Investigations into Athlon X2 Overclocking

by Jarred Walton on 12/21/2005 12:00 PM EST
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  • rekabwolrab - Friday, February 24, 2006 - link

    I'm new to OC and both the articles were very nice. Good Job. I am looking forward to the next installment with HSF/Cooling.
  • shoeish - Friday, February 24, 2006 - link

    Any results to share about watercooling or stock HSF with this chip yet?
  • mcpdigital - Wednesday, December 28, 2005 - link

    This article comes in the right moment since lots of people are thinking about upgrading their PCs or just did it.
    In my case I have a pretty simmilar configuration with LanParty Ultra-D, 3800 X2 and OCZ EL 3200 (2x1GB).
    I found the breakeven of my setup at 280x9(2520), Mem at 210 MHz CAS 2,3,3,5 1T and HT x 3. Memory is running at its best, with 1T, Fastest in BIOS and CAS2 achieving around 61000 MB/s transfer rate running Sandra 2005 Pro, a value that is a bit under the maximum bandwidth with HT @1680 MHz of 6720MB/s
    Anything over this speed makes the system unstable and requires a lot of slowdowns in other settings, voltage and temps raising fast, its a bad tradeoff IMO.
    So Anandtech simple of the 3800 X2 seems a little better than mine, not that I'm not happy, I'm for sure.

    Marcelo
  • Some1ne - Sunday, December 25, 2005 - link

    Re: If you have any specific requests or suggestions before then, let me know.

    I noticed that as you increased the clock speed, you also increased your chipset voltage in a fairly linear way. I question whether or not this is really necessary or beneficial. I have a MSI Neo4 Platinum mainboard, and I've never had to touch the chipset voltage when overclocking. In fact, some of the behavior I observed when playing with it seemed to imply that the chipset got slightly less stable with higher voltages (though I didn't do enough testing to know conclusively if the relationship holds or not). Using the stock chipset voltage, I was able to hit:

    2464 MHz (352x7) on a Winchester 3000+ w/ 6.6% over-VID on the CPU
    2420 MHz (242x10) on a Manchester 3800+ w/ 10% over-VID on the CPU
    2400 MHz (400x6) on a Winchester 3000+ w/ 6.6% over-VID on the CPU, just to see if the board would run stably at a 400 MHz "fsb" setting...it did

    So as far as I can tell, boosting the chipset voltage is not necessary in order to attain a good overclock. It might be interesting if you could do tests to see what, if any, impact it has on stability at higher clock speeds, or maybe at least re-run your 2.7 GHz tests with stock chipset voltage just to make sure that your instability wasn't coming from an overheating chipset.
  • JarredWalton - Monday, December 26, 2005 - link

    The results reported are only after testing all of the lower voltages. I encountered instability without the increased voltage to the chipset and processor. That said, other motherboards may not behave the same. I intend to switch to a different motherboard for the cooling tests -- a DFI LanParty SLI-DR. I will be sure to comment on whether the voltage requirements change or not.
  • AtaStrumf - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    Just want to commend you for a really thorough article. I miss that from other AT editors as of late.

    I also agree that all that ultra high end memory with tight timings is an absolute overkill for all but the most rabid overclockers. This is especially true since Athlon got an on die memory controller and became Athlon64. Just get some good quality RAM that will get you to 220-233 MHz so you have some headroom with BIOS FSB/dividers settings, because generic usually craps out at 201-203 MHz (sad but true).
  • Visual - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link

    Fantastic article, folks!
    It really showed alot. Sure, as someone commented, using a better mobo might have been interesting... but after all its the CPU that is important here, and you made the differences in performace with varying oc well presented.

    I have to say, this article showed a surprisingly high difference between memory types too. You did comment in the end that there wasn't much difference, but there are some cases where there is :) 3dMark05 is the extreme case i guess, and not "real world" enough to be worth the added price, but 15fps or more in a lot of games from going from generic to the PC4800 mem isn't bad too. Seriously, this article showed the importance of memory way clearer than any of your RAM roundups in the past.

    What is still dissapointing is that the test didn't reach the near-3ghz ocs a lot of people are bragging with on some forums :p But this is a good thing in a way, as now there won't be any misled readers buying the chip and expecting unrealistic achievments. I'm still curious about what the chips can do at max though, so I'm looking forward to your stock/Chill tests :) Maybe comparison with both infinity and lanparty boards? Maybe trying out several chips so you can give us a somewhat more realistic max average oc? (Hehe, no, scratch that last one. I don't want AT going broke from buying out all the X2s, plus no matter how many chips you test, the readers' own luck will deviate from yours)
  • Visual - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link

    Oh hey, I want to add a bit but there is no edit feature. So here goes...
    The RAM difference is much higher than with the singlecore veince. This does match with the assumption that two cores would need (and benefit) more bandwidth. So it also brings hope that the move to AM2 and DDR2 will have an even further boost, atleast for the dualcores. I'm already drooling over an imaginary AM2 X2 oced with DDR2 800mhz ram or faster :p
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link

    I would say the performance difference shown here (relative to Venice) is from two things. First, two cores can use more bandwidth, though most of these tests won't show that since they're single-threaded. Second, the faster graphics card allows the CPU to really stretch its legs.

    Once you're at realistic settings for this system (minimum 1280x1024 resolution), the scores get a lot closer. Also, 3DMark has a pretty large deviation between runs - probably 3% or so. I didn't run 3DMark multiple times looking for the best score, so the results may not present a completely accurate representation of performance. Still, the CPU tests do show generic RAM at a pretty major disadvantage as clock speed increases. If 3DMark05's CPU test is an accurate estimate of multithreaded game performance, we're looking at a 25% difference! But I wouldn't put too much stock in 3DMark05. :p
  • Visual - Friday, December 23, 2005 - link

    From what I read on the futuremark forums once, even though 3dmark05 is multithreaded, vertex processing in cpu tests is singlethreaded (some dx9 functionality from MS, not developed by futuremark) so isnt taking full advantage of dualcores still.
  • TheHolyLancer - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    i that since this is an OC thread, they should have used a DFI NF4 Ultra-D or a Expert, they have a 4V jumper that allows you to take DRAM voltage into 4 V (i hope no one does though)
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link

    The higher voltages would have helped the VX RAM a bit. I may shift to a LanParty SLI-DR for the cooling test... or at least try it at some point to see how much of a difference it makes in performance.
  • KingofCamelot - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    I noticed that the BF2 demo file for v1.12 did not work. The bf2bench.demo file needs to be changed for it to work. The bf2bench.demo file can be opened in Notepad, and the following changes need to be made.

    These lines:
    demo.camerafile mods\bf2\Demos\jw112.bf2cam
    demo.demofile mods\bf2\Demos\jw112.bf2demo


    Need to be changed to:
    demo.camerafile mods\bf2\Demos\jwanandtech112.bf2cam
    demo.demofile mods\bf2\Demos\jwanandtech112.bf2demo
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link

    Thanks! I've corrected the file and uploaded the new version.

    --Jarred Walton
  • tayhimself - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link

    Hey Jared,

    This was a very well written article. You were thorough with the benchmarks almost to a fault. I liked your introductory and ending commentary. Your first article was just as good.

    Props!
  • sxr7171 - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link

    Agreed. This was a quality job for sure and the questions he raises at the end are very pertinent. I'm sure he'll come up with the answers.
  • ElFenix - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    i assume you used the stock heat sink/fan unit?
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Er, sorry I forgot to mention that. I used an XP-90 with a 3000 RPM 92mm fan (generic fan). I'll make a note of that, since that's important information. The followup looking at cooling options will use a retail HSF as well as the XP-90, an Asetek MicroChill, and an Asetek WaterChill. (Why Asetek? Because they asked me to review their two products.)
  • Furen - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    How come the graphs arent zeroed? I suppose it'd be pretty much a bunch of overlapping straight lines if they were but having a graph that shows framerate from 63.5 to 65.0 is not much better.
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Yeah, the graphs could be a bit misleading unless you look at what the lines actually represent.

    The difference between the OCZ PC4800 and everything else looks huge in the http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/athlon...">Doom 3 graph @ 1600x1200 4xAA, but if you actually look at the lines, the difference is less than 1 frame per second.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Ugh - at a comment on is an article that true special attention to the fact that the graphs aren't zeroed. I think in the process of tweaking article to get things to look right, I accidentally deleted that paragraph. I have now http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">added to paragraph back in.

    If I start all the graphs at zero, everything overlaps and you can't really see what's going on. In some cases, everything is still overlapped a lot (FEAR). I normally hate nonzero graphs, but when the results are all so close together, that's no good either for readability.
  • BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Well, if everything is overlapping that much, it's likely that the results are too close to be really meaningful. The FEAR graph is a pretty good example of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310728/>Ho...">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310728/"... to Lie With Statistics</a> ;)
  • BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    ^ Still need my edit function for comments. :p

    Dammit
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    :)
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    ^ Still need my edit function for comments. :p

    That was supposed to say, "I had a comment in this article that drew special...." That will teach me to trust my speech recognition software.
  • Hacp - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    I have found that past 2.6, the heat and temps increase dramatically. Nice to know that anandtech got the same results as well.
  • Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    SuperPI crashes help! I have a Opteron 165 with 1 gig of value PC4000 kingmax ram at 133 2.5-4-4-8 2t. Board is OC to 1.4v at 9x277 = 2.494. I have run two torture versions of prime 95 (one of the CPU intensive, one of the ram intensive) on each processor, for a total of 4 prime95's. At the same time I run 3dmark 2005. At the same time I run winamp with visualizations on. I leave this on all night 9hrs+ in a loop. No errors at all. No buggyness at all. I game for 3 or 4 hours at a time and no problems.

    But I just read this article and SuperPI was mentioned and I never used that before and I tried it. It wouldn't work unless I lowered my overclock to 2.00 which is unacceptable to my sorry ass. I KNOW my system is unstable. I just was wondering if it mattered as the computer is completely stable. I am guessing that prime95 just rounds off answers and they don't have to be exact whereas I am guessing that SuperPI's answers are already known to be exact. Actually SuperPI runs fine but if I open up a second copy from a second folder and attach the affinity to both processors SuperPI will have errors as soon as I start it 1second of starting the 2nd process. Any ideas??

    Could it possibly be my motherboard or ram as both are 'value' versions not OC specialty items. I have already played around with rendering divx movies and playing doom no problem. Will I probably have some problem down the road or like some small encoding error or dvd writing error that is due to my overclock. I Overclocked my old PII too high and it was spewing out bad math. I did all these chem reports in college and was getting completly off the wall numbers (I never tested my PII oc in prim95). Is this the same or does the error correcting in my programs that I am running in XP make this point moot.

    Man I wish I never read about superPI poo :<
  • Furen - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Superpi and prime95 work differently. I think superPI is more reliant on memory bandwidth (if you're doing something like 32M superPi) so your ram may be the problem (I, personally, like crucial ram, I've never had any problems with it at all, and its not much more expensive than the generic crap). If your system doesnt crash when you're doing whatever it is that you do on your computer then you're fine, though, but I'd still try to work on the ram to see if you can get it to be superpi stable.
  • Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    It just gets wierder and wierder... If I don't set the affinity manually in the task manager it will run through to the end and the CPU's will both be at 100%. But if I set them manually in the task manager before I start 32M the second one I start always crashes? I am guessing that the task manager isn't running the processors at 100% or something, as the windows task manager is automatically putting the loads on the two cpus and for a milisecond one isn't doing anything???? My Memory is up to 95% utilization... This proggie sucks if you ask me.
  • Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Thanks for the feedback. BTW it is Kingmax Super Ram, Dual channel mate. My motherboard is a ASRock 939 dual sata-2. Bought it because it runs AGP and PCIe quickly. I have my ram underclocked normally it can run at 200 but is running at 133 normally, I also lowered it to 100. I lowered all the timings lower than what the spd says. None of these things help... I am really confused. I run the Blend (ram intensive) test on each processor at the same time as the FFT test in prime 95. Memory usage goes up to 1.5 gigs total (I only have a gig), so that is using all the memory + page. But there is no error at all. I am a little dumbfounded but I have been thinking about it and my computer doesn't have any 'random' errors which is fine. Cept for firefox 1.5 and it had the same occasional problems before my upgrade. Oh well hope everything stays stable. Thanks for the feedback.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    This may seem like a stupid question, but you did copy the SuperPi executable into two separate folders, right? Otherwise, the two running processes overwrite each others' data and one will always fail. Anyway, I don't find SuperPi to be a very useful stress test compared to Folding@Home, Prime95, and several other utilities; it just doesn't stress the system out that much IMO.
  • Yianaki - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Yes of course it is in two folders. I realized that the SECOND time I did it Heh.
  • Leper Messiah - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Thats actually a good thing, my X2 3800 does 2.65 at 1.425 vcore stable a rock. Looks like this x2 test is a good average indicator instead of most reviews which have the nice cherry picked silicon.
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Yeah, My Opteron 165 seems to top off at around 2.6GHz with the stock cooler.
  • Araemo - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    If you buy a socket 939 opteron, will it work in a normal NF4/etc mobo?

    A dual core opteron is tempting if it will work in the standard enthusiast motherboards. Get a nice heatsink and get it nice and toasty, I could turn my heater back off. :) And I hope 2GB RAM sticks go down in price within the next 9 months.. I'm still debating between a sweet laptop or a good overclocker desktop for my next computer, the desktop would be much cheaper, for sure, but it is a pain to take to LAN parties.
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Most NF4 motherboards support the S939 Opteron, yes. Check the manufacturer's site to confirm though.
  • Googer - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    I found it a bit humourous that this http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/athlon...">graph
    resembles a tent. It reminded me of the days in high school when kids would get fill in the bubble tests and use the answer sheets to do connect the dot drawings.

    I wonder if Jarred had too much time on his hands?
  • kleinwl - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    If you are going to start testing various cooling systems and how they affect max overclock... go ahead and throw in a Seasonic PSU as well. The Seasonic should be rejecting less heat into the case which may make as much difference in overclock as a more efficent Heat Sink. In any case... try it out please!

    <Note I have a XP-90, with a Antec SmartPower 2.0, on a venice... and I'm curious how such a case temp difference could affect the overclocking potential>
  • BigLan - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    quote: Looking at the different RAM options, it's difficult to make a good case for spending tons of money on memory.

    I've always thought that spending a lot of extra cash on memory was a bad idea. It pretty much shows no improvement in Fear. It's nice to see a review of the everyday stuff.
  • Puddleglum - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    The results for Fear looked bizarre. After reading some of the charts where 4xAA is used on games like Battlefield2 and FEAR, which would be a nice feature to show off on a high-end system, the numbers reveal marginal performance.
    I confess, I'm still using a Ti4200, which is only performing well in games because it's not drawing the DX9 stuff, and I've truly been waiting for an ideal video card to come out that's worth purchasing; but the new cards that are out right now are making it easy to sit back and wait for the hardware/software ratio to become a little more price-competitive.

    Also, why is the OCZ PC4800 freaking out with BF2 when the CPU is overclocked to 2.1GHz?
  • Puddleglum - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Neermind.. read this in the closing thoughts:
    "There is one other point to mention on the memory: overclocking with four 512MB DIMMs was almost a complete failure on the setup that we used. Other motherboards, or perhaps a BIOS update for this motherboard, might improve the results, but for now we would recommend caution with such attempts. If you want to run 2GB of RAM, two 1GB DIMMs would be a much better choice."

    Good info.
  • bobsmith1492 - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Actually, switching supply efficiencies can change dramatically with load; I wouldn't count on the draw at the wall as a good indicator of system load change. The efficiency may change from, say 70% at half-load to 85% at 3/4 load, which, on a 400 watt supply, would show up as: 285.7 watts draw (lower power) and 352.9 watts draw (high power). Now, the system is drawing 50% more power, while the meter is only showing 23.5% more power draw.

    Something to keep in mind anyway as I don't know exactly what the difference in efficiency for that particular supply is....
  • Cerb - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    It would be nice to know. However, if it's like the 470w one, it is 'close enough' at all loads.
    http://www.silentpcreview.com/article173-page4.htm...">http://www.silentpcreview.com/article173-page4.htm...
  • bobsmith1492 - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    Yeah, from 2-400W it's pretty close. Nevermind me then. :)
  • WRXSTI - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link

    I cannot wait to get a 64 X2 chip! Maybe by next year is better...
  • Futurebobis - Thursday, December 1, 2022 - link

    Yo, sup past people

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