Overclocking
18 January 2008I did my first real overclocking last night with my new PC. Well, in the past I did get my hand in overclocking a few times but those are realatively minor. Yesterday, I did get into serious bit of the business and surely why not! Core Duo 2, especially E6750 is really famous for their overclockability, even using the supplied Intel HSF. However, it is a bit noisy and might not give the best performance so I decided to replace it with the Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7. I got a free delivery offer from Scan so I ordered it and it arrived yesterday. Installing the fan was easy and straightforward, took less than 5 minutes in total and it is quieter and much better than the Intel one. The main source of noise now is the fan from the PSU (I think).
Getting to the serious business. After reading few guides in various forums, I decide to overclock my CPU from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz, getting about 20% increase for free. In order to do that, I have taken the following steps:
1. Getting into BIOS, change the AI overclocking from Automatic to Manual
2. Setting the DRAM frequency from Auto to DDR2 - 667MHz. This is to ensure the ratio between RAM and CPU are 1.1 and when FSB is increased to 400, my RAM will run as DDR2-800MHz, which is its native speed.
3. Change the CPU multiplier from Auto to 8
4. Change the FSB from 333MHz to 400MHz
5. Change the vcore from Auto to 1.35, this to ensure that my CPU will have enough power
That is, if everything goes right, my CPU will be 400*8=3.2Ghz instead of 2.6. I restarted the PC and get back to Windows. Things seems to be fine, temperature are normal, 32oC idel and 48oC underload for both cores. That is with my Freezer Pro 7 set to silent mode with 880RPM fan. So far so good. 3DMark 2006 score jumped from 10800 to 11700, which is 8% increase. Super PI with 1M digits took 16s instead of 18s, which is a huge 13% increase. Before I go to sleep I let the PC run the stress test with Orthos and when I got up, the system is stable after 7 hours of torturing CPU, which is great. Finally, my first real overclock experience is success (touch wood!). It will not strongly effect what my everyday use, but still, getting 10% more out of your PC for free is some achievement 
