Hi,
while looking through this forum I noticed that there was no real thread about overclocking. Now I want to make a beginning^^
I want to proof that overclocking can really improve the speed of your games and also find out how much overclocking is improving the speed. So, here we go:
Using Revision 3661, DolphinIL.exe, Sound, regular settings for more speed(dual-core, ...) - but not the most optimized fps, you may get more when playing yourself:
![[Image: thye9xmw.png]](http://s12b.directupload.net/images/090716/thye9xmw.png)
This is what I found out. I recorded that with Fraps(which made some problems -.-), running exactly 20 sec. for each setting, more later..
I used a lot of different "settings" (although I kept the same Dolphin-Settings for all of the games):
1. The Clock:
First of all, my System is:
Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3,0 Ghz original clock
4 Gb RAM
Geforce 8800 Gt
Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L
I choose to use four different clock-settings: 3 Ghz, 3.2 Ghz, 3.4 Ghz, and finally 3,6 Ghz. I could also overclock up to 3.8 or 4.0 Ghz, but then I risk a bluescreen... I don't want to have one, these things are annoying -.-
(although my CPU-Cooler cools my CPU down to 20° Celsius in Idle and 30° in Load I have slight problems when using a really high clock.)
2. The Games:
I wanted to test the probably most wanted games on the Emulator:
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- Super Mario Galaxy
3. The Testing:
I took two different testing-"areas":
- The Intro of each game (where the Title of the games appear, 20 sec.).
- A special scene out every game (20 sec. lasting):
TP: A scene out of the faron woods (?, don't know exactly in english, it's just the forest after the beginning before the first temple), just running straight forward to the place where the boy and the monkey where kept.
Brawl: The first stage of the regular mode.
Galaxy: Running from the starting place to the observatory.
4. Conclusion:
Maybe something general for all people who want to overclock:
- Get a good cooler. I use a ZEROtherm Nirvana NV 120 Premium, which keeps my CPU really cool. Don't use the Intel or AMD standard-coolers, they are not good for overclocking.
- Get yourself a tool to check your CPUs temperature, like the Freeware-Tool SpeedFan. This also allows you to keep an eye on other stuff like your hard-drives or the chipset of your motherboard.
- Don't be too afraid to damage your system. If you just increase the clock by 200 Mhz, the chance to destroy your CPU is less than a percent. Even with higher clocks, you will get a bluescreen or something like that before you hear some noise and see smoke coming out of your PC^^. If you just overclock your CPU step by step (maybe 100, 200 Mhz at once) and test it with, for example, 15 Minutes Dolphin, there should nothing happen, except of a small bluescreen when you are too high. But stay serious: I don't think you can reach 5 Ghz with a Core2Duo^^ But everything among 25% over your original clock should be safe.
(No waranty for all of that, and I would not advice you to overclock notebooks in general, just to jot down.)
- Getting yourself a tool to overclock in Windows is very helpfull, because you don't have to restart your PC every time you want to overclock. I use EasyTune5Pro, but I'm not sure if this works for everyone. Google is your friend...
There are two ways to overclock your CPU:
- Via BIOS:
This way depends all on your motherboard. I can't give you a 100% right guide for every PC, but I'll try to explain it as best as possible for everyone.
So, if you want to overclock with your BIOS, you have to do these steps:
1. Go to your BIOS. If you don't know how: Press either Del, F2, or on some Motherboards Esc while the PC boots (right after you turned it on). It all depends on your motherboard when and what key you have to press.
But if everything worked, you will now see a Window with a lot of blue/grey color and some options (Standard, Advanced, ...).
2. Now go to something like "Advanced Settings". This depends all on your motherboard, too. There are too many possible ways so that I can't give you and detailed guide how to do it. You should just choose a menu where you see something like CPU Clock / FSB , and so on.
Remember: Although it can be dangerous when changing something in BIOS without knowing what it is, switching to other menues doesn't count to this. So don't be afraid to open the wrong menu. Just try out. And if you've done something wrong, just leave BIOS with "Discard unsaved changes".
3. If you have found what you searched for, make first of all sure to unlink the PCI/PCIe - frequens from the FSB. If you don't do this, you will hardly manage any clock-improvment. There should be some option to unlink this, maybe you just have to choose a certain Value for PCI/PCIe-Clock (im not sure about this, but 33/100 should be the values.). If you don't find any option like that, don't be afraid, everything should be alright. But just make sure to check your graficcards temperature afterwards, if you have a really good one or one with just passive cooling.
4. Now it's time to change the FSB. The FrontSideBus defines the clock of your CPU. FSB * Multiplier = Clock. The Multiplier is predefined, you can just reduce it. It is something between 9-15 I think. If you have awesome RAM (with good cooling), then you may reduce the multiplier and increase the FSB, so that the CPU-Clock stay the same, but the overall speed will increase.
But lets stay at the FSB-Oc. There are two possibilities: First of all, you can directly increase the FSB without any other settings. Or, you have to change something to "Manual" before the option is getting accessable. Anyway, if there is no option with FSB in its name and you are not sure what to choose: look out this some numbers next to options: 166, 233, 333. That are the most common FSB-Rates.
(notice: there are also mainboards, cheaper ones, that allows you only to increase the CPU-Clock itself. doesn't make such a big difference).
5. If you found that, increase the FSB slightly. in normal ways, you should see anywhere how much the CPU increases its clock. If not, you should calculate with the multiplier or just stay in a serious way.
(before you really change something, please read on).
6. I hope this helped you a bit. Like I said, there are so many different BIOS-Versions, I can't give you a 100% guide. But now you should know the basics. But that is not all about overclocking. There are many more ways I'm going to explain soon (vor Example increasing the Voltage, changing memory timings, ...).
7. First of all, get a good cooling. But before you now change somethings and really try to overclock, measure the temperature of you PC after a certain time, lets say 15 minutes of dolphin. Download Speedfan to do this, or else you will have to measure through the BIOS, which is not so good. Now remember that figure, and then, after overclocking, do this again, and compare the numbers. None of them should be above 65°, that would be really to much, but you shouldn't have a too great increase of temperature eigther. If you have 40 before overclocking and 55 after I would recommend you to reduce the Clock a bit.
8. And what if you done something wrong? If the PC eighther makes problems or won't boot (not only because of the FSB-increase, even if you choose something wrong). The first option is, if the PC still boots, go to BIOS, and choose, "Load wtf Settings". I don't know exaktly what stands instead of wtf^^ It should be something like "earlier", "working", or "safe" (just from the meaning of the word. that is different too in every mainboard and I don't know even for mine, sry
).
If it doesn't boot, you have some options: There can be a switch on your mainboard which allows you to reset the BIOS, or, on older PCs, there should be a jumper to do this. The last option would be to remove the battery from BIOS for some seconds.
Now, thats it for now. I'll bring in some more things later on.
- Via Software:
~Coming soon~
____________________________________________________________
I hope that this is somehow usefull (maybe for the people who aren't keen on overclocking and don't know if it is really worth it. For some games it doesn't make such a great difference, but remember: 1 FPS can make the difference between choppy and good in Dolphin (afaik).
Well, I would be also interested if someone with a similar system gets other values. Must be to precise, but when somebody gets twice as much FPS in Galaxy as me I would be glad to know...
greetings,
The King
while looking through this forum I noticed that there was no real thread about overclocking. Now I want to make a beginning^^
I want to proof that overclocking can really improve the speed of your games and also find out how much overclocking is improving the speed. So, here we go:
Using Revision 3661, DolphinIL.exe, Sound, regular settings for more speed(dual-core, ...) - but not the most optimized fps, you may get more when playing yourself:
This is what I found out. I recorded that with Fraps(which made some problems -.-), running exactly 20 sec. for each setting, more later..
I used a lot of different "settings" (although I kept the same Dolphin-Settings for all of the games):
1. The Clock:
First of all, my System is:
Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3,0 Ghz original clock
4 Gb RAM
Geforce 8800 Gt
Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L
I choose to use four different clock-settings: 3 Ghz, 3.2 Ghz, 3.4 Ghz, and finally 3,6 Ghz. I could also overclock up to 3.8 or 4.0 Ghz, but then I risk a bluescreen... I don't want to have one, these things are annoying -.-
(although my CPU-Cooler cools my CPU down to 20° Celsius in Idle and 30° in Load I have slight problems when using a really high clock.)
2. The Games:
I wanted to test the probably most wanted games on the Emulator:
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- Super Mario Galaxy
3. The Testing:
I took two different testing-"areas":
- The Intro of each game (where the Title of the games appear, 20 sec.).
- A special scene out every game (20 sec. lasting):
TP: A scene out of the faron woods (?, don't know exactly in english, it's just the forest after the beginning before the first temple), just running straight forward to the place where the boy and the monkey where kept.
Brawl: The first stage of the regular mode.
Galaxy: Running from the starting place to the observatory.
4. Conclusion:
Maybe something general for all people who want to overclock:
- Get a good cooler. I use a ZEROtherm Nirvana NV 120 Premium, which keeps my CPU really cool. Don't use the Intel or AMD standard-coolers, they are not good for overclocking.
- Get yourself a tool to check your CPUs temperature, like the Freeware-Tool SpeedFan. This also allows you to keep an eye on other stuff like your hard-drives or the chipset of your motherboard.
- Don't be too afraid to damage your system. If you just increase the clock by 200 Mhz, the chance to destroy your CPU is less than a percent. Even with higher clocks, you will get a bluescreen or something like that before you hear some noise and see smoke coming out of your PC^^. If you just overclock your CPU step by step (maybe 100, 200 Mhz at once) and test it with, for example, 15 Minutes Dolphin, there should nothing happen, except of a small bluescreen when you are too high. But stay serious: I don't think you can reach 5 Ghz with a Core2Duo^^ But everything among 25% over your original clock should be safe.
(No waranty for all of that, and I would not advice you to overclock notebooks in general, just to jot down.)
- Getting yourself a tool to overclock in Windows is very helpfull, because you don't have to restart your PC every time you want to overclock. I use EasyTune5Pro, but I'm not sure if this works for everyone. Google is your friend...
5. How to Overclock:
There are two ways to overclock your CPU:
- Via BIOS:
This way depends all on your motherboard. I can't give you a 100% right guide for every PC, but I'll try to explain it as best as possible for everyone.
So, if you want to overclock with your BIOS, you have to do these steps:
1. Go to your BIOS. If you don't know how: Press either Del, F2, or on some Motherboards Esc while the PC boots (right after you turned it on). It all depends on your motherboard when and what key you have to press.
But if everything worked, you will now see a Window with a lot of blue/grey color and some options (Standard, Advanced, ...).
2. Now go to something like "Advanced Settings". This depends all on your motherboard, too. There are too many possible ways so that I can't give you and detailed guide how to do it. You should just choose a menu where you see something like CPU Clock / FSB , and so on.
Remember: Although it can be dangerous when changing something in BIOS without knowing what it is, switching to other menues doesn't count to this. So don't be afraid to open the wrong menu. Just try out. And if you've done something wrong, just leave BIOS with "Discard unsaved changes".
3. If you have found what you searched for, make first of all sure to unlink the PCI/PCIe - frequens from the FSB. If you don't do this, you will hardly manage any clock-improvment. There should be some option to unlink this, maybe you just have to choose a certain Value for PCI/PCIe-Clock (im not sure about this, but 33/100 should be the values.). If you don't find any option like that, don't be afraid, everything should be alright. But just make sure to check your graficcards temperature afterwards, if you have a really good one or one with just passive cooling.
4. Now it's time to change the FSB. The FrontSideBus defines the clock of your CPU. FSB * Multiplier = Clock. The Multiplier is predefined, you can just reduce it. It is something between 9-15 I think. If you have awesome RAM (with good cooling), then you may reduce the multiplier and increase the FSB, so that the CPU-Clock stay the same, but the overall speed will increase.
But lets stay at the FSB-Oc. There are two possibilities: First of all, you can directly increase the FSB without any other settings. Or, you have to change something to "Manual" before the option is getting accessable. Anyway, if there is no option with FSB in its name and you are not sure what to choose: look out this some numbers next to options: 166, 233, 333. That are the most common FSB-Rates.
(notice: there are also mainboards, cheaper ones, that allows you only to increase the CPU-Clock itself. doesn't make such a big difference).
5. If you found that, increase the FSB slightly. in normal ways, you should see anywhere how much the CPU increases its clock. If not, you should calculate with the multiplier or just stay in a serious way.
(before you really change something, please read on).
6. I hope this helped you a bit. Like I said, there are so many different BIOS-Versions, I can't give you a 100% guide. But now you should know the basics. But that is not all about overclocking. There are many more ways I'm going to explain soon (vor Example increasing the Voltage, changing memory timings, ...).
7. First of all, get a good cooling. But before you now change somethings and really try to overclock, measure the temperature of you PC after a certain time, lets say 15 minutes of dolphin. Download Speedfan to do this, or else you will have to measure through the BIOS, which is not so good. Now remember that figure, and then, after overclocking, do this again, and compare the numbers. None of them should be above 65°, that would be really to much, but you shouldn't have a too great increase of temperature eigther. If you have 40 before overclocking and 55 after I would recommend you to reduce the Clock a bit.
8. And what if you done something wrong? If the PC eighther makes problems or won't boot (not only because of the FSB-increase, even if you choose something wrong). The first option is, if the PC still boots, go to BIOS, and choose, "Load wtf Settings". I don't know exaktly what stands instead of wtf^^ It should be something like "earlier", "working", or "safe" (just from the meaning of the word. that is different too in every mainboard and I don't know even for mine, sry
). If it doesn't boot, you have some options: There can be a switch on your mainboard which allows you to reset the BIOS, or, on older PCs, there should be a jumper to do this. The last option would be to remove the battery from BIOS for some seconds.
Now, thats it for now. I'll bring in some more things later on.
- Via Software:
~Coming soon~
____________________________________________________________
I hope that this is somehow usefull (maybe for the people who aren't keen on overclocking and don't know if it is really worth it. For some games it doesn't make such a great difference, but remember: 1 FPS can make the difference between choppy and good in Dolphin (afaik).
Well, I would be also interested if someone with a similar system gets other values. Must be to precise, but when somebody gets twice as much FPS in Galaxy as me I would be glad to know...
greetings,
The King
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