Athlon 64 In-depth Overclocking Guide

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"

Increase usable life of your box

[Deliveranc3]

Gives you another few months, you start thinking about that shiney new GPU CPU and stuff and salivating, but you know it's going to drop to .3 of the price in 2 months.

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).

Overclock AMD on HP

[apache guevara]

Overclocking on the Pentium I was fun. CPU speeds were still far far away from the GHz levels and in school, it had amazing brag value. Never matter that the recursion programs we wrote in TurboC (it was way back ... I was a kid) never seemed to compile any faster.

Overclocked my HP Athlon 2.2GHz upto 2.5 Ghz. Noteable difference? Well, super pi http://www.computerbase.de/downloads/software/benc hmarks/super_pi/ [computerbase.de]did calculate PI to 512K decimals in 49 seconds (It was 52 seconds earlier). Didnt make much of a difference to anything else that I use. (Am an MBA now ... what i use is powerpoint and outlook ... I sold out!!)

The fact remains that overclocking is not a performance enhancement ... the results are just incremental, but they do give the kicks. Very zen!

Remember the "Turbo" button on the machines those days?

Re:Dumb, but at blazing speed!

[dr.badass]

Question: If you frigging overclockers are so frigging smart, why don't you design faster chips?
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!

[mejesster]

I don't see why this is so fantastically irritating to you. Does it bother you when someone has a ferrari that they just drive to work or an SUV that they just drive to soccer practice? You know, it really bothers me that you have a kitchen and don't bother to cook up gourmet 5 star meals.

How do you make a AMD64 cpu go like hell?

[SPY_jmr1]

Turn the power supply on.

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:People still do that?

[blackicye]

Well yeah, AMD's new "Cool and Quiet" feature, much like Intel's speedstep will lower your CPU frequency and voltage, thus lowering temperatures, and allow lowering the speed of the CPU heatsink fan.

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 owned) many a system which sounded like aircraft taking off when they were running (which was all the time.) Small price to pay for "free speed" :D

One of the first things you're supposed to do when attempting an overclock on an Athlon 64 CPU is to disable "Cool and Quiet" which by default (at least for my Asus A8V Deluxe Rev.2) off.

To be honest

[BlightThePower]

I'm beginning to wonder if the pendulum has swung to making underclocking the smarter move. Certainly I've never had as stable, cold and quiet a machine as when "Cool 'n' Quiet" (on my MSI NForce 4) is kicking in (dynamically lowering the multiplier). You might say I should have bought a slower cheaper machine in the first place but just sometimes (DAW stuff, those VSTis can be hungry beasts) I need the grunt, but not all the time.