual errors due to unstable hardware. Sometimes I even underclock my rendering system, for it is far better for a render to take a few extra hours or days than to have the whole render wasted because somethign went wrong with your elite hacked overclocking with ten percent enhanced performance.
Overclocking also reduces the life of the components, noticeably when they are rendering at full capacity nearly 24/7 for most of the year.
There are certainly professionals that overclock, but they have either carefully weighed the cost benefit ratios and decided on the most logical course of action, or have had a series major setbacks and mistakes and are desperate to finish before the deadline next monday; the boss will not be happy when he finds out that another project is late because of your bumbling incompetency, Jones, so you had better move right in to your cubical for the next week, or you will find yourself moving right out, permanently. You can have that little wife of yours bring you meals; I certainly would not mind having her around the office. Maybe she will finally see reason and bail out on that train wreck of a career that you are conducting, and set her sights up closer to where her standards should be. And if not, she will still be something nice to look at. Tell her to wear something that will cheer you up...Man, this is going to be a Hell of a week. Now get back to work, Jones.
Re: What kind of.... (Score:1)
Component life only seriously degrades when part voltage is raised more than a little, and even then, some parts are more forgiving than others.
If you're not doing any of that, it's free performance. If you are competent, why not, even if just a little (for a home user; obviously not on most enterprise equipment)?
Re: What kind of.... (Score:1)
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:1)
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:4, Insightful)
$482 Athlon 64 4000+ 90nm Rev
$478 Athlon 64 4000
$359 Athlon 64 3800
$369 Athlon 64 3800 512K 90nm Rev E
$334 Athlon 64 3700+ 90nm Rev
$282 Athlon 64 3700
$249 Athlon 64 3500
$249 Athlon 64 3500 939pin
$250 Athlon 64 3500 90nm 939pin
$272 Athlon 64 3500 512K 90nm Rev E
$174 Athlon 64 3400
$152 Athlon 64 3200
$169 Athlon 64 3200 939pin
$169 Athlon 64 3200 90nm 939pin
(Prices from pricewatch.com)
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2)
Probably the kind of "idiot" that knows how to avoid frying his new, expensive chip. Overclocking doesn't cause chips to just randomly explode; it's incredibly easy to avoid damaging a processor, if you know what you're doing. And why would you even try if you didn't know what you were doing?
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2)
I am currently typing this on an AMD 2500+ (barton) overclocked to 3200+.
Why would I do this? Speed. I play games. I want the max FPS I can get out of my machines. As simple as that. Is my stuff brand new expensive hardware? No. Not anymore. But it was when I built both systems. *
* (Ultra top of the line? No, but then I bought the parts specifically because they were know good overclocking parts.)
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The likelyhood of frying parts is not very high. Before that happens you will get restarts, BSODs etc, telling you that you've messed up the settings. If you do it properly, and test your systems stability with Memtest86, Prime95 and the like, then there is no harm.
I have my Athlon 64 3000+ running at 2.2 gHz up from the stock of 1.8. That's the speed of a 3500+ which at the time of purchase cost $170AU more. Do I need that extra speed? No. Is it handy? Yes. Games run smoother. Compilation is quicker. More research for folding@home is acheived.
Give it a go. It's plain old geeky fun.
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2)
That didn't stop me from frying a 20MHz 486SX by changing the mobo jumper settings to run it as 25MHz. No restarts, no fatal OS errors, it just stopped booting up one day.
Sorry OC'ers, I'm going to side with the chip manufacturers on this one. I think they know better than you what clock speeds their chips optimally run at. If your 1.8GHz Athlon wasn't likely to fail at 2.2GHz under normal conditions, they would have sold it as a 2.2GHz and made more pro
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually you're wrong.
Generally all of the chips in a single speed series come right off of the exact same assembly line, and each one is then tested for individual speed tolerances. This produces an erratic supply of lower speed tolerance chips. As the manufacturing process on a particular line ages it also tends to work out all of the bugs and the supply of low quality chips falls off. The market still demands a variety of price points to attract the maximum of low end buyers *and* to maximize profits from high end buyers. Therefore they ROUNTINELY grab "higher speed" chips to fill orders at the cheaper price points.
The longer a line has been out the more likely a mid or low end labeled chip is fully capable of handling the top rated speed, or even above.
Also they use fairly generous safety margins. Their CPUs get included in countless different mother boards with unpredictable variations and quirks. The voltage may be a little high or low, timings may vary, signal quality may vary, and most importantly different temperatures and cooling capabilites. Also they are supplying probably a hundred billion CPU-hours, they don't want to get a bad rep if even an insanely rare multiple-failure happens to hit a critical customer on a critical system. They use pretty generous safety margins.
Now if you're tuning a specific set of hardware with particular voltages and particular timings, and especially if you have a better than typical cooling system, then you can exactly tune the speed of the CPU. You don't need a huge saftey margin to cover huge uncertainties because there are no uncertainties. You can push the speed and maybe even the voltage a touch if you keep the CPU comfortably cool.
Also an overclocker is probably willing to accept actually running into a once-in-1000-hours system reset if it means he can get that much more speed out of it. That's not something you want to have happen on a mission critical business server, but it is an excellent tradeoff if it gets you 1000 hours of smoother gameplay.
Disclaimer: I have never actually overclocked myself (I've only tweeked BIOS timings), but I am about to buy a new computer and I am probably going to get a motherboard with enhanced overclocking capabilites. For just a few extra dollars and with a bit of serious geek-knowledge and and some (enjoyable) tuning and testing my system I can probably get a decent speed boost.
Not a bad tradeoff at all. Few 'hobby' activities provide such a direct tangible benefit. Even hardcore automotive 'horsepower overclockers' only see a benefit in rare race-type conditions and no benefit at all in day-to-day driving.
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Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Those more expensive costs eat into your processor savings.
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2)
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:1)
Like for eg. If I go out and buy the cheapest Athlon64 3000+ (1.8Ghz)for 150$ or so and overclock it to 2.8Ghz, which is very possible, then I get a HUGE difference in performance, that I would only be able to get by shelling out many hundreds of dollars more otherwise.
Basically all the cpu's with the same core are the same, only with different multipliers. If you buy the cheapest CPU you should be able to go to the highest speed of the range, if you
Re:OMG. What kind of.... (Score:2)
and i'll bet 10 bucks... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:and i'll bet 10 bucks... (Score:2)
Re:and i'll bet 10 bucks... (Score:1)
Seriously though (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seriously though (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seriously though (Score:2)
Re:Seriously though (Score:2)
Besides, even when I had overclocked my Athlon XP system, I couldn't really notice any difference between the overclocked and stock set up anywap.
Re:Seriously though (Score:2)
If AMD makes a batch of CPU's that can all run at 2.2GHz, and none that run at lower speeds they do not sell all of these as 2.2GHz CPU's.
Lets take an example:
The 2.2 costs $500, the 2.0 $300 and the 1.8 $100.
In our example, would they go out and sell all of them at $500 - no, because they wouldnt sell any CPU's to people that only want to pay $100.
If they instead lowered the price to $100 for the 2.2GHz part, they wouldnt get the extra money from people actually willing to pay
Re:Seriously though (Score:3, Informative)
The really funny thing is that people doing "professional work" are doing so with pure blind trust in the manufacturer. Very, very few "professionals" bother with the most basic of QA. They just open the box, plug it in, and run, based on pure blind faith.
I've worked with various computer companies, being involved with the bring-up of a wide variety of hardware, from work
Re:Seriously though (Score:2)
Uh, no. When the system starts becoming unstable, you know you've reached the limit. The point of overclocking is to push the chip as far as it is able to without becoming unstable.
The reason it's so popular is that many chips are capable of being pushed very far without any added instability. To the crowd that builds their own machines anyway, it's just another thing to t
Re:Seriously though (Score:2)
Re:Seriously though (Score:2)
The way I see it, I didn't overclock a 2.8, I underpaid for a 3.0. And yes it does make a difference. That's why they sell both.
Re:Seriously though (Score:1)
Re:Seriously though (Score:2)
Already done it. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Already done it. (Score:1)
Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course the real laugher is what the overclockers do with their "extra" cycles. Nothing useful, let me assure you. At least I've never seen a
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:1)
Admitedly there are the crazy "i gotta get high numbers" peeps, but they usually have chips whose life span is measured in hours.
As for what to do with extra cycles? i find folding@home is a good use (as does the people o
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:1)
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:1)
No, they don't. They just want to overclock. What a rant!
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:2)
It all depends. If you can get 2x300MHz celerons to both be stable at 450MHz it makes a major difference, and you can get a lot more done. At the time 2x300MHz celerons cost less than one 450MHz pentium II, and the dual board didn't cost a great deal more than a similar single CPU board. In that case chips way above spec were being sold as celeron 300MHz chips to meet demand.
Now lets loo
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:4, Interesting)
Answer: It's bleeding hard work.
What the hell does this have to do with anything?
Most chips are just higher-clocked versions of earlier bretheren. There are occasionally different cores, but the difference between Chip A @ 2.5GHz and Chip A @ 2.8GHz generally has nothing to do with differences in the design, and everything to do with pricing.
Of course the real laugher is what the overclockers do with their "extra" cycles. Nothing useful, let me assure you.
Are you going to assure me that when, many years ago, I overclocked a 300MHz chip to 450MHz, the >50% improvement in compile times wasn't "useful"? How about the fact that I saved about $300 overclocking a cheap chip instead of buying a faster-labeled one? Did that not actually happen? I remember it so clearly, too.
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:1)
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it fucking well does - that's environmentally irresponsible.
Yes, it would hugely annoy me and I would most definately make a point of it.
Really bad analogy
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:2)
Yes, they should be in a car club minimally, but preferably running autocross/solo2 at the local track on sundays.
or an SUV that they just drive to soccer practice?
That's what minivans are for, either get out camping and off the non-beaten path or buy a minivan. You are obviously a soccer mom, so face the facts and buy the van already (you will never have another adventuresome excursion in your life so stop pretending).
You
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:2)
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:1)
1. I have overclocked my home PCs for years. I've never spent a lot of time on it, and I've never sacrificed stability.
2. Do you feel that everthing you do has to improve the world? If so, I wonder how well you are living up to such a high ideal?
3. Wanting more system performance (at zero or low cost) does not imply an obligation to become involved in the design of "faster chips".
4. Some people who overclock actually use their computers for in
Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed! (Score:2, Funny)
Because the speed limit is 70 MPH?
Are these guides *really* edited? (Score:1)
Or are they just edited by the
If it ain't broke... (Score:4, Funny)
Actually Overclockers... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Actually Overclockers... (Score:2)
Increase usable life of your box (Score:4, Interesting)
So you overclock. If you bought the low end last generation you can keep going WAY LONGER!.
I had a 9000 pro and was able to overclock to survive DOOM 3 and CS source... didn't need a 9600 pro or XT and wasn't tempted until the 600gt showed up... now I'm good for a few more generations unless it's another really awsome one (like the 9700 pro).
Re:Increase usable life of your box (Score:1)
I've an Athlon "1700+" which I've underclocked to 800 Mhz. That drops the CPU temperature in excess of 10 C. That's going to double it's usable life.
It may even give me enough time to finish transcoding the LOR trilogy.
Not just for gamers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not just for gamers... (Score:2)
***Google check***
Omg still listed in the manual...
Re:Not just for gamers...Assembly (Score:1)
Re:Not just for gamers...Assembly (Score:2)
People still do that? (Score:2)
It reduces stability, it decreases component life, and it increases power usage and heat. If you want to do it, I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not going to complain if Intel and AMD come up with a way to effectively prevent it, and I'm still going to think it's stupid.
Re:People still do that? (Score:1)
It reduces stability, it decreases component life, and it increases power usage and heat. If you want to do it, I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not going to complain if Intel and AMD come up with a way to effectively prevent it, and I'm still going to think it's stupid."
Running a CPU at lower than its rated speed is just plain silly.
You gain no stability over running the processor at its rated speed.
Say you want t
Re:People still do that? (Score:2)
So you see, there is no point to what you're doing, and I think its stupid
Only if the assumptions you made were correct. Given the information you seem to have, your conclusions are reasonable. But you're missing something.
Newer desktop Athlon64s have laptop-like power-saving features. Basically, the chip I have (Athlon64 3000+) can run at 1.0 ghz or 1.8 ghz (changes between 1.1v and 1.4v). This can be changed dynamically at any time
Re:People still do that? (Score:2, Interesting)
But the benefits of this technology are not to extend processor life, or primarily to decrease power consumption.
Its to make your PC run quieter, most overclockers running air cooled CPU heatsinks don't really care about the noise though, and the ones that do, splurge on watercooling systems.
I've heard (and
Re:People still do that? (Score:2)
Electromigration is greater at higher voltages, so I would say going from 1.4 volts to 1.1 volts would increase the processor life. It's not a primary motivation, but it certainly doesn't hurt when deciding to buy the thing.
Heat, power consumption, and noise are all directly related, so an attempt to improve one necessarily improves the others.
Bah! (Score:1)
Re:Bah! (Score:2)
If you want to get all old-skool about it - - 1960s/1970s DEC (now Compaq (now HP)) machines were *frequently* overclocked. The PDP-7 could be overclocked by shorting some pins in an R401 Master Clock Flip-Chip in row N somewhere on the CPU which would override the Clock Speed setting on the front panel (yes - there were two knobs on the front panel, coarse and fine timing settings. Would be used to tune program
Overclock AMD on HP (Score:3, Interesting)
Overclocked my HP Athlon 2.2GHz upto 2.5 Ghz. Noteable difference? Well, super pi http://www.computerbase.de/downloads/software/ben
The fact remains that overclocking is not a performance enhancement
Remember the "Turbo" button on the machines those days?
Re:Overclock AMD on HP (Score:1)
Re:Overclock AMD on HP (Score:2)
Wow! So it did make your internet faster!! Intel was right all along!
Overclocking...pffff (Score:5, Funny)
watch out for data corruption when OC'ing (Score:1)
I've always like to overclock my PCs - and I've never sacrificed stability. It's true that the hardware will fail earlier in theory as a result of overclocking, but unless you are running crazy timings with way too much voltage or whatever, the hardware is still likely to last until it's practically worthless. If you can overclock with just a modecum of skill, you literally get more performance than you paid for. I ask you: how can it be wrong, when it feels so right?
I think that overclockers tend
overclocking..... (Score:1)
How do you make a AMD64 cpu go like hell? (Score:2, Interesting)
Honestly, every one i've seen is so insanly overpowered, it isn't even funny...
On top of that, people will try to overclock a cpu when the problem lies elsewhere... RAM, drives, etc.
An 4Ghz 64-bit cpu is nearly worthless if you mate it with 64 megs of ram and a 3600 RPM laptop drive...
Re:How do you make a AMD64 cpu go like hell? (Score:1)
You haven't checked the details on AMD64 power usage have you?
I suggest you README [anandtech.com] before making sweeping statements, and you might want to compare these figures to the latest P4's
shame on Abit... (Score:1)
I've got Abit AV8 with amd64 3200+. Now, I'd sure like to see how far the CPU can go, but the damn motherboard does not show any temperatures. Gkrellm does not support that chipset, nor does lm_sensors.
Only a madman would try overclocking without seeing how hot the CPU is. Overclocking and hoping that my cooler can remove the excess heat is not very reliable way to do it, I'd say.
If you know a way to see the temperatures on AV8, let me know. I haven't found
same temp problem here, it's likely a kernel bug (Score:1)
Re:shame on Abit... (Score:2)
Re:shame on Abit... (Score:1)
Re:shame on Abit... (Score:1)
maximum out of your amd64 (Score:2)
With a minimum of warrantee... to be exact NONE.
I'd like my processor to last for a while, so I don't take stupid risks for a little extra speed.
Overclocking (Score:2)
It gives 10% more realworld performance.
And 10000% higher failure/error rate!
Well having 100x higher error rate might go undetected most of time since errors in cpu are not that common without overclocking.
Anyway. I'm thinking that what the overclocking gives is minimal increase not worth the potential problems. Not everyone get problems, and not everyone who got problems realize them.
How you tell if the X server crashed by change of a bit at some place or by software failure i
Re:Overclocking (Score:5, Insightful)
*Few people get lucky because they need to mark some chips at lower speed than they are truly capable and they keep certain margins on the chip timings to ensure it works.* quite a lot of people "get lucky" as you put it. on a64's you often see 300-400mhz overclocks, that's not much unless you look into the cpu prices and how they hike up at those 300-400mhz. and those run whatever test you want for 24/7.. i got a k6-2 300 that has run at 450mhz for something like 6 years or whatever year they were introduced.
overclocking is not worth it usually when you buy the machine.. but ironically.. INCREASES THE LIFETIME as you can use the chip some time longer to play games etc, comfortably.
Re:Overclocking (Score:2)
You got 50% clock speed increase at time when the memory interface wasn't such a bottleneck as it is today. The older processes tolerate overclocking better. What I'm saying that what you get today isn't worth the risks. When I used 366 celeron I would of overclocked at the END OF ITS USABLE LIFETIME. Not before, before that its unnecessary risk which I took and once changed my GFX card and HD because of experimentation, got repl
Automatic underclocking. (Score:2)
To be honest (Score:3, Interesting)
why so many people so ignorant towards OC (Score:1, Informative)
if U don't know these procedures, don't EVER talk about overclocking, or undervolting, or anything.
Have an Athlon 64 3200+ (754) system here... (Score:2)
Running CPU at stock 2.2 GHz and mem(HTT) at stock 400MHz.
It's unbelievably cool with 42 degrees C reported after sustained 92% user 8% system operation.
If I understand the article, the optimum OC path is to keep the HTT at 400 by upping the CPU clock and upping the divisor, unless I want to worry about all the other system clocks and peripherals running beyond speced speed. If this is correct, let me know and I'll have a loo
So many peope talking out of their ***... (Score:1, Informative)
Last week, I bought an A64 3000+ with Venice core and a Neo 4 Platinum motherboard. A 3000+ runs stock at 1.8GHz. I bought this core with the very purpose of overclocking it. And well, it did damn well. This CPU is now running @ 2.65GHz, without upping the core voltage, without dangerously high temperatures. Actually, I will be buying a better cooler one of these days to keep it cooler that it ru
Re:So many peope talking out of their ***... (Score:2, Insightful)
That is something I never understood. Why would I want to waste a day making my computer work just as good as something i could have bought for $200 more?
AMD Newbie Help (Score:2)
Is there a website that spells everything out for newbies? I'm talking about information for all the different AMD chips and how they compare, socket types; the sort of thing. (The sites I have seen so far seem to assume that you are already knowledgable about AMD.)
Watch out if you use 4G of RAM... (Score:2)
I'm running a SLI-DR board (rev AA0) with 4x1G of RAM and a revision E (Venice core) AMD64 CPU. The BIOS only recognizes 3,407,334 KB RAM. I've tested each stick, ran them in pairs, and tried them in another machine - so I don't think this is a RAM issue. I will be dual booting, but 64-bit Gento and Win2K (not moved to Win64 yet, but will when the MSDN kit sho
Don't need to overclock (Score:2)
Granted, if I was running an antivirus suite, I'd probably welcome overclocking...
Re:As the owner of two FX-55's... (Score:1)
You might have to, for example, take the memclock down a notch (say to ddr333 instead of ddr400) and then increase the htt until the ram is running at a decent clock again. Memtest86+ is your friend.
Re:As the owner of two FX-55's... (Score:1)
Re:hey (Score:1)
seriously, this is my desktop running win2k pro sp4. its ran win2k3 server edition sp1. my linux box is a p2/400 w/ 128mb of ram. can someone overclock that too?"
I don't see why either system wouldn't be overclockable if your motherboard's BIOS has the requisite settings and your ram is of decent quality.
But a better solution would be to go plonk down $600 - $700 on a new PC, which will run at more than 10 times the speed, of your present
Re:It's not working for me yet... (Score:2, Funny)
Try putting the clocks on top of the case.