Overclocker

This is for all the geeks n’ techies out there, who might find it useful as a reference. Here’s the link to the detailed results (oc-ers only).

I played around with my 2-year old C2D E6300 two months ago and managed 3.15Ghz with some voltage increase. The board I’m using is the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, which encountered some trouble going past the 400FSB mark, but a +0.1V increase to the board fixed that. The OC is 24-hour prime stable and 7-hour OCCT stable. Here are the basic stats:

E6300: 450 x 7 = 3.15 Ghz (69% increase from the stock 1.86Ghz)

VCore: 1.3875V

G.Skill 2×2GB DDR2: 450 x 2 = 900 Mhz at 5-7-7-19 (automatically clocked down by the board from 5-5-5-15)

Memory Voltage: +0.1V

Now I’ll come to the more interesting bit. I acquired a PNY GTX 260 (192 SP) 2 months ago, which was the reason I went to the trouble of overclocking the CPU in the first place – since the CPU bottlenecking was so evident in 3DMark 06.

When I switched from my old 7900GS to the GTX 260, the 3DM’06 score went from 4430 to 8437 (1.9x), which I thought was extremely low for a GPU that was two generations ahead. So, after overclocking the CPU, I checked again to find a new score of 12396, at which point I noted that returns were becoming very small, and hence stopped pushing.

However, what’s even more interesting is how the new 3DMark Vantage behaves at the two CPU speeds. While this isn’t mentioned in the detailed results, the Vantage score went up only about 200 points, telling me that it didn’t care one way or another how much faster my CPU was, simply because it was that taxing on the GPU. This sort of explains why NVIDIA recommends (at least) an E6300 to go with the GTX 260; they expect newer games to be far more taxing on the GPU than the CPU and now, with PhysX ported to the graphics card, that makes more sense than ever.

On top of all that I’m getting a brand new BenQ E2200HD tomorrow, so yesterday night, I decided to push the GPU for that extra muscle it’ll need to get settings up at full HD. Here are the basic stats:

Core: 710 Mhz (19% increase from 576 Mhz)

Shader: 1420 Mhz (14% increase from 1242 Mhz)

Memory: 1225 x 2 = 2450 Mhz (23% increase from 1998 Mhz)

These values, I believe, are slightly higher than what most others have achieved with the 260! Yippee!! Memory was stable at 1250Mhz, but pushing past that to 1280Mhz caused a BSOD in the middle of my Vantage Test (2-minute run of Calico to test stability), so I backed down two steps to its current point. Same with the Shader, which caused artifacting at 1500 Mhz. The Core seems stable at 710, but I haven’t bothered pushing that since I’m not comfortable with a higher Shader.

This time, GPU scores in Vantage went up from 8828 to 10026, which I believe brings it in level with the Core 216 flavour. In any case, a 1.2k increase sounds really good to me!

While googling for some reference results to know what I could expect, I wasn’t able to find any overclocking test for the PNY GTX 260, so I hope this helps someone.