Some of you may be aware of AMDs recent price drops, which pretty much halved the price of its new AM2 range. Annoying for those that had purchased a new AM2 processor soon after release - such as myself.
Still, I paid £195 for my 4000X2, which is already discontinued and thus didn't receive a price-drop. Though the similarly spec'd 3800X2 is just over £100 now.
A decent overclock should combat this, as it'll bring my 4000X2 up to the speeds of the more expensive processors - though you can grab a 5000X2 now for just over £220 - around £25 more than I paid for my chip a month or two ago.
The 5000 hits 2.6GHz and has 2 x 512kb of Level 2 Cache. My 4000 hits 2.0GHz at stock, but has the larger (now discontinued) 2 x 1mb Level 2 Cache.
So to make myself feel better, I have to overclock it somewhere near the 2.6GHz of the 5000. Of course, if I was very lucky, the 4000X2 would hit 2.8GHz, equalling an FX-62, which currently retails for just over £560 - a huge saving.
If you re-read the title of this random spewing, you'll see that I've named it Part 1. Part 2 will conclude my overclocking, stating how much (if any) money I have saved, even after AMD's price drops...
Well, so far, so not-so-good. I spent a good hour or so overclocking last night, which involved adjusting various settings in the BIOS (FSB, CPU multiplier, Memory timings, voltages etc.) - then booting into Windows, running CPU-Z to confirm the clock and then Prime95 and SuperPI to check if the clock was stable or not.
I had 23 attempts at overclocking the 4000X2. 23. That seems like a lot to me. Every attempt was noted down, for future reference and to input into a spreadsheet if I feel like it.
I wont go into too much detail, because it'll bore you (if you're not bored already that is!)... but I ended up at 2.4GHz stable. That's a 20% increase over stock speeds - which was achieved with a 240x10 fsb, along with slacker 5-5-5-12 memory timings and 960MHz on the memory.
I had it up to 2.6GHz quite easily, but once it booted into Windows, SuperPI and Prime95 threw up errors almost immediately. 2.8GHz POSTed, but it would hang on the Windows loading screen.
So, tonight I'll be trying to increase the 2.4GHz clock, to ideally 2.8GHz stable, but I'll settle for 2.6GHz. The annoying thing is that others have achieved 3.0GHz stable with a 4000X2, but it's luck of the draw really.
As for temperatures - the CPU idles at around 27'c on stock speeds, but didn't go higher than 32'c when POSTing at 2.8GHz. So cooling isn't holding it back - in fact it's very cool.
One thing is for sure, even at 2.4GHz it's a lot quicker than stock - my SuperPI time was reduced from a poor 41+ seconds to a more respectable ~33 seconds. Still, that's miles off of the new Core2 chips, which have hit <20 seconds. But hey, I like AMD, I'm no fanboi, but they've served me well to date.
Stay tuned for Part 2, which will hopefully detail how I achieved 3billion GHz. Or maybe not.