On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Am 23.01.2013 16:35, schrieb Nikos Chantziaras: >> On 23/01/13 17:09, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: >>> On Wednesday 23 January 2013 07:52:03 PM IST, Nikos Chantziaras wrote: >>>> [...] >>>> In my experience, most of the time you can overclock. The issue is >>>> with the user not knowing exactly how to do it. You need to >>>> understand a few things and how they affect each other. It's not just >>>> a knob you can turn. >>> >>> That pretty much applies to me. I don't know much about hardware stuff. >>> Regarding your 1 Ghz overclock, you probably have good components in >>> terms of RAM & SMPS. >>> When I bought this rig in 2008, I knew nothing about good components, >>> blindly trusted local vendor... also internet shopping wasn't advanced >>> here. >>> So pretty much substandard components. >> >> The part that's really important is the mainboard. RAM doesn't >> matter. In my case, I had pretty basic 800MHz DDR2 RAM. Raising the >> FSB would bring it above that, so I changed the DRAM ratio to 1:1, and >> the RAM then ran at only 600Mhz. >> >> That was the starting point to rule out RAM problems. After that, I >> raised FSB but kept the VCore constant until I hit the first >> instabilities. When that happened, I raised VCore a bit. Rinse and >> repeat, until the VCore was still below the maximum recommendation by >> Intel. That happened at 3.4GHz (378MHz FSB * 9 CPU multiplier = >> 3402MHz CPU clock.) The E6600 CPU I got was an average sample. >> Others were running it at 3.6GHz (or even higher with water cooling.) >> >> This was a process that took about 3 days to complete (needs a lot of >> stability testing.) The good thing about those older CPUs was that >> the performance boost I got by OCing wasn't just scaling linearly with >> the CPU frequency. It was scaling *better* than that, because raising >> the FSB also made the mainboard itself perform better and with lower >> latencies. >> > and here we are - the point where the suspension of disbelief ends. > > All you may have gained you threw away with the slower ram - and you are > trying to tell us that your rig was faster? > > You do know that with today's CPUs the CPU is not the bottleneck - the > slow as molasses, no speed bump for 10 years ram is. > > (just look at the internal clock rate of dram chips - and you realize > that ddr1-3 are pretty much the same crap). >
Volker, in applications speficially tuned to keep their hot data small enough to stay in CPU cache (so, anything with a "frames per second" measurement), overclocking the CPU would still see performance improvements. Cache misses are always painful. -- :wq
