Overclocking, Anyone Experienced?

[JoshuaA]

Recently I decided to splash out on a new gaming rig or at least a gaming rig to ease the stress my laptop under goes. I ordered everything early December not really anticipating Christmas being an issue for deliveries and it kept getting set back, phoned up and eventually drove to Staffordshire to pick up the parts.

So this is what I got...

AMD Phenom II 965 125w (Rated 3.4Ghz) combined with a Corsair H50
4Gb (2x2GB) DDR3 1333Mhz ram
HIS Raedon 6850 Graphics card 1024MB GDDR5
Asus Crosshair III board
Some case...
650w PSU.
60GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD

Anyway straight away I set out to over clock with the intention of making my PC avoid fire.

CPU idles at 27 degrees on boot up so all is good there, under load on Everest ultimate stress test I get around 36-40 degrees. I then progressively overclocked it however keeping the voltage at 1.4v which is apparently its max rated voltage. I struggled to touch 4Ghz so I wasn't too happy about that and I was expecting more out of this CPU. I then pushed the voltage up 10% (perhaps a big jump but I trusted the cooler could cope with the added heat and following some advice I loosely found on a random website). With the voltage now at 1.54V I'm able to touch 4.2Ghz and have it stable, 4.4Ghz is achievable however the heat is a bit more of a concern. At 4.2Ghz and 1.54V its roughly topping out at 45degrees on 100% load when left for an hour.

So I'm hoping someone on here perhaps TechFrog could give me some general insight on how much heat most AMD cores can take before reducing their shelf life dramatically. I'm wanting to overclock the ram as well but just haven't bothered yet. I'm not going to touch the gfx card as I have a feeling it's faulty and by the looks of things the inbuilt overclocking voids any warranty ATI offer, I occasionally get the dreaded pink lines on simple things like MSN windows however under heavy load (BFBC2) I have nothing but praise.

Also... Anyone out there know much about Raid 0 or Raid 1? I only have a 60gb SSD drive at the moment and 4 games have filled that completely already, I'm wanting to get some standard disks (3 SATA slots available so I imagine 3 Disks would be nice). Whats the chances of a disk failing early or within a year or so and causing complete and utter loss of all data? Can anyone recommend me some disks for experience?

I don't like reading reviews as everything is heavily biased, for one the price of my AMD core compared to an equivalent Intel would be astronomical but reviewers always insist people should buy Intel for some strange reason.

 

[Tech-Frog]

things the inbuilt overclocking voids any warranty ATI offer, I occasionally get the dreaded pink lines on simple things like MSN windows however under heavy load (BFBC2) I have nothing but praise.

Send it back, those are artifacts, a VERY VERY BAD SIGN.

Avoid going over ~55c, but these days your processor will easily last till you get a new one, even overclocked.

Overclocking your RAM is pretty much a waste of time, the speed gain is absolutely tiny.

4.2ghz sounds about right for that chip, stick where you are and try to drop the voltage slowly.

HDD failure rates aren't that high, and for most things a cheap 1tb hard drive will do you fine.

As a final note, you've gone about overclocking pretty much the wrong way it seems. To begin with, do not touch the voltage, just keep upping frequency notch by notch until you loose stability, then up the voltage, but only by the smallest amount possible. Repeat until you reach unacceptable heat levels or the chip his a brick wall.

 

[JoshuaA]

This processor doesn't want to overclock without over volting. If I go anything over 3.4Ghz (stock)(1.35v) without changing the voltage it becomes unbootable almost instantly. If I boost the voltage 10-15% it opens a whole new world for the processor.

I'm noticing the only thing I am finding which is getting hot at 4Ghz is the south bridge which touches 50C when on a stress test.

I went to phone the shop (Overclockers.co.uk) about the GPU issue and whether it warrants a refund/replacement but they weren't open when I phoned. It hasn't happened recently but since I'm not over clocking the card I've got quite a warranty on it.

I put in a spare 500gb drive to give me some space to install other games.

 

[Tech-Frog]

As I said, you should nudge the Ghz up VERY SLOWLY, and ONLY EVER MOVE THE VOLTAGE IF YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST, AND ONLY THE SMALLEST AMOUNT AT A TIME. 10% is a very large amount.

 

[JoshuaA]

What downsides are there apart from excessive heat from increasing the voltage? Like I said without going above the stock voltage I can't seem to change the clock frequency at all without it becoming unable to load windows.

 

[Tech-Frog]

Power consumption, shortening live span.

 

[JoshuaA]

Power consumption, shortening live span.

To be fair, why would anyone who is over clocking give a crap about power consumption, that was the last thing on my mind when I built my PC anyway, From what I've read the expected lifespan of these sorts of processors without overclocking is around 10years+, shortening the life span by even 20% is pretty much meaningless when it comes to current PC technology.

So other than that there is no imminent failure due to over volting.

 

[always4lora]

I personally don't see the point in overclocking, never have. You wont notice the difference for most games / apps

 

[Tech-Frog]

Overclocking is very useful.

I've dropped boot times by ~10%.
Improved game performance by ~%25.

With overclocking a £100 piece of hardware can match a £120+ unit.

 

[JoshuaA]

Overclocking is very useful.

I've dropped boot times by ~10%.
Improved game performance by ~%25.

With overclocking a £100 piece of hardware can match a £120+ unit.

I wouldn't say I have achieved those sorts of performance increases but yeh you can push an extra £20 out of some of your stuff.

Most high end products are designed to be overclocked and you pay that at a premium price. Most high end motherboards have a lot of OC technology etc and it's a waste no to utilise that.

 

[saltynay]

I use to overclock quite a bit, I got my Q9550 (2.8ghz) to 3.6ghz on air and 4.1 on water.

Your lack of interest in case and PSU concerns me. The PSU is like the foundation of the computer and as in building if you have inadequate foundations you can destroy the entire structure. A power surge from a cheap PSU can easily wipe out any component and may void the warranty so 200GBP gpu dead because you saved 20GBP and bought cheap. The case is about cooling if you run hot then you reduce the longevity of your components, heat also causes information to become fragmented due to the electrons becoming too active and jumping around like a 5 year old on red bull.

So what case and psu are you using? What cpu and/or gpu cooler are you using?

Overclocking is a double edged sword you void warranty but if you do it properly and know what your doing then you get a large performance increase. A true overclocker will rarely buy the premium product that is marketed as over clockable unless it has an unlocked divider.

 

[JoshuaA]

About the case... I just couldn't be arsed naming it lol.

Coolmaster Scout case and Coolmaster GX650 PSU, the CPU cooler I am using is a Corsair HydroH50 however I have added an additional fan for push/pull.

Temperatures for my motherboard are around 21 (room temperature, I have a very cold room). CPU idles around 23/5 under load I usually find my CPU temp at 31.

GPU cooler is the stock cooler, I don't even think these days GPUs have interchangeable heat sinks and fans all closed units.

 

[Tech-Frog]

GPUs are still very interchangeable when it comes to heatsinks, especially in the watercooling world.

 

[JoshuaA]

GPUs are still very interchangeable when it comes to heatsinks, especially in the watercooling world.

I can only find about 6/7 stocked in the UK and they are all for old cards, currently I have found it impossible to find one for an ATI 6850 card however I'm not overclocking and the stock fan/sink is doing great.

 

[JoshuaA]

Haha speak of the devil it looks like my ATI card has packed in already. Ironically it's one of the things I haven't touched and recently I found my computer became completely unstable on games if I overclocked, I put this down to poor overclocking. However on further thought and issues when not overclocking I found my computer would bluescreen claiming ATI driver issue, further purple artifacts appeared yesterday on BFBC2 and today I decided to reinstall my driver to the latest version, half way through the install the screen flickered black as usual and then the screen took a more distorted horizontal approach with a nice purple tint to it, blue screen followed and now my GFX card is usable... only at a mobile phone size resolution.

Interesting, the only thing you don't overclock or mess with the settings and it breaks...

Multiple attempts later to restore the drivers and I have given up. The ATI CCC and Drivers install but upon reboot I get the same recurring message claiming "ATIadlxy.dll" has an error and may possibly not usable by windows...

So as a final gasp I installed the drivers which came on the disc with my GFX card but nope... doesn't want to know about it.

currently arguing the toss with overclockers.co.uk now and because it's out of the 28day return they're not going to be too helpful about this. I also appear to have to undergo their "we test it, if we think it works you pay us for reimbursement" policy. So yay \o/!