Cheapest 50% overclock ideas?

[porina]

You might look at the subject and think what am I going on about? One of the 3DMark Steam achievements is to run it with a system with a CPU overclocked 50%. I want to get it, but I don't want to end up spending a lot of money to do so.

 

50% is a fair amount, so it would be easiest with a lower starting clock. I've recently played with non-K OC on Skylake i3, so one path is to get a low clock Celeron or Pentium. I'm looking into this now, but they still cost more than I like. I also wonder if it is possible to do on a Kaby Lake CPU? The extra threads could make it more useful as a low end machine. Looking around at home, I do have a G4400, but with a stock clock of 3.3 GHz, I'd need to get it to just under 5GHz... probably too much of an ask. The G3900 at 2.8 GHz would only require hitting 4.2 GHz, which should be easily attainable.

 

There's no OC on Haswell era non-K CPU is there?

[oskarha]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

You might look at the subject and think what am I going on about? One of the 3DMark Steam achievements is to run it with a system with a CPU overclocked 50%. I want to get it, but I don't want to end up spending a lot of money to do so.

 

50% is a fair amount, so it would be easiest with a lower starting clock. I've recently played with non-K OC on Skylake i3, so one path is to get a low clock Celeron or Pentium. I'm looking into this now, but they still cost more than I like. I also wonder if it is possible to do on a Kaby Lake CPU? The extra threads could make it more useful as a low end machine. Looking around at home, I do have a G4400, but with a stock clock of 3.3 GHz, I'd need to get it to just under 5GHz... probably too much of an ask. The G3900 at 2.8 GHz would only require hitting 4.2 GHz, which should be easily attainable.

 

There's no OC on Haswell era non-K CPU is there?

I have been able to easly overclock both an i7 920 (62%) and a Celeron 440 (100%) very far with ease.

[porina]

5 minutes ago, oskarha said:

I have been able to easly overclock both an i7 920 (62%) and a Celeron 440 (100%) very far with ease.

Those CPUs are cheap now, but I don't have anything to put them in and the rest of the system will add up...

[oskarha]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Those CPUs are cheap now, but I don't have anything to put them in and the rest of the system will add up...

A celeron 440 and a cheap p35/p45 board shouldnt be too expencive

[Megah3rtz]

14 minutes ago, porina said:

There's no OC on Haswell era non-K CPU is there?

Pentium G3258! 

[porina]

1 minute ago, Megah3rtz said:

Pentium G3258! 

I thought of that, but it is practically a K even if not in name. It is not cheap, base clock a bit high, so not a good option.

6 minutes ago, oskarha said:

A celeron 440 and a cheap p35/p45 board shouldnt be too expencive

I will have to research further.

[done12many2]

3 hours ago, porina said:

One of the 3DMark Steam achievements is to run it with a system with a CPU overclocked 50%.

 

Just sitting here with my feet kicked up on my desk.   

 

Unfortunately, I didn't go the cheap route when I did it.

 

 

[porina]

1 hour ago, done12many2 said:

Just sitting here with my feet kicked up on my desk.   

 

Unfortunately, I didn't go the cheap route when I did it.

Nice.

 

I have just 3 to get:

50% overclock - of this thread

1337 - down to chance? I don't think I can make it happen in any sane way.

3 GPUs - just need to not be lazy one day and cram them all into one system for a test. They don't all have to be active in the bench right? Just 3 installed in one system.

 

[porina]

9 hours ago, oskarha said:

A celeron 440 and a cheap p35/p45 board shouldnt be too expencive

And now ordered off ebay  There's a seller practically giving away the 440's, even if I never use it twice I can use it as a decoration, or paperweight. The mobo was more challenging, with only one low cost P35 chipset mobo which I grabbed. To keep costs down, I'm hoping to reuse existing ram if I can find it. I just found two sticks of 512MB at home which isn't great, but I have an old Dell desktop elsewhere with 4x1GB, so stealing half of that would be enough to run Windows. PSUs, HDs, cooler, case I have spare. GPU I'll just grab something random from another system. I think I can do this! The mobo even has PATA so I can reuse my old DVD drives

 

The annoying thing is, I only sold my Core 2 era systems last year for not a lot. Now I'm buying it again... what next, a Pentium 4?

 

Oh, I found a Core 2 6300 which is 1.86 GHz, so that might be a candidate for OC too. It's higher bus than the Celeron 440, but I'll worry about that later. I mistook it for a Pentium E6300 at first, which is the same socket but higher clock.

 

Fun arrives next week.

[oskarha]

9 minutes ago, porina said:

And now ordered off ebay  There's a seller practically giving away the 440's, even if I never use it twice I can use it as a decoration, or paperweight. The mobo was more challenging, with only one low cost P35 chipset mobo which I grabbed. To keep costs down, I'm hoping to reuse existing ram if I can find it. I just found two sticks of 512MB at home which isn't great, but I have an old Dell desktop elsewhere with 4x1GB, so stealing half of that would be enough to run Windows. PSUs, HDs, cooler, case I have spare. GPU I'll just grab something random from another system. I think I can do this! The mobo even has PATA so I can reuse my old DVD drives

 

The annoying thing is, I only sold my Core 2 era systems last year for not a lot. Now I'm buying it again... what next, a Pentium 4?

 

Oh, I found a Core 2 6300 which is 1.86 GHz, so that might be a candidate for OC too. It's higher bus than the Celeron 440, but I'll worry about that later. I mistook it for a Pentium E6300 at first, which is the same socket but higher clock.

 

Fun arrives next week.

Sounds good

You will need some decent cooling tho, but judging by your sig you probably have something.

I had to push 1.7v through my 440 to get that nice 100% OC of 4GHz

[porina]

23 minutes ago, oskarha said:

Sounds good

You will need some decent cooling tho, but judging by your sig you probably have something.

I had to push 1.7v through my 440 to get that nice 100% OC of 4GHz

 1.7v! I know, for an older processor it is less insane, but still...  I was going to thrown on a Gammaxx 200T which is a low end tower, but now you mention it I do have a Corsair H110i GTX spare as it is a pain to use on 115x with all sorts of weird uneven cooling effects. For a bench setup, it might be worth it.

 

I was wondering, as the 440 was so cheap, it if might be worth a suicide OC on it. Just keep clocking until it dies, hopefully not something else. 

[oskarha]

7 hours ago, porina said:

 1.7v! I know, for an older processor it is less insane, but still...  I was going to thrown on a Gammaxx 200T which is a low end tower, but now you mention it I do have a Corsair H110i GTX spare as it is a pain to use on 115x with all sorts of weird uneven cooling effects. For a bench setup, it might be worth it.

 

I was wondering, as the 440 was so cheap, it if might be worth a suicide OC on it. Just keep clocking until it dies, hopefully not something else. 

I was trying a suicide OC on mine, but even with a P5Q deluxe and dangerous amounts of voltage I couldn't get past 400Mhz fsb

[porina]

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/ProductDetail.aspx?T=motherboard&U=en-us0000318

I finally reached the mobo's web page today. I tried before and couldn't connect, so thought I'd try again another time. Still can't. Hmm... using an online web site status check, they reported it CAN be accessed. I checked my DNS, I was using Google's free one. Flipped it over to my ISP one, and there's the site.

 

Anyway, browsing through the manual I found one point of concern. It only mentioned 667/800 speed ram. I only have 1GB of 667, and 4GB of 533. It looks like the lowest ratio is 1:1, which means the Celeron 440 could run DDR2-400, but it would still need to hit 600 for the 50% OC. Would the 533 go that far?

 

I managed to find 2x1GB of 800 for less than the cost of a tube of premium heatsink compound, delivered, so that'll do. I kinda have a backup plan. I know there are ancient PCs at work which aren't used often. I could in an emergency, poke around them and see what they have. Unlikely to be higher speed though. I'm also partially kicking myself, as I passed on looking at at least two P4 era systems in the e-waste pile which are now gone. They might have been a source of bits too. All the bits are supposed to arrive on Tuesday so I'll hopefully find out then.

 

I still haven't dug out a spare PSU and GPU yet...

[porina]

The mobo and Celeron 440 came yesterday and I've been doing some testing already. I'm held back by ram, as I only have 2x512MB of 667, and the mobo only wants to boot with 667 or faster. It wont boot with either of my 533 sets even if I force the multiplier to 1:1 as I think it resets when it detects new ram fitted.

 

Still, running Win7-64 with 1GB of ram was interesting... not as bad as I thought. I got enough installed so it will be ready for testing as soon as the 800 ram arrives, hopefully today.

 

I've moved my 750Ti into the system. Did try running 3DMark but it doesn't finish loading, and all I see is the splash screen with javaw spiking load on CPU forever. Will revisit after more ram.

[Jumper118]

19 minutes ago, porina said:

The mobo and Celeron 440 came yesterday and I've been doing some testing already. I'm held back by ram, as I only have 2x512MB of 667, and the mobo only wants to boot with 667 or faster. It wont boot with either of my 533 sets even if I force the multiplier to 1:1 as I think it resets when it detects new ram fitted.

 

Still, running Win7-64 with 1GB of ram was interesting... not as bad as I thought. I got enough installed so it will be ready for testing as soon as the 800 ram arrives, hopefully today.

 

I've moved my 750Ti into the system. Did try running 3DMark but it doesn't finish loading, and all I see is the splash screen with javaw spiking load on CPU forever. Will revisit after more ram.

You need a 45nm cpu to run 3d mark

[porina]

17 minutes ago, Jumper118 said:

You need a 45nm cpu to run 3d mark

Good point, I didn't check the requirements at all. Now I look on their web page I see "1.8 GHz dual-core Intel or AMD CPU". Ok, so I got a £3 Celeron paperweight then  I'll still want to have some OC fun just to see what its limits are, then swap to the Core 2 E6300 which should make the minimum requirements and still have enough OC headroom.

[Jumper118]

3 hours ago, porina said:

Good point, I didn't check the requirements at all. Now I look on their web page I see "1.8 GHz dual-core Intel or AMD CPU". Ok, so I got a £3 Celeron paperweight then  I'll still want to have some OC fun just to see what its limits are, then swap to the Core 2 E6300 which should make the minimum requirements and still have enough OC headroom.

It need to support sse4. 1 instructions as well. 

[porina]

33 minutes ago, Jumper118 said:

It need to support sse4. 1 instructions as well. 

I can't find mention of that. Only requirement for CPU is what I quoted earlier... will find out soon enough when I try it tonight. 

[Jumper118]

2 hours ago, porina said:

I can't find mention of that. Only requirement for CPU is what I quoted earlier... will find out soon enough when I try it tonight. 

I tried it last night on an e4300 and that is the error it came up with while loading the benchmark that's a 1.8ghz c2d but it's 65nm

[porina]

2 hours ago, Jumper118 said:

I tried it last night on an e4300 and that is the error it came up with while loading the benchmark that's a 1.8ghz c2d but it's 65nm

It is running (slowly) right now on my C2D E6300, still 65nm processor. Apart from higher FSB and addition VT, dunno if there is much difference between them. Maybe something else in system is preventing it in your case?

 

 

Feel the power!

[Jumper118]

6 minutes ago, porina said:

It is running (slowly) right now on my C2D E6300, still 65nm processor. Apart from higher FSB and addition VT, dunno if there is much difference between them. Maybe something else in system is preventing it in your case?

 

 

 

Feel the power!

i remember now. it was vrmark that i was running! 

[Intelfreak]

i know by facts that an I7 920 can do the trick. That I7 920 i had before i swapped it out with an I7 980X cut do 4.4 GHz and that is well over your 50 % goal.

 

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9319378

 

 

[porina]

 

Done it! It took more work than expected. In short, the mobo even when set to 1:1 ram ratio ran at 1:1.2, so I had to stabilise the ram at DDR2-1000!

 

 

The kit... everything is very low budget! The ram resting on top of the PSU is the 667 I had from before.

 

21 minutes ago, Intelfreak said:

i know by facts that an I7 920 can do the trick. That I7 920 i had before i swapped it out with an I7 980X cut do 4.4 GHz and that is well over your 50 % goal.

My goal was also cheapest. Without looking, I'm guessing even those early i7s are not that cheap yet.

[Intelfreak]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

 

Done it! It took more work than expected. In short, the mobo even when set to 1:1 ram ratio ran at 1:1.2, so I had to stabilise the ram at DDR2-1000!

 

 

The kit... everything is very low budget! The ram resting on top of the PSU is the 667 I had from before.

 

My goal was also cheapest. Without looking, I'm guessing even those early i7s are not that cheap yet.

The CPU's Arent so bad, but the motherboards tend to be a bit pricy. I got my self a nice deal with the I7 980X in a bundle. complete with ram, mobo and a CPU cooler. for 208 USD including shipping. besides CPU it contained asus p6x58d premium mobo, Noctua NH-D14 cpu cooler and 12 GB of Corsair vengeence DDR3 ram.

 

And I7 920 can be found on ebay to around 40 USD. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Core-i7-920-2-66GHz-Quad-Core-CPU-Processor-8M-Cache-SLBEJ-TESTED-LGA1366/112284338587

 

And a mobo like this for 51 USB http://www.ebay.com/itm/Evga-X58-SLI-LGA-1366-Socket-B-Intel-132-BL-E758-A1-Motherboard-/132078388578?hash=item1ec07c4562:g:U-QAAOSw4DJYjJS2

[porina]

1 hour ago, Intelfreak said:

The CPU's Arent so bad, but the motherboards tend to be a bit pricy.

You can say that again. All the parts I got would cost less than that CPU alone, and the mobo costs are scary. That is still most definitely not the cheap option.