got my 3.2e past 4ghz finally...

eric m. · Post by **eric m.** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 10:15 am

well i finally was able to get my system to boot into windows and run PCmark and 3Dmark sucessfully at 400omhz last night. I just moved and I don't have internet there yet but i will take some screen shots and post them here later. I basically followed rich's (capper) advice and used loose timings (1:1) and turned off turbo mode and experiemented with voltages at certain speeds. i guess i didn't have to because 250fsb works fine at 1.5vcore. my system never got about 44 degrees C even under load and it worked fine. It did finally reboot on me after I started pushing it with some sandra tests, but overall i just wanted to see if i could do it. I lowered it down to 3.9 just to be on the safe side and so far no rebooting. I'm sure most of you guys here have already got a prescott past 4ghz but it's something I wanted to try.

I also experiemented with overclocking my video card but with today's new benchmarking software, the 9600XT just can't really give me a good score. it's a great card though for what i use it for. i ran the card at 600mhz (100mhz over) and 330mhz memory and it helped the score a little but not enough to risk overheating the card, even though it is water cooled and all the memory has chipsinks.

LVCapo · Post by **LVCapo** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:52 pm

Congratulations! It is a nice accomplishment....and i know you put an awful lot of time into tinkering and testing to make it happen.
With my 3.2 E, i was able to hit 4GHz, but no higher, and it was never stable. i found the sweet spot with that processor and board is between 3.71 and 3.84, anytrhing over that wasn't really stablr and didn't provide much of a boost in performance.

eric m. · Post by **eric m.** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 2:48 pm

i think i will keep it at the sweet spot and enjoy it. but there is some pleasure in seeing the processor speed at 4ghz at least for a little while.

LVCapo · Post by **LVCapo** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 4:50 pm

Oh yeah, i totally agree...nothing like smoking by the 4 GHz mark....that seems to be what all enthusiasts strive for right now...where will it end
The DFI board and an engineering sample CPU set to 3.6 ran decent up to 4.23 GHz, but wasn't stable at all.

Post by **Apoptosis** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 5:07 pm

Congrats on breaking the 4GHz mark, even if it was just for a second it is cool!

eric m. · Post by **eric m.** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 6:14 pm

Apoptosis wrote:Congrats on breaking the 4GHz mark, even if it was just for a second it is cool!

thanks. i left it on for a few hours actually, just to see if the machine would reboot. it stayed on until i pushed it pretty hard, and never got past 45 degrees C. i guess water cooling, arctic silver, and lapping the water blocks really helps. and i think i could get the temps lower if i did some more experimenting. maybe i could put another fan on my heat exchanger for a push/pull configuration to get more flow. i don't know.

now that intel and AMD aren't playing the MHZ game anymore, i think we are going to rely more on benchmark scores because as we all know, simple clock cycles aren't the only thing that make a computer fast.

thanks to everyone for helping me set up my computer and get it to this point. i wouldn't have had a clue how to go about setting up a decent system without all your help.

eric.

LVCapo · Post by **LVCapo** » Mon Dec 20, 2004 7:16 pm

Eric, hows the system going? Have you found the sweet spot yet?
Give us an update on what you are tinkering with and while you're at it, throw in some pics so we can see what you are doing.