Who Overclocks Their Components?

So like I say, who does it?

I now rarely run a chip/motherboard/memory/GPU at stocks speeds & voltages anymore. I find it helps quite a bit when you’re running those CPU hungry VSTs, and it’s what I’ve actually spent far too much time doing over the past 12 months!

I’ve recently upgraded to an Opteron 170 which I’ve managed to get 2.8GHz stable on both cores. The memory runs at 220MHz with tightened timings, and realtime performance is pretty astounding.

I did a wedding gig the other night, and whilst projecting Winamp’s Milkdrop visual for most of the night (reacting with low latency off the line input), I then hooked up Renoise on the other screen & patched the output to the line input and played a few a pretty CPU intensive tunes, whilst switching over to another Winamp plugin that ran a collage of morphing JPGs (with oscilliscopes of course) from the couples earlier years! All this without crashing once made me feel unstoppable, and they loved it!!

OK might be a bit of a brag post, but I do want to hear your overclocks, honest!

that’s awesome…

unfortunately my cpu actually crashes even when i run it at stock speed, so i have to underclock it by a couple of mhz. i’m not brave enough to OC my RAM… but i do overclock my video card quite a bit… geforce 7800 gs agp, stock is 375mhz cpu/1200mhz RAM, i have it clocked to 480/1400 :)

i have overclocked my athlon64 3500+ by 10% from 2,2 GHz to around 2,4Ghz
but actually it runs very good and im yet to compose a song that will max out my cpu… with my previous celeron 2.2 Ghz that happend very often

EDIT: and i dont have any heat problems (i have zalman copper cooler though) But what gets hot is my gpu… (radeon x850 pro) even at stock it crashes some time while i play some game.

Ì’m afraid I’ll bust my computer trying, since I’ve never done it before…my comp. even comes with a special utility in the bios for it…I dunno…t’would also increase the power consumption, right? And my pIV 3,6gHz already vacumes pretty loud :)

Well. I live with the maxime: “Never touch a running system” :)

Not entirely sure what you can do for Pentiums, but for athlon 64s, you can use Cool ‘n’ Quiet (even when overclocking) to save on power consumption. I’ve been experimenting with this for a while as well, and found a good combination which keeps my CPU on low volts and cool (~29°C) when idling.
I use a load multiplier of 10x, a voltage of 1.425 and HTT speed of 270 which activates when the cpu goes over 70% load, giving 2.7GHz per core. When idle It steps down to a lower 5x multi and just 1 volt. The HTT stays the same which gives 1.35GHz. There’s even a mid-range power state you can set up if you desire!

Both lower temperatures and voltages, along with the plethora of power management features in most components will save you a fair bob on electricity bills in the long run. Worth doing if you cant afford a lot, and if you want to save a few more trees!

does that cool & quiet work on athlon xp’s??? i should really do that

you dont sleep at all on weekends? :)

I think you can alter the CPU speed and multiplier, but I never experimented with that myself. I think theres definitely somthing called Halt @ idle which does help out with temperatures & consumption a lot, some motherboards come with it as an option, or just enabled in bios, others have to use software in windows.
Try this!
To monitor your results and tweak settings afterwards, try this!

It’s been a while since I was using my old Barton, but I just rebuilt it, so I could test for some further advice if you wish. I need to get tweking this anyway! :D

definitely less than i should :D

I have an opty 170 as well on my desktop PC. I have clocked it to a stable 2.8, and can get it to hit 3, but then it locks up or everything gets unstable. I haven’t really gotten into clocking my comp lately though… see I have this problem where everytime I start clocking, I end up staying up all night clocking and posting pics on a million clocker forums, installing all sorts of useless sofware… looking on bittorrent for the latest video games to put my comp to the test that I will never play again… I don’t produce music when I clock, cause as soon as I think I have a good high clock that nobody else has hit, I just let my comp sit for days on my new high speed to see if it’s stable over periods of time. I tried a little when I first got my opty, but terminated that really quick cause I knew It would mess with my production. I’m never satisfied with just keeping it at one speed when I get into it.

That’s exactly what my problem is, just can’t stop fiddling! I’m truly happy with the setup now, and I’ve gotta start saving for things (like holidays and a wedding), so i’ll be putting the time to good use. I might even consider disconnecting my internet for a couple of months, but I envisage a new Renoise release is due, so perhaps in a month or so.
Just had a little look a DBlue’s glitch though, this should keep me distracted for a while!

This is what I did get from Opteron 148:
2.2GHz -> 3.1GHz

I used Asetek WaterChill for cooling.
Dont have this machine anymore, changed it to laptop B)

See what I’m talking about? Posting links to bragging rights… an opteron, Prime 95, tweak this, tweak that, zips files of who knows what, doom3, call of duty- all that shit… but no renoise or anything on that desktop!
:lol:

:P

since about 2 years i am running a P4C 3.0 northwood @3.8Ghz rockstable.
coolingwise i’m on h2o for CPU/GPU/Northbridge.

looking forward to the new intel core2 duo e6700 (conroe core, 2.66ghz) which already beats the current flagship, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 3.46 overclocked to 5.066Ghz in most application benchmarks like audio/video encoding and alike at plain stock speeds. :)
i think it’s quite impressive that the conroe at 2.66ghz kicks the extreme edition’s butt when clocking in at 5Ghz+.
if the conroe will even offer some headroom for some higher clocks, it will kick serious ass.
without the headroom, it will only kick some ass :)
really can’t wait! :dribble: