Investigations into Socket 939 Athlon 64 Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on October 3, 2005 4:35 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Test Configuration
9000 words into the article, and we still haven't even given you benchmarks or tested settings. Hopefully, we've managed to convey something of the complexity involved in overclocking. If you already knew all of the preceding material, think of it as a quick refresher course. If you're new to overclocking and skimmed most of that, your success in overclocking is going to be limited. Patience is a major component for any overclocking endeavor. Skimming a guide, finding some tested numbers, and plugging them into your BIOS may work fine, but more likely, you'll have periodic instability and you'll be stuck as to what needs to be changed in order to fix the problem. Now, we're finally ready to give you our test setup and the settings that we used for the various overclocks.
Our system configuration is definitely targeting value rather than the high end. The OCZ RAM is decent, but the remaining parts are mostly mid-range. We've listed the current prices in the above table, and we're looking at about $900 without the monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, and power supply - assuming that you use the included PSU in the Antec case. Dropping to value RAM can cut another $70 from the price. While a slightly nicer PSU isn't a bad idea, the OCZ 600W is overkill for non-SLI setups, for sure - which is why we list it as an alternative. If you're looking at running an Athlon 64 X2 with 2x1024MB of RAM and dual 7800GTX cards, we've seen an overclocked setup actually break the 400W mark, so 600W might not be a bad idea in that case.
The graphics card is going to be something of a limitation, as the X800 Pro is certainly not going to compete with a high-end card like a 7800GTX. For the cost, though, it's really not a bad choice. The X800 GT and GTO cards also look good, priced at under $200. Since we're looking at a value-oriented overclocking setup, running a high-end graphics card that eats up more than half the total cost of the system is a bit extreme. However, we'll try to get some benchmarks in a future article looking at exactly that sort of setup. For gaming, at least, the GPU is going to be the critical factor in reaching high frame rates
Because of the GPU limitation, we're going to be testing at 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. We'll also test many of the titles with 4xAA enabled, which should serve as a reality check. Even with a super fast CPU, many games are going to be completely GPU limited with the X800 Pro when we run 4xAA, especially at resolutions 1024x768 and above. Frankly, we wouldn't bother enabling 4xAA unless you can at least reach 1024x768 anyway.
9000 words into the article, and we still haven't even given you benchmarks or tested settings. Hopefully, we've managed to convey something of the complexity involved in overclocking. If you already knew all of the preceding material, think of it as a quick refresher course. If you're new to overclocking and skimmed most of that, your success in overclocking is going to be limited. Patience is a major component for any overclocking endeavor. Skimming a guide, finding some tested numbers, and plugging them into your BIOS may work fine, but more likely, you'll have periodic instability and you'll be stuck as to what needs to be changed in order to fix the problem. Now, we're finally ready to give you our test setup and the settings that we used for the various overclocks.
| AMD Overclocking System | ||
| Hardware | Component | Price |
| Processor | Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 512K 2.0GHz (939) - Retail | 190 |
| Motherboard | DFI nF4 INFINITY | 95 |
| Memory | OCZ Rev. 2 Platinum (TCCD) 2-2-2-5-1T | 162 |
| Video Card | (PowerColor) X800Pro PCIe | 224 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate SATA 250GB 7200RPM 8MB 7200.8 NCQ | 109 |
| Optical Drive | NEC 3540A Black (OEM) | 45 |
| Case | Antec SLK3700-BQE | 90 |
| Bottom Line | 915 | |
| Optional Parts | ||
| Hardware | Component | Price |
| Memory | OCZ Gold VX PC-4000 2x512MB 2-2-2-8 @3.3V | 183 |
| Memory | PC-3200 2x512MB Value CL2.5 | 85 |
| Power Supply | OCZ PowerStream 600W | 190 |
Our system configuration is definitely targeting value rather than the high end. The OCZ RAM is decent, but the remaining parts are mostly mid-range. We've listed the current prices in the above table, and we're looking at about $900 without the monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, and power supply - assuming that you use the included PSU in the Antec case. Dropping to value RAM can cut another $70 from the price. While a slightly nicer PSU isn't a bad idea, the OCZ 600W is overkill for non-SLI setups, for sure - which is why we list it as an alternative. If you're looking at running an Athlon 64 X2 with 2x1024MB of RAM and dual 7800GTX cards, we've seen an overclocked setup actually break the 400W mark, so 600W might not be a bad idea in that case.
The graphics card is going to be something of a limitation, as the X800 Pro is certainly not going to compete with a high-end card like a 7800GTX. For the cost, though, it's really not a bad choice. The X800 GT and GTO cards also look good, priced at under $200. Since we're looking at a value-oriented overclocking setup, running a high-end graphics card that eats up more than half the total cost of the system is a bit extreme. However, we'll try to get some benchmarks in a future article looking at exactly that sort of setup. For gaming, at least, the GPU is going to be the critical factor in reaching high frame rates
Because of the GPU limitation, we're going to be testing at 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. We'll also test many of the titles with 4xAA enabled, which should serve as a reality check. Even with a super fast CPU, many games are going to be completely GPU limited with the X800 Pro when we run 4xAA, especially at resolutions 1024x768 and above. Frankly, we wouldn't bother enabling 4xAA unless you can at least reach 1024x768 anyway.
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Powered by AMD - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
Do not forget The Athlon XP 1700+ 1.5Volts, DLT3C, mines is OC from 1467 Stock to 2250 Mhz and pretty cool with an old Thermaltake Blower...It can ever reach 2450 Mhz but with 1.8 Volts.
hey, at 2250 Mhz its a 53% OC too!!
Great article but it will be useful for me only when I need an Athlon 64 :p
donkeycrock - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
i noticed that frys is selling x-connect (500 Watts)psu for 25 dollars after rebate. it is extremely heavy, and not many reviews say if they are very good PSU's for overclocking, anybody have knowladge about this PSU.thanks
brad
cryptonomicon - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
nice article jarred, and you worded the disclaimers perfectly, bravo.and its nice to see those ram comparisons. good to see those results on the latest a64 platform and confirm once again that the ram makes only a few percentage points difference, if that. shelling out all your dough on a good GPU, then buying the lowest model venice, a DFI board, and value ram is the way to go.
Googer - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
http://www2.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/Down...">AMD Thermal Grease List PDFRupertS - Wednesday, October 26, 2005 - link
Interesting, AMD only recommends thermal grease for short term use 'where the heat sink is removed and attached multiple times over a short period'. They definitely do not recommend it for long term use.StriderGT - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
Both me, Zebo and many others have clarified long time ago in Anands forum the pointless struggle of purchasing extreme memory parts in Athlon64. Dividers and value ram will do the trick of excellent ocing giving you 95%++ of the performance someone gets with expensive and overvolted ram modules. Nice seeing anandtech come up with an article backing up the threads like this one (http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid...">http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...mp;threa...PS For those owning MSI Neo3 m/bs -and even the rest- I have created back then an excel calculating the actual memory frequency with the various BIOS settings. Enjoy
http://www.geocities.com/gtstrider/">http://www.geocities.com/gtstrider/
JarredWalton - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
Yeah, I've seen quite a few threads around the 'net on this, but AT hadn't covered it very well, and I hoped to get something "official" out there. (None of the enthusiast sites have really covered this that well, as far as I could see.) Since I've been fooling around with various AMD CPU overclocks for a year now, I figured others might like to see the possibilities. High-end, high-cost is well and good for dreams, but like most people I live a bit closer to reality. $200 is about as much as I'm willing to pay for a CPU in most cases.andyc - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
So you can basically overclock the 3000 to the same speeds the 3200 can? So it's not even worth it to go with the 3200?JarredWalton - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
Well, perhaps. 9x300 requires a better motherboard than 10x270, though most boards than can handle 270 MHz CPU bus speeds will also handle 300 I think. For value overclockers, though, I don't think I'd bother spending the extra $50 on the 3200+, no. Spend it on the GPU instead (if you play games).Mogadon - Monday, October 3, 2005 - link
Great article Jarred, thanks for putting in all the hard work and time.I have one question regarding voltages. As I understand it, you wouldn't recommend running a VCore above 1.65V for a long term overclock. I understand the warnings and possible effects on the CPU with running a high VCore but I wanted to know if this is around the VCore that you would run on, say, your overclocked system?
The majority of people on the forums here don't really recommend going above 1.55V or 1.6V, i was wondering if you had any comments about this.