Northwood overclocking- promises, promises

Pugwash

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Intel_CPUs_15.html

Quote: "When run on the standard Intel cooler (supplied) with voltage and FSB options available on both Abit and Asus boards speeds as high as 3.4GHz have been attained with ease."


Yes i know ths is a commercial site and it could be a sales pitch but, if this is true, how the feck would you go about this?????

strat

umm its in the link u gave - the link to sharky anandtech and check tomshardware aswell

Gerry

you up the fsb (and voltage if needed) in the motherboard bios. Nothing could be simpler really. Note that ocuk say "up to 3.4ghz". When you are increasing a chips speed beyond its rated one, you are exploiting a margin which varies from chip to chip, even between chips on the same wafer. Expect around 2.6 - 2.9 ghz.

Inspector Gadget

Nicely worded, Gerry - couldn't have put it better. The shortest and simplest explanation I've seen so far...

Another important thing to note here is that this whole thing with "margins" applies to a lot of important items in your system; the PCI/AGP cards and memory are the big ones.

Since the PCI & AGP buses run at a given divider of the FSB, your motherboard has to be able to slice up the FSB (which, for the top-end of what OcUK are touting, is about 200MHz :eek: ) so that the PCI bus is getting something not too much higher than its expected 33MHz. The AGP bus is supposed to run at double that (66MHz), but I'm not sure offhand how that clock signal is derived. If you go offspec on the PCI bus, cards can stop working - Ethernet NICs seem to be the first to go, on average.

Then there's the RAM. The RAM has to be able to work at FSB speeds (although some mobos can offer fractions, like with the PCI bus example above). From what I've read, the consensus is that high-grade DDR memory outperforms and and all Rambus RAM in dealing with high FSBs.

Hope this helps,
Gadget