E5200 overclocking.

[revol68]

I've been running CPU burn instead of Prime 95, cos I heard it was quicker to find errors and I can't be bothered leaving Prime running for 12 hours.

[Rave]

I recently bought a 5200 to go with a secondhand Asus P5K deluxe I got from these forums. Also got some OCZ 533MHz (1066MHz DDR2) RAM.

I couldn't get it stable with anything over about 300MHz FSB. And I found the stock heatsink to be woefully inadequate for overclocking. I bought an Akasa 965 which is way better. With that I had it very nearly stable at 12x300 for 3.6GHz at 1.4V- but one core errored in prime after 2 hours. I couldn't be bothered to muck about with it after that so just banged it back to 11.5x300 for 3.45GHz. It's still an order of magnitude faster than the Athlon XP @2.3GHz it replaced- literally in the case of prime95, the 5200 will run 400 iterations of a 1024K FFT in less than a tenth of the time the XP took.

I really ought to do something with this comp that actually stresses the new processor (and my new 4830), so far all I've done is play Far Cry at 1600x1200 with 2x AA which looks AWESOME (it can't manage 4X AA without occasional slowdowns though, which says something about Far Cry I guess). For the time being I'm just enjoying having a properly snappy comp again.

As for memory speed, I didn't find that playing with the ratios made much difference. Remember that although the Intel bus is quad pumped, the memory controller is dual channel DDR2, so running them at sync speed ought to be enough to saturate the bus. That's why I was a bit disappointed that I hit the FSB wall so early.

[jdmanonamission]

Funnily enough I have just done a system build and used an E5200 - damn great chip! overclocks like a dream, very comfortable in excess of 3Ghz and actually keeps itself remarkably cool even with just stock cooling, both REALTEMP and CORETEMP reported maximum CPU heat of mid 50s! If u want to add a stylish, cheap and very efficient CPU cooler though try the Thermaltake CL-P0378 Silent 775 Intel CPU Cooler, cant recommend it enough for £20 notes!

[nightkhaos]

If by "quicker" you mean 3-4 hours rather than 6-12, then yes, you would be right. Still, I strongly recommend that if you intend to push the system further than you already have that you put some form of aftermarket cooling on it. Having the processor run really cool is better than having it run on the boarder line.

Besides, a decent cooling upgrade only costs you £100 and is a really good investment.

[revol68]

If by "quicker" you mean 3-4 hours rather than 6-12, then yes, you would be right. Still, I strongly recommend that if you intend to push the system further than you already have that you put some form of aftermarket cooling on it. Having the processor run really cool is better than having it run on the boarder line.

Besides, a decent cooling upgrade only costs you £100 and is a really good investment.

Yeah I've left CPU burn for 5 hours and my max was 68, I di however manage to get prime95 to push my temp to 71 for a second by running the cpu-z test, utorrent and a firefox with about 10 tabs running all at the same time, I then left it running for 6 hours and it tended to sit at 67.

Yeah better cooling would only be a good thing but considering I bought the e5200 and the board together because they were around 94 quid I see little point spending money on an expensive after market cooler to eek out a few more mhz when I could have just spent that money on a faster chip in the first place.

In real temp my distance to TJ max has never got below 29 so that seems safe enough to me, certainly nothing to justify spending 100 quid I don't have on a chip that cost 56 quid.