Question about OC'ing

Shanio100

Hey guys

I currently have a Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3Ghz processor in my PC. I'm interested in trying to possibly OC this to improve performance. Firstly, is this possible with this processor? And if so, can anyone link to somewhere that will help with doing so? (I've never OC'd before, will it be easy enough?)

Thanks in advance.

S

PogMoThoin

It all depends on what mobo and ram You got

Shanio100

Sorry about the lack of information earlier!

Mobo is : MSI P6N SLI Platinum, nforce-650i SLI
RAM is : Crucial DDR2 BallistiX PC6400 CL4 4 x 1GB (4GB)
PSU is: Corsair 620W ATX
GPU is: Sapphire Radeon 1 GB 4890 (recently purchased).

Thanks again.

Solitaire

Moved to a more appropriate forum

You can OC the E6850 on that mobo, but there's a big question over how far. That's a pretty fast high-end CPU you have there; if there's anything taxing it too hard its time for a quad! Being a high-end CPU it starts life with a fast 333MHz (FSB1333) bus speed. Unfortunately the P6N has issues with OCing performance chips and has difficulty behaving itself past FSB1500 (i.e. 375MHz base clock) without BIOS issues (usually amnesia). As a result you may have difficulty hitting even 3.4GHz, although you might still have decent results with the E6850; the P6N is just insanely random about not budging past certain speeds with certain CPUs. On a good day you can hit over 3.6GHz with an E6850 with decent air cooling and nearly 4GHz on water.

You're not going to be seeing any stellar improvements here; this isn't like taking a 1.6GHz E2140 and pumping it up to 3.5GHz. But, to be perfectly honest, anything over 3GHz is good news for real-world usage; if you're running into massive speed issues at 3GHz the problem lies elsewhere. Or you need more CPU cores to play with...

Shanio100

Thanks for the reply Solitaire.

To be honest, the reason I asked is that I've just order Dragons Age Origins and am awaiting delivery, however, I was surprised that my PC failed the recommended specs for CPU. It was recommending a Quad. I'm going to wait and see what the performance is like with the game as I would of expected to be able to run everything on full @ 1680 x 1050.

If this isn't the case I might look at upgrading CPU's. On this topic, anyone know a decent (Quad?) CPU I could possibly upgrade to while keeping this mobo?

Thanks again guys.

Anti

Solitaire wrote: »

Moved to a more appropriate forum

You can OC the E6850 on that mobo, but there's a big question over how far. That's a pretty fast high-end CPU you have there; if there's anything taxing it too hard its time for a quad! Being a high-end CPU it starts life with a fast 333MHz (FSB1333) bus speed. Unfortunately the P6N has issues with OCing performance chips and has difficulty behaving itself past FSB1500 (i.e. 375MHz base clock) without BIOS issues (usually amnesia). As a result you may have difficulty hitting even 3.4GHz, although you might still have decent results with the E6850; the P6N is just insanely random about not budging past certain speeds with certain CPUs. On a good day you can hit over 3.6GHz with an E6850 with decent air cooling and nearly 4GHz on water.

You're not going to be seeing any stellar improvements here; this isn't like taking a 1.6GHz E2140 and pumping it up to 3.5GHz. But, to be perfectly honest, anything over 3GHz is good news for real-world usage; if you're running into massive speed issues at 3GHz the problem lies elsewhere. Or you need more CPU cores to play with...

Not just the p6n, all 650i boards are just random when it comes to overclocking. The abit one i had would some days keep my Q6600 at 3.9ghz, and other day wouldn't post past 3.4ghz. They have crazy vdroop issues. I suppose thats what heppens when you chop down and try to make a chipset as cheap as possible.