Oc'ing Hurts Performance...

[3rd gen noob]

a friend of mine has just built up an uber PC
his spec is as follows:

Athlon 2800+ (Barton)
ASUS A7N8X-D
2x512MB TwinMOS PC3200
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
120GB S-ATA hdd
450W Antec PSU
Thermaltake Xaser Case
Lite-On 52/32/52 CD-RW
16/48 DVD-R

it's obviously a rather powerful machine, benchmarking in 3dMark03 at 5409 standard:



however, he wasn't satisfied with that and overclocked the cpu and tweaked the ram to try and increase performance...
he dropped the cpu multiplier to 11 and increased the fsb to 200MHz ddr (400MHz effective), yielding a clock speed of 2.2GHz (effectively an Athlon 3200+)
he also tightened the timings from the standard 2.5-4-4-8 to 2-3-3-7, however, this overclocked setup actually caused a huge dip in performance:



does anyone know what the cause could be?
firstly, you'd think temperature might be the issue here, however, his system is running pretty cool:



is it possible that the large increase in fsb (nearly 20%), has interfered with the AGP bus and caused the decrease in performance?
any help/advice would be greatly appreciated

[adamp2p]

Hmmm, that is rather strange. What else is going on there, because that makes no sense. Overclocking should increase performance, but only hypothetically.

If the overclock somehow interferes with the devices in the machine, it may cause you some trouble; however, my experiences with overclocking have been *lovely*; and the only troubles I have ran into have been either the fault of the operating system or the fact that I had a program running (in one case flashget seriously hamered performance in real time gaming, it caused a lag) that I did not realize. However, when I stopped the program everthing went back to normal again. You might want to reboot that machine and see if you can find some more stable settings. Thanks for the post; I like this discussion, as all of those you engage in 3rd gen noob.

B)

[3rd gen noob]

ok, a bit of an update...strangely enough, it seems to have been the agp frequency which was throwing things out...he's locked that to 66MHz and tried again.
this time he got up to 5861, but he's still not happy...



now he's oc'ing the gpu to try and crack 6000

@adam, thanks for the advice, this problem had us a little baffled too...we were lucky we remembered the agp frequency thing...i suppose overclocking isn't a very exact science, so it's hard to diagnose things sometimes...

[LeGoMyFnLeg]

If you have mentioned the adjusted core voltage anywhere in this thread, I am not able to find it. Please don't tell me that you have attempted an overclock without a core voltage increase proportional to the expected clockrate.

[3rd gen noob]

Originally posted by LeGoMyFnLeg@5 October 2003 - 03:13
If you have mentioned the adjusted core voltage anywhere in this thread, I am not able to find it. Please don't tell me that you have attempted an overclock without a core voltage increase proportional to the expected clockrate.

no cpu core voltage change...is this necessary?

[james_bond_rulez]

power hungry bastards...

[LeGoMyFnLeg]

Absolutely! Where do you think the need for expensive cooling measures comes from? It's the heat generated by more electrons passing through the processor.

[3rd gen noob]

Originally posted by LeGoMyFnLeg@5 October 2003 - 03:18
Absolutely! Where do you think the need for expensive cooling measures comes from? It's the heat generated by more electrons passing through the processor.

well, if the system is stable at the standard voltage, is there any point increasing the voltage (and therefore heat)?

he's up to 5997 now at 405/750 on the gpu

[adamp2p]

Wow, that is a powerful score/machine! What's that dude get on Aquamark 3?

[james_bond_rulez]

you have to increase cup voltage to properly overclock otherwise your games would hang.

it's like you are running a high performance engine but the fuel injectors are not pumping enough fuel into it the car stalls