945p and overclocking

[Beomagi]

I gave my little bro one of my favorite builds 2 weeks ago -
athlon xp-m oc's from 2.0/266fsb to 2.3/400fsb, 6800 @ 16/6 with 750MHz memory. My favorite because of the tweakage done i guess. *sniff*

Well, he was happy, and I wasnt.  Since my other pc doubled as TV, I felt computerless often. So i built another to appease my multitasking nature.

Pentium D 805 + x1900xt, 945p (asus) and some 1000MHz DDR2 (planning ahead for connie or x2 par deux).

Looking at boards, i wanted the intel chipset. more important to me than minor gains in ocing is stability. After hearing the Nvidia chipset didn't work with 820's, I pretty much ignored all else. I could have tried the 661 SIS chipset, but i havent heard much about it.

Upon startup - holy crap!
here's a $130 processor capable of running at 3.8GHz! The bang for buch ratio on this is really nice - reminds me of the ratio on the 2800+ sempron64.

Then came the list of problems -
The 945p chipset, and apparently 9xx chipsets in general don't handle the pci-e bus, onboard components (usually on a pci-e lane), or sata very well when overclocked.

At 3.5GHz or higher (note, the bus should be handled, it's STILL in spec for the mobo really at 175MHz base clock) it would intermittently lose sound mixers, ethernet or sata. Any higher and it's definitely gone.

Still 3.4GHz for a $130 cpu is impressive, yet at the same time, it's disappointing to know the chip can handle higher but the board can't.

So to anyone thinking about overclocking preslers or just on the 9xx in general, try sticking to IDE, and pci based components instead of onboards.

Still enjoying oblivion at it's best. I <3 technology.

[W1nTry]

This is interesting, someone has bought the best selling Intel Pentium at present. I had posted earlier that in spite of a lower FSB and clock speed that the 805 has the worst power consumption beating back its 820 elder? in about a year your increase in power bills will offset the 70USD difference that the 820 cost, this I think that was a bad move. It's unfortunate the 945 performed so abysmally. Intel is usually known for great chipsets, but I guess when you have a crap processor a crap chipset won't make much of a difference. Did you consider the ATI chipset at all? Radeon Express 200 I believe. Anyways with the choice of RAM for futureproofing I will presume you will be going Conroe as by then lower latency ram would be out and AMD benefits from that (not to mention it'll be cheaper), so this ram was bought in anticipation of conroe and to be honest if conroe does what most ppl are saying (baring its prohibitively expensive) I am sure that'll be the way to go (plus the latency shouldn't bother it too much). Lastly is if you were buying a budget platform (ala 805 and 945) why did you buy such a GOSU video card? I mean sure it'll go into your next (conroe) system, but by then they'll prolly have the RD600 out and the X1900XT will drop in price, not to mention a card like that is likely to be held back by that CPU. Just some thoughts. Good job on the XP-m though!

[TrinireturnofGamez]

 And more bad news... your motherboard  likely won't be compatible with Conroe , so might as well hold out till AMD brings out 65nm AM2 processors and Hypertransport 3 ....
     An amd  64 would easily pwn up to a 4ghz P4 @ 2.4 ...  Very good deal with the pricing though... but i'm waiting for conroe..
 

[Beomagi]

Yes, i KNOW the athlon x2 is faster - but far form cheaper, and i would not have been able to use the ddr2 memory which i can reuse later.

The 2.66 uses more power in idle because it is lacking normal throttling stages, and speedstep. This doesn't matter to me, because while folding, the cpu wont have a chance to be idle anyway.

For an intel proc, the only other chipset i'd have considered was the sis 661 FX. Nvidia had problems with the 820 not being detected, and the only ATI chipset that would run a dual core chip was shipping in a bunch of micro atx boards - they just are not shipping enough xpress boards out - probably because they're relying on ULi(now nvidia's) southbridge. Also, i would say calling it a crappy chipset harsh - overclocking isn't great - that's different from being a bad chipset. The performance is the same as almost any other chipset - indistinguishable at equivalent speeds.

Consider that the x1900xt can match and surpass the level of the 7900GTX (sells for 500-700). Also consider that it's $430. I DID consider getting the 7900GT - but even with the volt mod to 1.4Volts, and overclocked past the level of the 7900gtx - which can fail anyway with just bad luck of the oc draw - i'd have to spend money on a proper fan to replace the gimpy one they use in it's stead. The current HSF actually end up running hotter that the GTX version even though it's at 1.2V instead of 1.4, and slower. Granted, the x1900xt doesn't oc well, but it would be about $60 more than the 7900gt after replacing the fan - and i'd rather have the warranty, and piece of mind. Not to mention the ability to run with AA and HDR With cpu's i frown at spending more, but gpus still tend to maintain a near linear increase in power with cost. At the moment, i think the 7900gt presents a gigantic jump over lesser choices, and the x1900xt is sizable enough over the 7900gt while costing another $100.

playing in oblivion, it's not held back by cpu - dropping my cpu speed, or adjusting shadows(heavy cpu operation) isn't altering the frame rate. As it stands, killing grass does have it run smoother, so i know it's bottlenecking on the gpu core shaders. this will of course change from game to game.

I'm flashing the bios right now - here's hoping for better