Overclocking

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I have this old celery 2.4 ghz (400 fsb) and I'm thinking of pushing it up a bit since I'm not going to sell it when I'm done with it, anyway, and it's not like it's going to die before I upgrade if I don't kill it outright.

Another piece I have here is an MSI GF5900XT (designed for OC'ing, sort of, from what I've gathered) with custom radiators on the RAM from the previous owner. I can bump the card's CPU to some big heights and it actually works fine and the RAM can be oc'ed to 811 max (from 700) unless the CPU is left alone, then it can go a bit higher. I've got a 20% increase in 3D Mark benchmarks from that. Generally, it's the choice between CPU and RAM oc'ing. I've heard that this kind of card is well receptive to full FX5900 BIOS override and will oc even better afterwards, let alone the inherent increase from just replacing the BIOS.

And my system RAM is 400 MHz, just in case it matters, and the mobo is a solid ABIT IS7 one.

How do I test it out to make sure it isn't going to hurt performance in the long run or actually damage the hardware too quickly (apart from having the system shut down at 70 degrees Celsius, I guess). What should I pay attention to? How much can I reasonably expect without buying any fancy equipment?

 

Well...first off, whenever you decide you're going to overclock anything, you need to take extra cooling measures. As the speed goes up, so does the heat.

You said that you didn't wants any "fancy" equipment, so with that in mind, your OC limit solely depends on how well the stock HSF can keep the CPU cool. I would say that 50 degrees Celsius should be your upper limit under full load. 70 degrees is just waaaaaaay too hot. Aim low, and stop once you get near 50 degrees under full load.

If you get a good aftermarket HSF unit however, an OC'ed CPU that's running stable and at reasonable temps, wouldn't take too much off the CPU's life span. I don't think the CPU would notice that it's OC'ed if you were able to keep the load temps right around <45 degrees.

Serious OC'ers opt for water cooling though. Once I get enough $$$ for a Core 2 Duo system and a water cooling system, I'm going to attempt to take it near the 4GHz mark. I've heard that it can break the 5GHz mark if you use super exotic cooling methods like phase change or "total emersion".

 

The reason why I don't want to buy any equipment is that a fancy fancy cooler could well cost me half the processor's standing price. I wonder if I'm actually under 50 degrees under full load without OC'ing. But the card can take OC'ing up to the point of 17% increase in efficiency (proportional to the frequency by which you increase, so it's not like double the clock for ten percent more oomph) without danger, so I think I'm going to do that. Actually, I think that's the average and my model can take more because I sort of recall 20% total computer efficiency increase, so that would mean a bigger increase for the card alone. Then again, I tested than on a more heavily OC'ed card than that portal/webzine.

Any idea how to get around to replacing the card BIOS without special equipment? I know that FX5900XT works safely as 5950 or even 5950 Ultra and that's more GPU and RAM clock increase than OCing the normal way can safely achieve. E.g. you can't make it more than 811 on the RAM but with a flashed bios, it takes 900 well and even more if you still OC.

 

What is "overclocking"?

I assume you're not talking about the weird stitching that's done on the the edges of fabric that somehow needs to have a whole separate sewing machine.

 

How do you make them run faster?

 

With graphics cards, you can do it even in the driver settings (google Coolbits if you have nVidia), with processors, you can often fiddle a bit with the settings in BIOS. Just so long as you keep AGP at 66 and PCI at 33, you shouldn't damage anything so long as the temperature doesn't exceed a certain limit. Getting a processor one notch higher without additional cooling isn't really such a problem, but bigger increases require special cooling. If you spend a lot of cash on liquid-whatever-crap, you can get half again the normal clock and make it work. But it costs more time and effort and money than just buying a faster processor, I think.

 

Overclocked CPU's have decresed life span VS a CPU runnning at it's normal frequency.

 

Yeah, but by the time even that shorter-lived CPU dies, replacement is already cheap.

 

I've actually had to underclock my processor as it kept overheating and causing the computer to crash and restart (the processor fan is minus a spoke)

 

Have you tried OCing the card with the help of software like RivaTuner? You should be able to get the speeds up to the wanted levels with it, instead of updating the BIOS.

 

Lol...you *do* realize that a 80mm fan cost about $5 right?

 

Yeah, I've just not been bothered to mess about with it