[Fredrikgroth]

Hey everyone, this is my first post here even though I've been lurking around in here for quite a while.

Until today, I hadn't overclocked a computer in what, 4 or five years, since I bought my top-of-the-line Pentium III 600 MHz. I overclocked it to 800 when I got it, and lowered it to 780 two years ago, because it started to play tricks on me. Basically it worked like a charm, but a few months ago it crashed and burned. And since I am the semi-unemployed heavy metal musician that I am, I don't have the money to get tha fancy machine I want. So here's my budget solution:

ASRock P4i45D mobo
Celeron 2,8 (the old one, 128kb cache)

I stayed with my old SDRAM for a while (the mobo supports it), but just recently I got myself some better stuff; 2 x 512 twinmos 3200 DDR.

OK, it's overclocking-time! The worst thing with this mobo is that you have to stay with the default vcore voltage; there's no way to increase it, so I started slowly to raise the FSB. To my surprise, it worked like a charm all the way up to 120 (480), so I jumped up to 125 (500). It POSTed, but crashed during windows loading. I decreased to 124, worked great, but Prime95 gave me errors after 15 minutes. Same thing with 123.

But at 122 (488) FSB, which means 3416.6MHz according to CPU-Z, everything seems fine. No errors after 1 hour 47 minutes of Prime95, but I will of course let it run overnight. Temp peaked at 41 degrees celsius by the way, which seems fine to me.

I guess it's time for memory-tweaks now, but I don't know what the settings mean, or wich one to start with. I left everything as loose as it gets. Any suggestions?

Thanks!!

Fredrik Groth
http://www.storyteller.nu

 

[andy8125]

you're doing pretty good for now...

 

[SpencerM]

well if you are looking for the best overclock possible, try to reach that before you tweak memory timings. The tighter (lower) the timings, the faster your ram will run, giving you an overall increase in computer performance

 

[ShawnMcGrail]

YEAH! Another celeron user!! They overclock like a charm eh? You get the low temps too! Amazing what a low budget cpu can do... but then when you get to the part when your ready to load doom 3... lol

 

[Inquisitor]

wait you clock it to 3.0 and you cant load doom 3 on it man

that blows

 

[ShawnMcGrail]

no, 3.4 is definatly enough, its just the cpu can definatly NOT keep up with my 9800, i get choppy framerates when I have it on 3.4 and Vid on 377/365 and about the same amount of chop when I have the cpu on 3.2 with the same video settings

 

[Inquisitor]

that blows man good luck though

 

[Fredrikgroth]

I don't play games, so I don't care much about Doom 3, hehe.

I use my computer mainly for audio applications (like Cakewalk SONAR 4), and more cpu power is valuable because I can use more plugin effects and virtual instruments in realtime without dropouts.

I wonder how much difference it would make if I had a real P4 instead of a Celeron? From what I've read; it makes a huge difference in games, but virtually no difference at all in divx-encoding. Is the calculation of realtime audio effects closer to games or divx-encoding?

I started playing with the memory settings btw. It was 2.5-3-3-7 from the beginning, now I have 2-3-3-6 which seems very stable. Does it really make a practical difference to play with these numbers, or is it measureble more than noticable?

Rock on,
Fredrik

 

[YiffyGriffy]

The major differences between Celerons and P4s is memory bus, and L2 cache, other than that I believe the cores are identical, so unless coding operations use alot of memory (?) I wouldn't expct too much of an improvment, though I would imagein you'd seen a nice gain for the 512K of L2 or the 1MB if you go with Prescott, and SSE3 might prove to be of some benefit in medai applications

 

[NoAffinity]

Well, without being 100% certain of what kind of workload the CPU has to do for sound application type stuff, I can say that going to an add-in sound card, as opposed onboard sound, frees up clock cycles...so in theory, possibly a good sound card would benefit you in your needs rather than a new CPU. But then again, I could just be talking out my @$$.

Timings don't affect Intel system as much as AMD's, but at any given clock speed, tighter timings will offer better performance than looser timings. What speed is the RAM running at right now (check CPU-Z)? In addition to tweaking timings, running the RAM faster than the CPU (if your board supports faster FSB CPU's, then it should offer you a divider to run the RAM faster than the CPU) will offer better performance still.

 

[Fredrikgroth]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NoAffinity Well, without being 100% certain of what kind of workload the CPU has to do for sound application type stuff, I can say that going to an add-in sound card, as opposed onboard sound, frees up clock cycles...so in theory, possibly a good sound card would benefit you in your needs rather than a new CPU. But then again, I could just be talking out my @$$. Timings don't affect Intel system as much as AMD's, but at any given clock speed, tighter timings will offer better performance than looser timings. What speed is the RAM running at right now (check CPU-Z)? In addition to tweaking timings, running the RAM faster than the CPU (if your board supports faster FSB CPU's, then it should offer you a divider to run the RAM faster than the CPU) will offer better performance still.

I have a great soundcard already; an M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496. Excellent for music productions, offers very low latency with either WDM or ASIO drivers.

About my memory; it's now running at 162.7Mhz, which is 3:4, 33% faster than FSB (122Mhz). That's as fast as it gets, unless I raise the FSB. So I have to play with timings... but unfortunately I might have reached the tightest possible settings already; 2-3-3-6 compared to default 2.5-3-3-7.