Stability

[shadowbreaker513]

From what I've read over the past couple days as I've been looking for upgrades, it seems that the popular thing to do nowadays is getting one of the cheap, easily overclockable intels and pushing them as far as they can go. I've though about doing this, but the I also need my computer to be fairly stable as one of the reason I am doing a round of upgrades is to get my computer in full working and stable order for college starting in the fall. From my limited overclocking experience, when I did it, it was relatively unstable. Is this latest batch of overclocking gems still reliable and stable when you crank them up? If so, it may be a good way to save some extra money where I didn't have to spend it, but I would prefer not to sacrifice too much reliablity.

(If this post seems disjointed and rambling, I apologize, I'm exhausted)

 

[calebb]

Overclocking core 2 duo's is definitely not like overclocking Celerons and P2's/P3's back in the day. Back then, HSF technology was nothing like it is today - VRM's provided unstable voltages, you were almost always running FSB frequencies way out-of-spec (unless it was a 66MHz -> 100MHz bump or something like that).

I didn't do any overclocking since my dual Celeron 400's @ 600 several years ago - and at that time, the stability was definitely questionable. Even with water-cooled pelts & a high quality PSU, things were far from 'rock' stable. Windows 98 (or 2000) managed to get corrupted every few months - and people around the [H] had similar results.

Fast forward to the Core 2 Duo. E4xxx start with a 266MHz FSB and E6xxx start with a 333MHz FSB. The batch quality of nearly all c2d's being produced today will allow them to run at 3GHz+ with little to no increase in voltage. And modern motherboards (with high quality VRMs, solid state capacitors and heatpipe technology) are easily able to sustain 400MHz FSB frequencies. Some newer 965 and P35 motherboards even run up into the 500MHz FSB frequencies with no stability issues.

A few weeks ago I decided to build a new system. Asus P5K-deluxe (deluxe for higher quality components -> stability), E6320 (7x multiplier), PC8500 Ballistix memory (since it's dirt cheap these days), high quality Corsair 620hx PSU. Right out of the box, I bumped the FSB up to 400MHz (2.8GHz) with everything default - default voltages across the board. I ran Orthos overnight, memtest for a few hours - no problems at all.

I ended up settling at 426MHz FSB so I could run my memory at 5:4 / 1066MHz 5-5-5-15 and it has been rock solid for a couple weeks now. Load temps (Tuniq Tower Cooler) are very low - 40C.

I could keep going, but basically, you are just about guaranteed a stable 400MHz FSB with the current low-end core 2 duo processors if you pick up decent memory, motherboard, PSU.