I've never tried. I'm not sure I'd want to do it on an already high end CPU incase I stuffed it.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

I've only really overclocked GPU's. But yeah you should be able to clock up to 3ghz if you have a nice cool case.

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Please support us and post a [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com] on your website.

--Matt

so how to you overclock a GPU. do you get significant performance gains?

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I use an app called ATITool, dont let the name fool you works for NVidia too. You can pretty much just click "Find Max Core" and walk away for a few hours and it'll stress test it for you. If you want to get more involved theres various benchmarking apps that will stress your gpu so you can see just how stable it is under the heat of overclocking.

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Please support us and post a [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com] on your website.

--Matt

i manage to get my dual core from 1.6ghz to 3.0ghz on gigabyte ep35-ds3 board, thermaltake cooling, it ran stable for 1h than i shut it off, that was to extreme and i was to scared not to burn a hole trough my board, so i droped it down to 2.2ghz and it's working like that for 4 months now without any problem.
When overclocking, crucial thing you need to look is your memory to cpu ratio, every newer bios calculates memory frequencies automaticly when you boost your fsb or multiplier, i would sugest that you lower your multiplier a little and raise your fsb 10-20mhz at the time and boot to windows, when you reach that crashing point, than it's time to check your memory freq and lower it a little.
It's all trial and error procedure, but it's good to know that chances to destroy your cpu are small, but chances that your cpu will burn a hole trough your motherboard are great if you don't have adequate cooling and your cpu temperature goes to high.
Also there's a lot of tutorials on the net, try to google for your motherboard and cpu.

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

Thanks man, yeah I found a few tuts. and one youtube video specific to the cpu in question. seems I can do a small overclock up to 3ghz without messing with voltages and stuff. I probably wont bother trying to push it too far. its already fast enough but I was just interested as to the process, to learn more about it etc.. I ended up getting slightly better ram Hyperx with heat sinc and a thermal take cooler. i figure it will make everything last longer and be less risky if I do try and push it up to 3.6 or something. I'm hoping to run my old machine as a render box. I worked at studio that had vray set up to do distributed rendering with vray spawner. with vray set up on all the boxes in the studio I had something like 60 buckets all working on a single frame at the same time. that is something almost orgasmic to watch

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Oh man 60 buckets!!! aaaaarghhhhh.....

*matt turns into goo on the floor*

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Please support us and post a [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com] on your website.

--Matt

mmmmm 60 buckets

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

I'm going to issue a warning to Tyson for posting porn on the forum.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

ohh, are you sure. I was thinking of posting some pics. I may even install a perspex window on the side *raises eyebrows*
"wink, wink. nudge, nudge, say no more!" maybe a mature rating is required.

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i just did an experiment, i lowered my cpu to 1,6ghz, booted, loaded up max and did a simple car render at 800x640 with only ambient occlusion and render time was 0:00:24, that's 24 sec.
overcloocked cpu on 2.4ghz did the same render in 0:00:17, that's 7 seconds faster for 800mhz higher speed.
So small overcloock probably does pay off if you're are careful not to blow up your pc

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

think I could safely take a 2.8 to 3.0 or even 3.2?

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Please support us and post a [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com] on your website.

yeah probably you could, but i wouldn't recommend that you go beyond 3.2.
Try increasing it to 3.0 and install a motherboard monitor of some sort to monitor your temperatures, than load max and put something to render and monitor your temperature if it goes to high than you should get your self a new cooling, if not than try to increase it to 3.2 and do the same.
If you overcloock it to much you should get random freezes, crashes and in some cases you can't even boot, i know when i did mine, couple of times i reset it after overcloocking and my monitor went black, simple bios reset and every thing is back to normal. It's all about finding a nice working balance.

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

well, after running my new machine through its paces on stock settings I tried overclocking it.
I was confused as to why the cpu speed was slower in the bios than when I checked it in windows system. 2.66 instead of the spec of 2.83ghz
and I realised they must have had it set up slightly slower than I had read about. the multiplier was at 8.0 with FSB 333.
so I upped it to 8.5 so it was maxed out. and upped the fsb to 360. that worked fine so i pushed it to 400 (after reading that people had done it succesfully).
Now the cpu is running at 3.4ghz and rendering frames 21 seconds faster than the stock speed. the user bench encode scores have gone from 44.57 to 57.04.
Temps are consistent at between 40-45 idle and 51-60 when rendering. I rendered a 300 frame sequence overnight with no problems. so hopefully I can leave it at this speed indefinitely.
So if anyone is thinking of upgrading to a quad core this q9550 seems to be a good option unless you want to wait and get a completely new system with an i7 in a year or so.

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That's awesome. Let us know if it blows up.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

that's great, 21 sec is a lot of time to spare and your temperature is not to high I forgot to mentione if it hangs or something try updating your bios, sometimes a new bios can give you a little more speed to your memory and higher fsb, but be careful when updating it. When i update it on my older board a power went off in the middle of process and i had to buy a new one, this time with dual bios

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

yeah 21 seconds could equate to several hours when you are rendering alot of frames. I thought about updating the bios just so I know its all current but I don't want to mess with it if its working ok. I think my motherboard has a dual bios. Is that some sort of backup bios if you frak up the first one somehow? Do you install a bios update from windows or some other way? never done that before.

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i had, and have now a gigabyte board, they come with a windows update utility, i did it from windows, my bios was all wiped out and new one was on 40-50% uploaded and power went off hahaha some luck anyhow, yeah dual bios is actually a 2 bios setup on one chip, when one goes dead, backup kicks in and stays active until you replace the main bios. So there's really a small, small chance that you can ruin your board with wrong or corrupted bios.

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein