Overclocking a 64 bit box :)

[alexander]

Ok, so all the parts for my new system are in, and i decided to clock it :), yeah a hacker thing, needed to do it....

 

Anyhow, i couldnt find a lot of sensible information, but here is what i needed to do...

 

I got an Asus K8N9-E Deluxe mobo with what was supposed to be an Athlon 64 2800+, but came in with a 3400+ (2800 is a 2.8GHZ with 512k cache, 3400 is a 2.2GHZ with a meg of cache, i didnt complain :) )

2 gigs of pc 3200 400MHZ ram

2 160Gig sata drives (now setup in raid 0) with HD fans

dvr-rom

dvd-writer

i bought an antec 500 watt power supply for it with real neat cable management... (and it actually can run at 500 watts, its not the peak performance :) )

i got 2 gig nics

and finally an Express PCI 128 meg Asus Extreme N6600GT grahics card with DDR3

 

Goal:

Building a fast, yet reliable system, but will optimize it for speed when i install the OS, hence raid 0 on SATA.

When i got the mobo, i was dissapointed to hear that the CPU was only a 2.2, so i decided to make it my mission to make it a 2.4GIG, so i hit the books, and came up with these two links:

 

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1787

http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=gethowto&howtoID=58

 

If you need to do this, the first guide is quite useless, and it made me reset the mobo, so on to what it is i did to make my dream truly come true :)

 

After reading the long, second article on basics of overcocking a 64 bit system, which is quite cool, i came up to my spec of clocking 200 MHZ higher then what it normally operates at. Reason - reliability, i could go for a 2.75GIG system, but it is one, unnecessary and 2 it squezes out all the resources of the board, i wanted it to stay intact for a while, not too much abuse :)

Also I would like to mention; DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME, AND IF YOU DO, DON'T BLAME ME IF IT BREAKS!

I can safely clock my system because of a few factors:

I ordered a 3x3 coper heatsink with a 3x3 fan on top

the case has an antec fan on the back, and another one on the side

I also have 2 HDs each with an HD fan on it, one i had to throw into the floppy slot, but since i got the case for free, i dont have the plate to cover anything, nor do i want to, that provides an extra point of air flow in and out of the system making it pretty nicely cooled

No extra wire, also contributes to it all, although wiring is a still a pretty big issue, lets count, 2 HDs, 2 DVDs, side fan, 2 HDfans, IDE cable, 2 sata cables, and all the cabling for the front USB and Firewire jacks, as well as the main power running to the board all equals loads of wires inside...

 

Now to the fun part, what to do :) (or not to do)

Ok, i ordered the board because it provides a dream interface for overclocking the PC without ever having to do jumpers and all of that crazyness, that was previously needed to do the task.

 

I hit the bios, and headed straight for the CPU info:

2.2, 1054 k cache.... cool, now to work

 

went into the dram setting, set the control mode to manual,

clocked the speed down to 166 (from 200),

set the memory timing to 1(from 2),

CAS latency to 2.5 (from 3),

RAS/CAS Delay to 3(left default),

MIN ras active to 7(from 8) and

TRP to 3(default).

 

that should have bumped the performance of RAM, ok, good now to the processor....

 

I hit the Jumperless config, and switched that to manual,

i brought CPU frequency up to 220Mhz (from 200) and

changed the multiplier from auto to x11,

DDR voltage went to 2.65V but

the CPU one was left at Auto, for safety sake :)

 

Basically it, restarted, no errors, the Proc shows up as a 2450MHZ at 1054 K cache, went in, changed a few minor settings, disabled floppy, changed boot sequence and so forth, and will start installing the os on there, in, lets see, about 12 hours or so. I'll run some benchmarks on it, tell ya what i get if you're interested.

 

Any questions, comments, requests, anything, is welcome... :)

[Tormod]

Excellent...keep us posted!

[GAHD]

just curious on why you'd lower the ram speed. doesn't make much sense to me.

[Tormod]

just curious on why you'd lower the ram speed. doesn't make much sense to me.

 

I had to do the exact same thing on my ASUS A7N8X because it became very unstable when the RAM ran at 2x200 rather than 2x166. Someone here at hypography actually pointed me to that solution.

 

Don't know why Alex needed to do it, though...

[rockytriton]

yea I'd rather have faster RAM than faster CPU, that's where the bottleneck is. Unless of course you have a really high L2 Cache.

[GAHD]

Yeah, I love my 400mhz ram, makes the macheine scream with speed. I tempraily switched out to 333mhz ram with an extra 256mb, and the macheine was far slower.

[alexander]

the reason i needed to lower ram speed is so i can make it work faster without the possibility of making it extremely unstable. just incase you havent noticed, i lowered the timing on it to 1 as well as the latenly by 1/2 point. overall that was squeezing it pretty hard, and it would perform faster, even though its clocked lower... (yeah try to make sense out of that...)

 

Unfortunately i had to put it back to stock today while i encountered problems with even booting into any live cd, something was screwing with something, had malloc errors and i dont like seing those. i think i will clock it up eventually, but for now i choose an almost running os to not even being able to boot into a live cd :)

 

another thing, if anyone tries to install an os on a raided anything: raided cards dont really raid your array propperly, what you need is software raid, and although cumbersome to setup, it actually works...

 

btw, my suspicions on the malloc are: Ram, Hardware Raid, not very possible, but at least probable, cpu clocking, but should not be... i turned off all of these and resolved the issue, now i need to do some reading on what actually caused it all. and as i said its running at 2.2 for now, i will clock it higher in a bit, but first i need a running OS on there.

 

P.S. all the documentation on installing Gentoo with Raid (at least on my system), i will post when i finish documenting it (have to do it for a credit for an independant study class, so might as well post it here... :) )

P.P.S. for those of you who have installed Gentoo before, yeah it is quite a bit different in setup, i mean when was the last time you got to play with creating and managing hardware nodes and stuff?