On 6 May 00, at 23:52, keith wrote:
> I have an athlon 700, and i overclocked it to 800 w/o soldering the cache.
> Now when I run prime95, I get errors. I clocked it back down to 700, and
> prime runs fine. But is there any way i can run it overclocked and run
> prime too? Everything else runs perfectly fine exept for that. Thanks all!
It's not unusual to find that a system will apparently take more
overclocking than Prime95 is comfortable with. Prime95 works some
parts of the system (particularly the FPU and the memory) very hard &
also reports some errors which would not normally be obvious.
Especially when it's being run in self-test or torture test mode.
If you elect to dump Prime95 so you can continue to run overclocked
to 800 MHz, don't be surprised if your system isn't as stable as it
should be. In fact you will probably come across some applications
which will crash the system for reasons which are entirely
consequential to the excess overclocking.
IMHO Prime95 is worth at least $49.95 more than you paid for it as a
hardware testing tool alone. If a system will run the full (16-hour)
Prime95 self-test without complaining, when run in an environment
that's as hot as it ever gets, it's probably not going to have much
difficulty running anything reliably.
Unless the reliability problem is inherent in the software...
BTW - Athlon overclockers please note - the Asus K7M M/B allows one
to set the (100 MHz nominal) bus speed in 1 MHz increments. For
reasons of reliabilty I'd reccomend finding the fastest bus speed
which will reliably run the Prime95 selftest & then reducing by 1 MHz
just to be on the safe side. Don't be disappointed if you don't get
away with more than 2% or 3% - _anything_ is a bonus!
Personally I would not resort to any trick involving increasing core
voltages. If you really need the extra performance that much, then
either bite the bullet & pay the extra for a chip with a higher
rating, or simply wait a few weeks for the price of the faster part
to fall.
I would reccomend that _any_ overclocked system has a full self-test
run regularly - say every 3 months at the outside - as a check that
the system is still operating reliably. Of course, this strategy will
cost about 1% of the total system performance. In my opinion, better
safe than sorry... the hardware's replaceable, and at a cost which
will tend rapidly towards zero, but the _personal_ cost of missing a
prime due to a hardware error caused by excess overclocking would be
unbearable!
Regards
Brian Beesley
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