Today I'm building a custom gamer for an associate.

In return, he's buying me an Athlon 64 XP3700+ CPU which is based on the San Diego cpu core. He's also agreed to buy me 1gb of PC4000 Kingmax Hardcore RAM and I must hand over my current 1gb of PC3500 to him, with a cash adjustment.

My current CPU is a not-so-old-at-all XP3500+ Venice core. Both the old and new CPU's have a default clock speed of 2.2ghz.

The 3500+ has limited overclock potential on air cooling with temps rising sharply beyond 2.4ghz.

I've read in the overclockers forums that the 3700+ is basically an FX CPU with a locked multiplier and that they are wunderbar for overclocking.

I hope to overclock the new CPU up to the new PC4000's rated 250mhz Front Side Bus speed, which would give me a CPU speed of 2.75ghz, and though I doubt whether this would be stable on air cooling, I hope to be able to leave the CPU running at 2.6ghz, which equates to a FSB speed of about 236 mhz. At that speed, I should be able to have fairly tight timings on my new PC4000 ram.

I get back with the results in a couple days.

Here is another way I overclocked this new CPU.

I left the CPU Multiplier at it's stock 11x and set the FSB speed to 250mhz, my PC4000 ram's rated speed. I set the Hypertransport multiplier to 4x (4 x 250mhz = 1000 or 2000mhz DDR).

This screenshot shows (well, it's a bit tiny at 800x600 but...) my system running Prime 95's max heat and stress tests. At the same time you see my mainboard monitor's temperature page. The San Diego cored CPU is running steady at 52*C, chipset at 40*C and the ambient air temp is 28*C in my room.

Everest is running there as well showing my real time system specs.

     CPU Type               AMD Athlon 64
     CPU Alias               San Diego S939
     CPU Stepping        SH-E4
     CPU Name             AMD Athlon 64 3700+
     CPUID Revision     00020F71h

     CPU Speed:          2749.43 MHz
     CPU Multiplier       11.0x
     CPU FSB               249.95 MHz  (original: 200 MHz, overclock: 25%)
     Memory Bus         249.95 MHz

     L1 Code Cache    64 KB  (Parity)
     L1 Data Cache     64 KB  (ECC)
     L2 Cache             1 MB  (On-Die, ECC, Full-Speed)

    Motherboard ID    Asus A8NSLI
    Motherboard Chipset      nVIDIA nForce4 SLI,
     Memory Timings         2.5-3-3-7  (CL-RCD-RP-RAS)
     Command Rate (CR)                                 2T

     Kingmax 512 MB PC4000 Hardcore DDR SDRAM  

Have you considered an Opteron AMD chip?

These are suppose to be absolutly highly overclockable, and extremely fast.
They cost £120 and they can reach the speeds of a £600 FX!!!!

Check out the Overclockers forums in "CPU" section to find out more, personally if your into clocking, GO ahead for it. , but you got your system sorted now.

James 8)

Glad to see you was following my newb posts

Although when the new Dual core games come out, i still maybe tempted for the dual core solution. 8)

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The San Diego core is the way to go. Mine is O/C to almost FX57 performance. May I suggest you back off the FSB 5-10 or 20Mhz (230-240-245fsb)and enable the 1T Command Rate for the memory. This will provide a significant boost in performance... much, much greater than the 5-20fsb reduction.

Here are my memory benchmarks:

Asus A8V Deluxe:



Benchmark Results
RAM Bandwidth Int Buff'd iSSE2 : 6401 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth Float Buff'd iSSE2 : 6356 MB/s

Chipset 1
Model : ASUSTeK Computer Inc K8T880Pro CPU to PCI Bridge
Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 436MHz (872MHz data rate)
In/Out Width : 16-bit / 16-bit
Maximum Bus Bandwidth : 3488MB/s (estimated)

Logical/Chipset 1 Memory Banks

Chipset 2
Model : Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Athlon 64 / Opteron HyperTransport Technology Configuration
Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 436MHz (872MHz data rate)
In/Out Width : 16-bit / 16-bit
Maximum Bus Bandwidth : 3488MB/s (estimated)

Logical/Chipset 2 Memory Banks
Bank 0 : 1GB DDR-SDRAM 2.5-3-2-8 1CMD
Bank 1 : 1GB DDR-SDRAM 2.5-3-2-8 1CMD
NOTE: The OCZ memory is rated for 2.0-3-2-5 2CMD


With my A8V Deluxe, best memory performance is obtained by reducing the memory system to 5:3 (DDR333) and increasing FSB to 240-245. This will run the memory @ around 203-205FSB (not important) and max out what is actually important, which is communication (transfer rate) on the CPU/Memory bus.

CPU:



Benchmark Results
Dhrystone ALU : 11827 MIPS
Whetstone iSSE3 : 5333 MFLOPS

Processor
Model : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3700+
Speed : 2.641GHz
Model Number : 3700 (estimated)
Performance Rating : PR1800 (estimated)
Cores per Processor : 1 Unit(s)
L2 On-board Cache : 1MB ECC Synchronous, Write-Back, 16-way set, 64 byte line size


Dual Core is the way to go... when the software becomes dual-core aware however the San Diego core is the best single core AMD64 to have as it will exceed just about any other AMD64 in overclocking ability.

HT should remain as high as possible however in some cases (some motherboards) it must be reduced to 800 to peak the O/C. This is not an issue that would ever be seen in your real world game use, only in benchmark software numbers. The reduced HT can provide a higher stable O/C which will provide much higher performance. Mine is at 1000 right now. I do reduce it to 800 and easily nail 260FSB when I want to really push the system.


I idle at 28c and max out at 48c

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Run a 5:3 divider (DDR333)... you are not reducing performance AT ALL if you raise the FSB so the CPU/memory bus (transfer rate) is maxed out. Also, lock the AGP/PCI frequency (if it is AGP) and set any AI overclocking to manual.

Sometimes it requires bumping up the DDR voltage a tad and slow the CAS from 2.0 to 2.5. Also, the T-RAS sometimes helps to raise it by 2 or 3 clks.

In any case, best performance is usually always reached by using the divider and increasing the FSB.

The A64 system is nothing like the Athlon of the past. A64 overclocking is all in FSB/memory bus communication. DDR400 is typically not the best performance setting even with PC4000 memory. The idea is to max out the FSB/Memory transfer rate and forget about the actual memory frequency. For your system it may be possible to nail 260-280 or higher using that method. Mine is a bit limited as it is one of the last AGP motherboards that will run all A64 dual cores and FX57 grade processors.


Also, with AMD64, Using the program SPEEDFAN and AMD COOL & QUIET, all my fans are practically silent at idle (24c-28c) (under 1000rpm)and barely heard under full load (48c, sometimes 50c if ambient is high). The only time my tower fans are at 100% is if all the following are reached:

the system goes above 28c,
the CPU is above 45c,
the video GPU is 70c...

otherwise the tower is practically silent... and I mean so quiet you can hear a sewing pin drop in the next room.

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I'm going to build another nForce4 PC for my daughter and use it in that, selling the P4 rig she has or use it as a server PC.

I tried for days to get better results with all sorts of combinations.

I'm not able to get timings like I see in O/C forums everywhere.......... for a start, CAS 2 just fails completely at any FSB speed, and 1T command rate is never stable and impossible at higher speeds.

However, Everest returns me close to 7gb/sec bandwidth in the mem write test, which I'm impressed with.

I was able to go a little faster but things were either dodgy with the way it was configured, or I had to add a lot of voltage to get things stable, so, at the end of all this initial tweaking I ended up with these stable and cool settings:

CPU                            = Athlon 64 3700+ (San Diego)
Chipset                      = nForce4 SLI (Asus A8N SLI)
RAM                            = Kingmax Hardcore PC4000 2 x 512mb


FSB/HTT                      = 260mhz
HT multiplier                = 4x
HyperTransport Clock = 1040mhz

CPU multiplier             = 10x
CPU Clock                   = 2.6ghz

RAM timings                = 2.5-3-3-7
RAM Clock                   = 260mhz (520mhz DDR)

Vcore                           = 1.45v
Vram                            = 2.75v