First of all the system before overclocking:
1.CPU - C2D E8200 @ 2,66
2.GPU - ASUS 8800GTS 512, 650core & 972memory.
3.RAM - 2GB Kingston 800 CL5
4.Resolution - 1400x1050 4:3.
5.Mainboard - MSI P7N SLI Platinum
Eventhough i didnt do anything with the RAM, playing around with the FSB still changes the RAM speed. I will post a picture of it later. Eventhough the board is SLI, getting a second used 8800GTS 512 here is quite difficult because they are very rare. There wasnt any real need for overclocking either, it was more of a need to learn how exactly to do it and what are the dangers etc.
So i started with a CPU. I did some reading on the net about overclocking in general and then specifically on the 8200. There wasn't any good articles or posts about the e8200 but i did find one on the E6750 which is the "predecessor" of the E8200 (both have 8x multiplier and FSB333). What i wanted was a nice 500mhz overclock but that didnt happen without messing around with the voltages and i didnt want to mess with those. I did reach a clock speed of 3,12 at FSB 390 but since 400 started a reboot loop i pulled back to a safe fsb of 375 which means the clock speed was now 3,0ghz.
Overclocking the cpu wasnt that hard really, rather the problems came elsewhere. For instance i had to upgrade the bios on my mobo because the Cpu Z didnt display the correct speed in windows. But to upgrade the bios with MSI tools i need MSI live update and that program required me to update to version 4.0 which kept crashing endlessly. So eventually i managed to bypass that with an older version and flash the bios to 1.3 successfully and i could now see the correct speed in CPU Z.
I havent done anything with the ram untill i find out more about the sticks i have. I dont want to accidentally kill them even i am doing very mild overclocking which is more like a reduction of safe zone rather than overclocking.
The GPU overclock went smoothly as well. Unfortunately the tools caused some major annoyance. I figured i should start with Asus tools as its an Asus card. But since the asus tools failed to start at all because of some weird stuff with EIO.dll i uninstalled all Asus tools and downloaded nTune and EVGA Precision and after using both I opted for the EVGA tool. So again i did some research on the overclocks of the 8800GTS and started playing around with the tools. The first thing i did was to see how much noise i would be willing to tolerate so i raised the fan speed untill it got annoying which was at 59% so i scaled back to 55% (default was at 37%). So this was the first barrier I set because I wanted more performance but not at the cost of a lumbermill below my desk. So the default speeds were 650mhz on the core and 972 on the memory. I managed to raise the core speed to 806 and memory 1060 all the while during playtesting no artifacts and the temperature remaining at 60C-61C degrees. The stock Asus cooler is quite ok actually because for the other overclockers their cards were hotter by default.
To see the difference that i had caused i used two benchmarks: X3Terran Conflict Rolling Demo and Stalker Call of Pripyat Benchmark. Both are freely available and weigh in about 500mb download.
So the system after OC:
1.CPU - C2D E8200 @ 3,00
2.GPU - ASUS 8800GTS 512, 806core & 1060memory.
3.RAM - 2GB Kingston 800 CL5
4.Resolution - 1400x1050 4:3.
5.Mainboard - MSI P7N SLI Platinum
Stay tuned for the results. Since im getting hungry im going to stop here for now and go grab something to eat.Statistics: Posted by Peltz — Thu Jan 28, 2010 7:53 am
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