Investigations into Athlon X2 Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on December 21, 2005 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Closing Thoughts
I'm certain that there are going to be plenty of you who've read this and think, "yeah - so what?" As I said at the outset, this article isn't targeting the hard-core enthusiast or overclocker. Everyone needs to learn how to overclock somewhere (at least if they're interested in that sort of thing), and if nothing else, this should give you an idea of what results to expect, as well as some reasonable starting settings. Again, your results may vary.
Looking at the different RAM options, it's difficult to make a good case for spending tons of money on memory. Yes, it can improve performance by 10% or more in some cases, but in many instances, you will be bottlenecked by some other component in the system. There is one other point to mention on the memory: overclocking with four 512MB DIMMs was almost a complete failure on the setup that we used. Other motherboards, or perhaps a BIOS update for this motherboard, might improve the results, but for now we would recommend caution with such attempts. If you want to run 2GB of RAM, two 1GB DIMMs would be a much better choice. Having that much memory certainly isn't required, but then again, neither is a dual core processor. Personally, I'm done purchasing 512MB DIMMs for myself.
Something many AMD users are concerned with right now is the pending switch to socket M2 and DDR2 memory. From my perspective, it's really not a big deal. Everything that we've heard indicates that the switch will be little more than a change in the memory controller in order to support the new RAM type. If we could compare a 2.4 GHz Athlon X2 with the future DDR2 equivalent right now, I would wager heavily that the difference will be less than 10%. Buying an X2 3800+ right now and overclocking it to 2.6 GHz will, in all likelihood, match the best official dual core processor that AMD will release during the next nine months. (You might also try to get one of the dual core Opteron chips, with which many people are overclocking to 2.8 GHz and beyond.)
I'm not yet done overclocking this Manchester chip, as I want to take a closer look at how the heatsink used affects overclocking performance. What can you reasonably expect from the stock HSF, what can you get with performance air cooling, and how much better is water cooling? I'm already working on gathering results covering these questions. If you have any specific requests or suggestions before then, let me know.
I'm certain that there are going to be plenty of you who've read this and think, "yeah - so what?" As I said at the outset, this article isn't targeting the hard-core enthusiast or overclocker. Everyone needs to learn how to overclock somewhere (at least if they're interested in that sort of thing), and if nothing else, this should give you an idea of what results to expect, as well as some reasonable starting settings. Again, your results may vary.
Looking at the different RAM options, it's difficult to make a good case for spending tons of money on memory. Yes, it can improve performance by 10% or more in some cases, but in many instances, you will be bottlenecked by some other component in the system. There is one other point to mention on the memory: overclocking with four 512MB DIMMs was almost a complete failure on the setup that we used. Other motherboards, or perhaps a BIOS update for this motherboard, might improve the results, but for now we would recommend caution with such attempts. If you want to run 2GB of RAM, two 1GB DIMMs would be a much better choice. Having that much memory certainly isn't required, but then again, neither is a dual core processor. Personally, I'm done purchasing 512MB DIMMs for myself.
Something many AMD users are concerned with right now is the pending switch to socket M2 and DDR2 memory. From my perspective, it's really not a big deal. Everything that we've heard indicates that the switch will be little more than a change in the memory controller in order to support the new RAM type. If we could compare a 2.4 GHz Athlon X2 with the future DDR2 equivalent right now, I would wager heavily that the difference will be less than 10%. Buying an X2 3800+ right now and overclocking it to 2.6 GHz will, in all likelihood, match the best official dual core processor that AMD will release during the next nine months. (You might also try to get one of the dual core Opteron chips, with which many people are overclocking to 2.8 GHz and beyond.)
I'm not yet done overclocking this Manchester chip, as I want to take a closer look at how the heatsink used affects overclocking performance. What can you reasonably expect from the stock HSF, what can you get with performance air cooling, and how much better is water cooling? I'm already working on gathering results covering these questions. If you have any specific requests or suggestions before then, let me know.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
46 Comments
View All Comments
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Ugh - at a comment on is an article that true special attention to the fact that the graphs aren't zeroed. I think in the process of tweaking article to get things to look right, I accidentally deleted that paragraph. I have now http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">added to paragraph back in.If I start all the graphs at zero, everything overlaps and you can't really see what's going on. In some cases, everything is still overlapped a lot (FEAR). I normally hate nonzero graphs, but when the results are all so close together, that's no good either for readability.
BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Well, if everything is overlapping that much, it's likely that the results are too close to be really meaningful. The FEAR graph is a pretty good example of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310728/>Ho...">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310728/"... to Lie With Statistics</a> ;)BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
^ Still need my edit function for comments. :pDammit
JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
:)JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
^ Still need my edit function for comments. :pThat was supposed to say, "I had a comment in this article that drew special...." That will teach me to trust my speech recognition software.
Hacp - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
I have found that past 2.6, the heat and temps increase dramatically. Nice to know that anandtech got the same results as well.Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
SuperPI crashes help! I have a Opteron 165 with 1 gig of value PC4000 kingmax ram at 133 2.5-4-4-8 2t. Board is OC to 1.4v at 9x277 = 2.494. I have run two torture versions of prime 95 (one of the CPU intensive, one of the ram intensive) on each processor, for a total of 4 prime95's. At the same time I run 3dmark 2005. At the same time I run winamp with visualizations on. I leave this on all night 9hrs+ in a loop. No errors at all. No buggyness at all. I game for 3 or 4 hours at a time and no problems.But I just read this article and SuperPI was mentioned and I never used that before and I tried it. It wouldn't work unless I lowered my overclock to 2.00 which is unacceptable to my sorry ass. I KNOW my system is unstable. I just was wondering if it mattered as the computer is completely stable. I am guessing that prime95 just rounds off answers and they don't have to be exact whereas I am guessing that SuperPI's answers are already known to be exact. Actually SuperPI runs fine but if I open up a second copy from a second folder and attach the affinity to both processors SuperPI will have errors as soon as I start it 1second of starting the 2nd process. Any ideas??
Could it possibly be my motherboard or ram as both are 'value' versions not OC specialty items. I have already played around with rendering divx movies and playing doom no problem. Will I probably have some problem down the road or like some small encoding error or dvd writing error that is due to my overclock. I Overclocked my old PII too high and it was spewing out bad math. I did all these chem reports in college and was getting completly off the wall numbers (I never tested my PII oc in prim95). Is this the same or does the error correcting in my programs that I am running in XP make this point moot.
Man I wish I never read about superPI poo :<
Furen - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Superpi and prime95 work differently. I think superPI is more reliant on memory bandwidth (if you're doing something like 32M superPi) so your ram may be the problem (I, personally, like crucial ram, I've never had any problems with it at all, and its not much more expensive than the generic crap). If your system doesnt crash when you're doing whatever it is that you do on your computer then you're fine, though, but I'd still try to work on the ram to see if you can get it to be superpi stable.Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
It just gets wierder and wierder... If I don't set the affinity manually in the task manager it will run through to the end and the CPU's will both be at 100%. But if I set them manually in the task manager before I start 32M the second one I start always crashes? I am guessing that the task manager isn't running the processors at 100% or something, as the windows task manager is automatically putting the loads on the two cpus and for a milisecond one isn't doing anything???? My Memory is up to 95% utilization... This proggie sucks if you ask me.Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Thanks for the feedback. BTW it is Kingmax Super Ram, Dual channel mate. My motherboard is a ASRock 939 dual sata-2. Bought it because it runs AGP and PCIe quickly. I have my ram underclocked normally it can run at 200 but is running at 133 normally, I also lowered it to 100. I lowered all the timings lower than what the spd says. None of these things help... I am really confused. I run the Blend (ram intensive) test on each processor at the same time as the FFT test in prime 95. Memory usage goes up to 1.5 gigs total (I only have a gig), so that is using all the memory + page. But there is no error at all. I am a little dumbfounded but I have been thinking about it and my computer doesn't have any 'random' errors which is fine. Cept for firefox 1.5 and it had the same occasional problems before my upgrade. Oh well hope everything stays stable. Thanks for the feedback.