I overclocked my Opteron 170

Last weekend, I overclocked my Opteron 170. I've been giving it a few days to ensure performance is stable. As written in an earlier post, these are my system specs:

PROCESSOR (CPU) - AMD Opteron 170
GRAPHICS CARD - eVGA e-GeForce 7800GT CO
MEMORY (RAM) -  OCZ EL Platinum PC3200 2GB
MOTHERBOARD - ASUS A8N-E
COMPUTER CASE - Antec Sonata II
HARD DRIVE -  Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250GB
DVD WRITER -  LG GSA-4167B

It's over a year later, and some things are beginning to show their age; suffice it to say, I wanted to squeeze more juice out of my computer. Previously, I'd overclocked from 2000 to 2300 MHz, but didn't play with the RAM timings. This time around, I was able to climb higher.

One reason why I chose this chip was because it's a special gem that worked out so right: the price was right at a goodspeed, and I kept reading on reliable forums that the Opty 170 is a great overclocker. Here's my CPU-Z results:

While I'm running pretty hot (under load, high 50s °C) and didn't get as good as kenjin's results in this thread, I'm happy for the performance boost (it's been noticeable while video rendering) — all those extra minutes add up.

My settings:

• I earlier thought I was running stable at 2700 MHz, but I had the odd nasty lockup, so I backed off to 2650 MHz. (CPU Frequency = 265.0.)
   
• I had to increase the voltage to a base of 1.475 v to stop lockups.
   
• My RAM timings are 3-4-4-8; I'm not alone in this. Note that the A8N-E lists the "Tcl" value before the others in the BIOS — that initially confused me.
   
• The other thing I changed was HyperTransport to 3x, but according to some, that doesn't make a difference.

I didn't do stress testing — I jumped into using the actual apps that put my system to the test. While I don't have the time (that infernal luxury) to do much more testing, hopefully, the time I did put in will shave off precious minutes in the weeks, months to come.

On a lark, I also hopped over to my older rig (a Pentium 4) and upped it from 2.4 GHz to 2.77 GHz. Might as well make the most of my tools! Like Nam June Paik said it best, at least how I recall him from an old JAL inflight mag:

"Time is not money. Time is the opposite of money. People with lots of time have little money, and people with lots of money have little time."

Or to quote Vladimir Golovin from the Filter Forge forums:

"The general idea is that a professional or a company who has money but no time would pay for it, while a hobbyist who doesn't have money but has time can get it for free."

(But where does knowledge come into all of this?)

Tagged as: General, Ideas