How far can a winchester OC?

rico01 · May 2, 2005, 03:59 PM

I have an AMD64 3200+ winchester CPU and managed to OC it to 2.4ghz without any VCore changing and arctic cooling freezer 64. Temps are 39C at idle and 48 at full load. No instability at all.

I'm in no way a hardcore OC'er and I had read that it was harder to overclock the AMD64 than the older Athlon chips so I was expecting not to OC at all.

My question is, how far can this puppy go? I'm quite happy with it right now but am asking out of curiosity. Don't know if I'm going to go further.

Also saw a review on the new Venice core which is said to be even better in terms of temps and OC capability... Daym...

Zelig · May 2, 2005, 04:22 PM

Depends on your chip (as usual.)

The older Winchesters overclocked better than the newer ones for the most part. I seem to have gotten a good chip though, my 3000+ is currently running at 2.4 Ghz on stock cooling, at 1.45 vcore. 2.6 at the same vcore boots fine, but won't prime for more than a couple of minutes, I'm going to try pushing it further when I get a new heatsink.

The revision E cores (Venice/San Diego) do overclock better, but I'm quite happy with mine... I may upgrade to dual-core sometime in the future on this mobo though.

**Asmoday** · May 2, 2005, 04:42 PM

Uhmmm....Zelig, are you aware that you're linking to some nasty stuff that isn't allowed on DH, in your <--specs--> link...

nevermind...aparantly there is something weird going on on my computer....

e v o · May 2, 2005, 04:49 PM

**Asmoday** · May 2, 2005, 04:53 PM

can you say busted?

***Zardon*** · May 2, 2005, 04:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Asmoday

can you say busted?

mmmm, me thinks Asmoday has some nasty spyware links in his browser

***Zardon*** · May 2, 2005, 04:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rico01

My question is, how far can this puppy go? I'm quite happy with it right now but am asking out of curiosity. Don't know if I'm going to go further....

If you up the core voltage, you can generally get great overclocks on those chips.

itchy5 · May 2, 2005, 05:51 PM

whinnies OC quite well on air

CrapolaJola · May 2, 2005, 07:08 PM

Look at the code on your cpu and post it here, also list some of your other hardaware. I can prolly give ya a good idea of how far it will oc

rico01 · May 3, 2005, 12:12 AM

Uhm... The code is behind my cooling and I'm not eager to take out the entire cooling to check.

Anyhow, most of my parts is in my sig.

quakerjtf · May 3, 2005, 07:40 AM

You also have to keep in mind that you need a good motherboard. Go with nf3 or nf4 chipset and make sure it's a good overclocking board. If the rest of your setup is good, you can pull out 500-900 mhz overclock.

rico01 · May 3, 2005, 09:14 AM

Yeah, I have an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum NForce3 Ultra mobo which I believe is supposed to be able to OC quite good. My bottleneck is my memory which is DDR 266. I plan to upgrade to 2x512MB DDR400 soon.

Warpy · May 3, 2005, 10:06 AM

So far I have O/C my WInchester to 275 FSB with the cpu multi @ 10, giving me 2.75Ghz, I didnt even adjust the vcore, just the DIMM voltage to 2.8v. I did lower the timmings on the RAM to 7-4-4-2.5

Zelig · May 3, 2005, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Warpy

So far I have O/C my WInchester to 275 FSB with the cpu multi @ 10, giving me 2.75Ghz, I didnt even adjust the vcore, just the DIMM voltage to 2.8v. I did lower the timmings on the RAM to 7-4-4-2.5

This was stable? I can boot to windows all right to Windows at 310x9 (3000+, so no x10 multi) but prime fails after only a couple of minutes at the voltages I've tried so far.

rico01: Go ahead and use a memory divider if it will help you overclock further, running memory asynchronously won't hurt performance much at all with Athlon64 systems.

rico01 · May 3, 2005, 02:04 PM

I tried to go up to 2.45ghz today but prime failed so I upped the Vcore. It ran stable but the max load temps crept up to 50 so I decided that it was time to call it quits.

2.4ghz is still amazingly good to my standards, like I said, I'm not a hardcore OCer anyhow. With idle temps at 39 and full load temps at 48 I'm very happy with my purchase.

As for RAM timings I have a very hard time to really understand it. I've read a few guides and such but I'm still unsure if it is better with high or low numbers etc.

Zelig · May 3, 2005, 04:16 PM

Lower is better, but will limit your overclock. It's best to benchmark while you change timings/speed to see which combination will give the best performance.

I'm doing so currently... with all the ram timing options on my DFI board, it will likely be a month or so before I finish at the rate I'm going. (However, it's not needed to mess with all the timings as I'm doing, there's barely any performance difference with all of the lesser known timings set to "auto" compared to them lowered as far as they go.)

CrapolaJola · May 3, 2005, 11:39 PM

What ram do you have. The errors in prime may be caused by erroring ram. Try running a divide and loosenign your ram timings, that will most likely rule out ram as the cause of errors.