Core 2 Duo Stuff

[Capper]

What motherboard are you using? I and several others have had issues with the OCZ DDR2-800 memory. With the DFI motherboard I'm having to drop the memory to 400MHz to get everything out of the processor....there's just so much headroom in these processors that the rest of the system is having a hard time trying to keep up

[gvblake22]

I think the days of 1:1 overclocking are slowly being cast to the wayside. Seems as though the higher bandwidth DDR2 can offer will yield much more of a performance improvement than a 1:1 with tighter timings. And tighter timings on DDR2 basically means going from 4-4-4-X to 3-3-3-X. So getting at least some good DDR2-667 or DDR2-800 would be beneficial for overclocking.

[Quakindude]

I'm using this ram. It's revision 2 OCZ and they've supposedly fixed the issues they had before with overclockers. I've had the memory overclocked to 910Mhz so far before it locked the system up, so if I drop the Ram a bit, I know I'll get a lot more out of the CPU. I'm using an Asus P5N32-SLI Premium motherboard with the Nvidia 590 Chipset. I know, not the best overclocking board out there for the C2D's, but I'm hoping future Bios releases will fix this. Having true SLI support for the C2D was important to me, more of a gain from running two Nvidia cards in SLI than overclocking to 3.5Ghz when it comes to gaming.

[Capper]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

I think the days of 1:1 overclocking are slowly being cast to the wayside. Seems as though the higher bandwidth DDR2 can offer will yield much more of a performance improvement than a 1:1 with tighter timings. And tighter timings on DDR2 basically means going from 4-4-4-X to 3-3-3-X. So getting at least some good DDR2-667 or DDR2-800 would be beneficial for overclocking.

Well, 1:1 is now DDR533 not DDR400 that you are used to......so overclocking with that should yield AT LEAST DDR2-667, if not DDR2-800

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Capper

Well, 1:1 is now DDR533 not DDR400 that you are used to......so overclocking with that should yield AT LEAST DDR2-667, if not DDR2-800

Good point, but running a divider with DDR2-800 can yield even more performance. This article has a lot of great benchmarks showing the performance of different speeds and latencies. Some cases show a pretty decent improvement from higher speed (bandwidth), but other cases show very little. But overall, it looks to me like higher speeds make more of a difference than tighter latencies and/or lower speeds.

[GV2NIX]

Capper, Blake, good points, I'm starting to get a better picture of the whole situation here. The Conroe chips seem to be super overclockers (in terms of % overclock over stock speed). So much, in fact that you'll quickly run into other non-processor bottlenecks.

I'm seeing a pattern that no one really gets over FSB 400. If that's the case, then DDR2 800 should be reasonable. Unless, as Blake said, asymetrically overclocking the RAM is no longer a bad thing for Intel chips... If that's the case, wouldn't it be beneficial to just get DDR2 1000 and max out the RAM regardless of what FSB and CPU divider I'm running?

Also, Capper, I haven't decided on a mobo yet, but for now, it looks like I might go with some sort of Asus P5 Deluxe (there are too many of them, I need to do some reading to figure out which one is best). I'm open to any 590 chip boards pretty much as long as it's performance-oriented.

Quakindude, you seem to have some experience with the latest Asus boards. Is there anything you can tell me?

[Quakindude]

Originally Posted by GV2NIX

Quakindude, you seem to have some experience with the latest Asus boards. Is there anything you can tell me?

Brother, I'm still trying to figure this thing out myself. I do know form my research that the Intel Chipsets overclock better than the 590's and that the 965 chipsets from Intel are newer/better than the 975 chipsets.

Also, the 975X Intel chipset is the only Intel chipset that supports two lanes of 16x PCI-e. But to run Nvidia SLI, you need a bios/driver hack and I personally wasn't gonna touch that with a ten foot chipset.

Nvidia has a fairly decent history of adding fucntionality to older chipsets while Intel seems to me to be more geared towards the next chipset rending the last obsolete.

I decided on this 590SLI chipset knowing I wasn't going to be able to overclock the CPU as much as an Intel 965 chipset can, but then again, since I don't like ATI products much, I wanted an Nvidia Chipset for SLI'ing with. Were I to ever trust ATI to not bend me over the drivers desk and screw me over hard again, the 975X is the way to go and run crossfire.

I know that eventually I'll squeeze out a very decent overclock on this board and CPU. It's just gonna take me some time. One thing I love about this board though, other enthusiasts who have had it longer can upload their overclock profile for you to download and run on yours. Now that's support!

It will eventually nd up being up to you. If you want the hi-end Crossfire, then an Intel board is a no brainer. If you want SLI, you're kinda stuck with the 590 right now. The 570's had some RAID issues and while I no longer run a RAID array, I would stay with the 590's until Nvidia ponies up the next chipset.

So far though, this Bios has had me on the internet looking stuff up more than any other has in a long time.

[Capper]

Corsair, Crucial, and OCZ still recommend 1:1 Divider, although the performance hit is minimal, its still the best. As far as the whole tighter latencies vs higher bandwidth, that whole argument is really nothing new, and the only time tighter latencies were really preached were with the socket A and s939 platforms.

In the end, the only thing that makes a real difference is overall CPU frequency

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by GV2NIX

I'm seeing a pattern that no one really gets over FSB 400. If that's the case, then DDR2 800 should be reasonable. Unless, as Blake said, asymetrically overclocking the RAM is no longer a bad thing for Intel chips... If that's the case, wouldn't it be beneficial to just get DDR2 1000 and max out the RAM regardless of what FSB and CPU divider I'm running?

Because you reach the point of diminishing returns. As you can see from the link I posted earlier, while there is a performance increase with every jump in memory speed, it isn't an extravagant amount. Compare that with the larger price increases as the memory speed ratings go up and you can quickly see that it's really not worth your while to get such fast RAM. Unless of course you are totally against overclocking and want to run everything at stock speeds, but if you are buying RAM like that I really doubt you are running at stock speeds...

Originally Posted by Capper

In the end, the only thing that makes a real difference is overall CPU frequency

Yes, definitely. A higher processor clock speed is always going to yield better performance than faster RAM.

[GV2NIX]

Quakindude, woops, for some reason I thought the 590 chipset was the top of the line. I don't know what I was thinking. 975X is the top dog right? I'm going to keep using my X1900XT and I'm sticking with 1 GPU for now. Basically I don't need a performance board for SLI or Crossfire purposes. I just want to make sure that the mobo can hold up under overclocking. Do you have any experience with the Asus 975X boards?

Capper, good point with the timings. I got so obsessed with having tight timings with my Socket A/939 chips that I guess I assumed it would be the same for the C2D chips which now have the short pipelines.

I think you're right, in the end, CPU clock matters the most. I think I lost sight of that in my RAM obsessiveness.