PC Club Enpower Sabre Extreme: E6600 Made Easy
by Jarred Walton on August 29, 2006 4:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Overclocking
We mentioned earlier that since a standard Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard is used, end-user overclocking is entirely possible. (The same should hold true for versions shipping with the MSI P965 boards.) There is risk involved with overclocking, and individual results will vary. After updating to the latest F4 BIOS and finishing the initial benchmarks, we gave overclocking a shot. The installed memory is pretty generic and we didn't want to push things too far, so we set the memory to a 1:1 ratio and decided to see if the CPU and the rest of the system could handle running at 334 MHz front side bus. We did have to increase CPU voltage slightly: we used 1.3875V, and though the system did POST at lower voltages it was not fully stable during stress testing. Other than that the 25% overclock was extremely easy to achieve.
What more is there to say about a $370 CPU that can easily overclock to the performance level of a stock $1150 CPU? This is using the retail processor heatsink and fan, and even under extreme stress testing the system remained stable and the HSF stayed under 45°C. We could have certainly gone farther with the overclock (see below), but most people will be more than happy with a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo processor running inside their computer system.
We will include results from the overclocked system in our benchmarking results for reference. In some instances, the increased clock speed will have a dramatic impact on performance. In other areas, the system bottleneck is elsewhere and the added CPU performance does little to help. Depending on how you plan to use the system, it may not even be worthwhile to overclock it. Perhaps down the road once the warranty has already expired and after adding a faster graphics card, overclocking will become more beneficial.
After fully testing the 25% overclock, we decided to push things a bit further. With a bit more voltage to the CPU, memory, chipset, and FSB (+0.1V), we also managed to run our full set of benchmark tests at 9x350, and then we tried 9x366. The CPU fan was definitely working harder to keep the processor cool, and we don't actually recommend these higher settings unless you're okay with potentially frying a $300 processor. A better CPU heatsink would alleviate our concerns, and we will be sticking with the 9x333 results as a setting that we consider truly stable and attainable by most users. The 9x366 result was "mostly" stable - our gaming benchmarks completed without problems, but 3DMark06 and PCMark05 would periodically crash. Apparently, the limit of the RAM and/or CPU is somewhere between 9x350 and 9x366. We would say the RAM is the more likely culprit, given some voltage and stability issues encountered (see the Reliability, Warranty and Support page for details).
One final comment is that the system we have for testing uses a Core 2 Duo E6600 stepping 4 revision B0 CPU, which is generally not considered one of the best overclocking revisions. This is also an engineering sample (ES) CPU. Final retail systems will not come with anything other than full retail chips, but the lead times required to get system reviews done in a timely fashion account for the processor used. All of the other hardware is stock and retail units should perform at least as well as our test configuration.
We mentioned earlier that since a standard Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard is used, end-user overclocking is entirely possible. (The same should hold true for versions shipping with the MSI P965 boards.) There is risk involved with overclocking, and individual results will vary. After updating to the latest F4 BIOS and finishing the initial benchmarks, we gave overclocking a shot. The installed memory is pretty generic and we didn't want to push things too far, so we set the memory to a 1:1 ratio and decided to see if the CPU and the rest of the system could handle running at 334 MHz front side bus. We did have to increase CPU voltage slightly: we used 1.3875V, and though the system did POST at lower voltages it was not fully stable during stress testing. Other than that the 25% overclock was extremely easy to achieve.
What more is there to say about a $370 CPU that can easily overclock to the performance level of a stock $1150 CPU? This is using the retail processor heatsink and fan, and even under extreme stress testing the system remained stable and the HSF stayed under 45°C. We could have certainly gone farther with the overclock (see below), but most people will be more than happy with a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo processor running inside their computer system.
We will include results from the overclocked system in our benchmarking results for reference. In some instances, the increased clock speed will have a dramatic impact on performance. In other areas, the system bottleneck is elsewhere and the added CPU performance does little to help. Depending on how you plan to use the system, it may not even be worthwhile to overclock it. Perhaps down the road once the warranty has already expired and after adding a faster graphics card, overclocking will become more beneficial.
After fully testing the 25% overclock, we decided to push things a bit further. With a bit more voltage to the CPU, memory, chipset, and FSB (+0.1V), we also managed to run our full set of benchmark tests at 9x350, and then we tried 9x366. The CPU fan was definitely working harder to keep the processor cool, and we don't actually recommend these higher settings unless you're okay with potentially frying a $300 processor. A better CPU heatsink would alleviate our concerns, and we will be sticking with the 9x333 results as a setting that we consider truly stable and attainable by most users. The 9x366 result was "mostly" stable - our gaming benchmarks completed without problems, but 3DMark06 and PCMark05 would periodically crash. Apparently, the limit of the RAM and/or CPU is somewhere between 9x350 and 9x366. We would say the RAM is the more likely culprit, given some voltage and stability issues encountered (see the Reliability, Warranty and Support page for details).
One final comment is that the system we have for testing uses a Core 2 Duo E6600 stepping 4 revision B0 CPU, which is generally not considered one of the best overclocking revisions. This is also an engineering sample (ES) CPU. Final retail systems will not come with anything other than full retail chips, but the lead times required to get system reviews done in a timely fashion account for the processor used. All of the other hardware is stock and retail units should perform at least as well as our test configuration.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
30 Comments
View All Comments
koomo - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Hi Jared,Any expectations for when the next mid-range buyer's guide will be posted? (Last one was May 9th, just prior to AM2 and Core 2 Duo).
It sure would be nice to see one juat after you all have tested the soon-to-be released ATI lineup. I'll be very interested to see how power requirements compare between the mid-range NVIDIA and ATI cards, as well as comparative noise levels (will the new ATI blowers help that much?) Thanks!
Very nice review, BTW.
Turin39789 - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Get in in under $1000 and We'll talkKorruptioN - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
It appears that the three right side holes are not utilized in screwing the motherboard down to the tray? They instead run the optical drive IDE cable underneath.Also, the choice of using an ALLIED PSU is a bad one -- consider it bottom-end generic.
QueBert - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
I consider your statement to be generic. Allied does make a lot of entry level, very basic PSU's. But, they make some http://www.pcclub.com/product_details.cfm?itemno=A...">great ones.. Infact. the one I just linked to, replaced a Enermax that died in my system. Was very quiet, had plenty of power, and overall is a PSU I'd recommend to anyone looking. Allied makes a ton of different PSU's, some of they might very well be crap, I won't dispute. But the one I own, ran a system with 4 HD's, 2 Opticals, an X800, 2 120MM and 80MM fan and more then enough power left over. Powmax makes "bottom end PSU's" there's a HUGE difference between "bottom end" and "generic"A good # of the barebone cases PC-Club sell come with Allied, I build pc's for people for a living, and I've had very few problems, with even their lower end psu's *shrug*
Allied gets a bad rap, which I'm sure is for reasons that date back 5+ years? Based off that line of thinking, Maxtor makes the worst HD's ever...
yacoub - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Good review, Jarred. Nice to see how a pre-built system can perform in a review that covers all the basics and even overclocking.Harkonnen - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
On the internals and construction page, third paragraph. PSU is typed as SPU."If you want to do more than that, you may find that you need to replace the default SPU with a beefier unit."
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
I dunno - I kinda like the way SPU rolls off the tongue. :Dchunkychun - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Is it really a great time to upgrade? It seems that directx 10 would require you to upgrade your graphics card realitively soon. Should people just wait?JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
DX10 may be important for games, but there's always something coming in the near future. I'm not aware of any games that are going to require DX10/WGF2 any time soon. I mean, we're only now getting a reasonable number of games that require SM3.0 (just in time for DX10, right?) At the ultra-high-end, it's probably worth waiting, but for mid-range a 7900 GT or X1900 XT level card is going to last quite a while at moderate detail settings.We need Vista before we'll get DX10, and I'm not holding my breath for an early 2007 Vista launch. I'm betting on closer to March. That's over six months away, so really I think now *is* a good time to upgrade... provided you haven't already done so in the past year or two. If you have a 6800/X800 GPU or better, you can probably wait. If you have an Athlon XP/Pentium 4 (prior to Prescott) or earlier CPU, upgrading to Core 2 wouldn't be a bad move. Maybe wait another month for prices to stabilize, but that's about it.
bamacre - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Well said, JW.