Overclocking Crap - the NV34

[VSpecII]

My 6800U lays maxed out beside me. Friends and the once overflowing river of beer in my fridge is now a dry riverbed. But to my surprize, $200 is laying in my wallet, and a garage sale is down the street!

At the sale, I purchased two XP 2200+ T'Breds for $15 (WITH HSF's), a Fx5200 for $30, a CD-drive for $5, a hard-drive for $10, and some cheapo DDR-400 for $20. The guy was pretty nice, and not to computer savy. Barganing them down was not a problem. Not a bad find at any rate! Not enough to for some good fun though. So I ran down to my local MemoryExpress. There I got a GA-7VM400M on clearance for $59.99, Zalman RAMsinks for $15 and a ATX case/PSU combo for $35.50.

All in all, a $191 investment (not including tax, because I don't care), for:
AMD AthlonXP 2200+ (1.79GHz)
Asus GeForce Fx5200 128MB (250/330)
512MB DDR-400 (2.5-3-3-7....I was all "WTF?". Then I remembered what I paid.)
And the rest of all the kit.

Before I did anything, I just had to mess a bit with the cooling. Everything, exept the RAM-sinks, were just laying around (even the Vantec DDR heatspreader).

Firstly, I stuck the RAMsinks on the card, and added a boxed-AMD fan with some elastics and zip-ties, along with a shot of Arctic Silver under the heatsink.
http://img76.exs.cx/img76/9643/cimg13036st.th.jpg (http://img76.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img76&image=cimg13036st.jpg)

On the CPU, a 60-80mm fan duct and a 80mm Evercool.
http://img76.exs.cx/img76/8822/cimg13047fh.th.jpg (http://img76.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img76&image=cimg13047fh.jpg)

And now that baby's ready to bench! Time for a baseline. All settings stock (4320 3DMark, 1941MB/s system bandwidth, 2810MFLOPS, and SuperPi in 67 seconds):
http://img96.exs.cx/img96/4629/stock6nn.th.jpg (http://img96.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img96&image=stock6nn.jpg)http://img76.exs.cx/img76/8030/stock8nu.th.jpg (http://img76.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img76&image=stock8nu.jpg)http://img76.exs.cx/img76/2116/stock8tk.th.jpg (http://img76.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img76&image=stock8tk.jpg)

A couple basic Windows tweaks, and the massive gain of 16 marks! The Ricky tweak, along with the LOD made a notable difference though, with a gain of 242.
http://img76.exs.cx/img76/8241/tweaked0re.th.jpg (http://img76.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img76&image=tweaked0re.jpg)http://img76.exs.cx/img76/3261/rickylod4jj.th.jpg (http://img76.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img76&image=rickylod4jj.jpg)

And then came the fun. The overclocking of course. First up was the GPU. I did the whole basic thing. Up by 5 on the core untill artafacts/snow/etc, then the same on the RAM. I was pretty surprized when I hit 320/420. And I almost fainted when I saw the results: 5516! Compared to what it was before, I haven't seen a jump like that before. And I had the CPU yet to go...
http://img214.exs.cx/img214/3205/3204209mo.th.jpg (http://img214.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img214&image=3204209mo.jpg)

When it came to do the CPU, I ran into the worst wall I've ever hit - ever. The motherboard only went to 160FSB. Even at 13.5x, stock volts, weak-a$$ stock heatsink and all. Maxxed it out compleatly. The results (Note on the 3D score: no GPU overclock.):
http://img137.exs.cx/img137/5941/135x1602qr.th.jpg (http://img137.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img137&image=135x1602qr.jpg)http://img137.exs.cx/img137/9711/135x1608jq.th.jpg (http://img137.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img137&image=135x1608jq.jpg)http://img137.exs.cx/img137/892/135x1606yh.th.jpg (http://img137.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img137&image=135x1606yh.jpg)


All in all, it wasn't either a bad way to kill a night, or spend $200. Honesly, I was asounded it got this far. Totally money and time well spent. The final results:
http://img137.exs.cx/img137/2813/final4ns.th.jpg (http://img137.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img137&image=final4ns.jpg)

[VSpecII]

Linky:
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8477010

[Geforce4ti4200]

that must be alotta fun :) maybe I should build a cheap rig with some of my extra parts laying around and see how far below 20k this slow rig gets. 18fps nature? wow those fx5200s are sure slow, you probably have a 64 bit one and without lod or 44.03 drivers. you could ebay that fx5200 and grab a cheap ti4200, should get you over 10k easy ;)

[blinky]

:) i love ghetto OCing

[bachus_anonym]

Cool stuff there, VSpecII

BTW, talk about ghetto OCing... R7000, no hardware 3D acceleration, no OC options :lol: :ROTF:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=26469&stc=1

Am I still eligible to keep my "Xtremesystems.org 3D Team" membership ? :lol: :ROTF:

[don_vercetti]

that 2200 overclocked well, for one of them. I had one of them, except a T'Bred A and it required 2v to get to 2.2ghz. How come the mobo only went to 160? PCI Locks?

If that's the case, smack it up to 166 and everything should go back in sync.

Also, i assume that's a VIA KT400. That means the multi should be unlocked (assuming those CPU's were made before week 39 of 2003...which i bet they were) so try raising that a bit.

Anyway i've been tempted to do something like that as well. Get a computer cheapish, overclock the hell out of it, then give it to one of my brothers as a nice fast rig. Only use decent air cooling.

[Squid_Spit]

Its always fun to oc the crap out of cheap low end rigs.

[VSpecII]

that must be alotta fun :) maybe I should build a cheap rig with some of my extra parts laying around and see how far below 20k this slow rig gets. 18fps nature? wow those fx5200s are sure slow, you probably have a 64 bit one and without lod or 44.03 drivers. you could ebay that fx5200 and grab a cheap ti4200, should get you over 10k easy ;)
Yeah, I have a 64 bit one. But LOD is at 3. The drivers at 75.90. It doesn't matter what a GF4Ti can do really. I only have this card because it was what was at the sale. I'm not going to go throught the effort of shipping/waiting.

Also, I'm sticking this little bugger in my regular box and seeing what I can do, haha (3400+ claw, HyperX, etc).

[Geforce4ti4200]

well if you want to make that a backup gaming rig, more gpu power will help ;)

[jumanji969]

Thats awesome, I wish I could find garage sales like that. I want some cheapo rig that I can just bash to hell with volts.

[VSpecII]

Cool stuff there, VSpecII
Cool? 53 degree load. Rocksome? Hellz yeah! I'm so doing this again sometime. But maybe I'll just perhaps try for some better hardware...

[zakelwe]

That's very little money for a lot of fun, shame about the cpu not being that good.

Regards

Andy