floydfan

I want to try oc'ing my i7 920. What would be the highest oc I could get with very good cooling, possibly water?

greenbrucelee

That question can't be answered because all cpu's are different (even the same make). It also depends on the rest of your components like your motherboard and ram of which you have some decent components.

Getting a 30 % increase with decent cooling should be possible.

I wouldn't bother with water cooling if I were you, it's a waste of time imo and water and electricity don't mix if it goes wrong.

floydfan

30% seems rather conservative, it seems that 4ghz+ is pretty common with i7 on air.

Get Rekd

With those computer specs, you don't even need to overclock it. That being said, it is obvious you think your a badass and wish to prove it. If you think your computer can handle the heat, I would suggest trying to get it to around 4.2ghz.

kyle glied

get a new i7. get the lynnfield 2.93ghz processor. thats what i have. it has better turbo, and if you are running a single thread the other 7 cores can automatically over clock the one core with more of a multiplier then your core i7.
bloomfield 920's turbo 1/1/1/2
lyynfield 870's turbo 2/2/4/5

Phædrus2401

The new core i5 and i7 CPUs use a different CPU socket, LGA1156 rather than LGA1366. I rather doubt that the user wishes to replace half of his computer for a decrease in performance (even with turbo, i7 850 is slightly slower than i7 920) and negligible overclocking benefits.

greenbrucelee

like I said all cpus are different. Some people like me can get my E8400 from 3GHz to 4GHz no problem some people can't get it passed 3.6GHz

Lots of cpus get made at same time and come from the same die you may find that one at the top will overclock well whilst one in the middle might not and one at the bottom might overclock well.

That is why I say you should be able to get to 30% but other than that I can't tell you as overclocking is all about experiementing and taking your time to get the best results.

kyle glied

with the turbo is the i7 870 faster then the i7 920? even thought the i7 920 is clocked higher. the 870 has much better turbo

greenbrucelee

the 920 is the one for i7s but still a waste of time since ddr3 is still slow, expensive and buggy.

kyle glied

i won my lynnfield 870, 8gb ddr3, 2gb evga nvidia gddr3, 1 terabyte hd, p55 motherboard in a contest. ddr3 ram sure seems fast to me

greenbrucelee

yeah it will do but it's not as fast as it could be, it'll be 1 or 2 more years before they get it sorted and by then the i5 will be mainstream and 6 core cpus will be coming out.

Phædrus2401

Congrats. Personally, I would have sold it for the value of the parts and used it to build a better designed system (either the classic P45+E8500+4GB DDR2+high end graphics card, or P55+i5 750+4GB DDR3+high end graphics card... probably a Radeon 5850 or 5870). But it's a powerful rig, no denying that.


DDR3 has very high clock speed, higher than DDR2 can reach, but also very high latencies which limits its MOPS (memory operations per second).

The way to estimate MOPS to within 10% is to take the physical clock speed (reported clock speed and divide by two), then divide by the CAS latency. So:

My DDR2 1066 CL5:
533 / 5 = 106.6 million MOPS
A set of DDR3 1600 CL9:
800 / 9 = 88.9 million MOPS

Therefore, my mid-upper-range DDR2 RAM is faster than average DDR3 RAM.

greenbrucelee

Thanks for that Phaedrus2401 I couldn't remember the caluclation bu was going to type something similar.

kyle glied

ok so my ram has a reported clock speed of 1333MHz. so i divide that by two, and how to i figure out the CAS latency to finish the calculation?

Phædrus2401

You have to look it up on the website, or locate the RAM timings section in your BIOS. For DDR3 1333 a CL of 9 is fairly typical, 7 or 8 might be seen on higher-end kits.

If it has CL7 that gives 95.2 MMOPS. CL9 would be 74.1 MMOPS.



But really, memory speed has fairly little impact on performance. Any difference less than 20MMOPS would be barely noticeable.

kyle glied

also couldn't i just upgrade my ddr3 ram when they come out with lower CAS latency ram?

Phædrus2401

Of course. There is lower-latency DDR3 out right now (down to CL7), and also higher-clock speed DDR3 (fastest I've seen was a G.Skill kit that claimed DDR3 2200 CL7. It's discontinued, though). It's more expensive, though, so your call.

kyle glied

ill stick with mine. it can run any game i want to play easily, halo 2 runs on 1650 x 1050 perfectly. very smooth and fast fps.
i think it is cool that i have a computer thats better then the xbox 360 haha

Phædrus2401

Yup, no need to go overboard.

Though Halo 2 isn't really a taxing game at all. The Xbox 360 has a mid-range triple core CPU (by today's standards) and a graphics card based on the Radeon 2000 series. My computer is literally twice as powerful as a 360, and cost about $700, give or take. Your computer can handle a lot more than you're throwing at it.

kyle glied

also if you are thinking of getting a new computer case i would go with this cm storm sniper.
http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/revie...niper-pc-case/
its big but it cools down very easily and has a fan controller on it. feels like an are conditioner when its up all the way, and not loud at all. i love how easy and accesible everything is on the front panel