New PC! Overclocking Advice Needed

[Dom]

Hi all,

After um-ing and ah-ing for months about upgrading my PC, I finally took the plunge and did it. My last PC has lasted me four years, and it's still going strong to be honest, but it's not quite up to standard for the latest eyeball-bleeding games.

Anyway, I went for a mobo bundle that involved an overclocked Intel i5 CPU. Now, the seller on Amazon said it had all been tested and was ready to whack straight into a case. But I've never overclocked anything before, so I'm not entirely sure what I should be doing to make sure it won't die in a horrible melty stench of failure once I get it installed and start using it.

I know that airflow is important to keep things cool, so I invested in an Antec 902 v3 case (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/245777) which seems to have good reviews and washable air filters (yay!).

But that's as far as my OC knowledge goes. So I wondered, is there anything else I should/shouldn't be doing, or are there things I should know? As I say, I'm an overclocking noob, and although the setup has all been done and tested for me by the seller, I still want to make sure I don't end up melting the CPU by doing anything silly.

Any thoughts?

[JasonD]

If the seller knows what they are doing and it wasn't shaken apart in transit then it will be fine.

If you don't trust the seller to do it properly you shouldn't have bought from them.

[Dom]

*bought.

And I do trust them (I have no reason not to at this point) but I just wanted to make sure that *I* didn't do anything silly, like shoving an overclocked CPU into a case that didn't have enough air flow, etc. There might be other things I have to watch out for too, but like I say, I'm new to it all, so I thought I'd ask.

[JasonD]

If think a case with that many vents and fan mounting points your only problem will be noise.

[Dom]

Yeah hehe. Well it doesn't bother me at the moment, but then again, my PC doesn't have that many fans and vents, so who knows how it'll be when I get the new case. I'm hoping it comes with a way of turning the fan speeds down when they're not needed to be set quite so fast.

[Steve Lampkins]

So what are your specs? I'm thinking about buying a new computer.

[Dom]

It's an Intel i5 2500K, which is usually 3.3GHz but it was overclocked to 4.4GHz. 8Gb of Corsair DDR3 RAM running at 1600MHz, and an ASUS P8P67 motherboard. I basically bought this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004TGN6RA/

I also bought an Antec 902 case from Ebuyer - http://www.ebuyer.com/245777-antec-902-nine-hundred-two-v3-gaming-case-0761345-15924-1 - although it was a tenner cheaper when I got it last week.

I shoved in my old power supply, hard drives and CD drives from my old machine, so saved a bit of money there. All in all it was just shy of £500 and I've got a brand spanking new PC out of it. Runs like the clappers, it do.

[Steve Lampkins]

What gfx card?

I've always gone with midrange consumer PCs, but I think I'm finally going to get a decent PC, made from more standard parts. But I don't want to build it myself.

I'm thinking of getting one custom built. An Antec Three Hundred case, i7 2600k, 16 GB RAM, 120GB SSD 2TB regular HDD, GTX 580 1.5GB, and other goodies. But it costs around 1800 quid...

[Dom]

I've got a GTX460 1Gb, which I picked up for £170 when the card first came out. It wasn't the best of the 400 series (the 465, 470 and 480 were all out at the time) but it was "the best bang for your buck" mid-range card at the time, and out performed the 465 ad 470. I put that card in my new machine and I can still run games on maximum everything.

The GTX590 is the daddy of the GeForce cards right now I think, but they were £600 when they came out. I don't think it's worth spending more than £200 for a GFX card these days, especially as so few games use the full potential of them. And a lot of PC games are also built for consoles as well these days, which means they need to run on typically lower specs than a PC-only title, meaning that a PC GFX card won't need to have quite as much power as it might if the game was PC only.

[Dom]

As for hard drives, I've just bought a SATA III drive for Windows 7, so I'm going to see how much difference that makes over a SATA II boot drive. I know that SSDs are quick, but I need at least 500Gb for a boot drive these days, and SSDs that size make Baby Jesus' bank account cry.

[Steve Lampkins]

Yeah, the GTX 590 is not worth it, I reckon. It's still expensive. I just really want a card that will crush Battlefield 3. I got into the Alpha and it made my computer cry.

[Dom]

Well I was playing Mass Effect 2 for about 12 hours yesterday (it's what Sundays are made for) and everything ran nice and smooth with my 460. So yeah, a 580 should last a fair while.

[Steve Lampkins]

I'd just like to futureproof a little, for once. I hope games and more applications will take advantage of hyperthreading if I go for this setup. Now I have a camera that takes full HD video, perhaps I will be doing a little more video encoding in future.

[Dom]

Yeah future-proofing is always good. My last machine has been going strong for four years, and it's still pretty nippy. It started off as a 2.4GHz AMD Athlon dual core, with 4Gb of DDR2 RAM running at 800MHz, and an 8800GT graphics card (512Mb). I put a 3.2GHz CPU in after a couple of years (the fastest the mobo could take) and only in the last few months bought the GTX460, so not a lot has been upgraded since I bought it, and it still runs most modern games on high settings.

I didn't buy top of the line stuff for it either, and four years later it's still nice and quick. If I'd future-proofed a little more and bought a better GFX card originally instead of an 8800GT (which wasn't bad at the time really) then I'd probably not have bothered buying this new machine for another year or more.

There are three things I do to keep a PC running nicely:

- Virus scan once a week with Microsoft Security Essentials
- Defrag all hard drives once a week (which you might not need to do with SSDs)
- Don't install/uninstall things constantly

Works wonders.

[slaughteredlamb]

Bearing in mind that I'm an old fart but I don't get it, graphics cards costing £600 

Okay so I understand that this is to play games with fast frame rates and with loads of detail and all that but £600? SIX HUNDRED POUNDS?

Why would you not just buy a PS3 and an XBOX 360 and a whatever either of which would cost you a fraction of the price and just work straight out of the box. It just seems bizzare to me to spend a fortune on that much power and then overclock it, thus putting the parts under more strain than they were designed and potentially shortening their life just to play a game a frame or two faster than the next spotty, too afraid to talk to girls, teenager ( )

[Steve Lampkins]

I'm not mad enough to spend that much on a GFX card. :p

But PS3/Xbox = 5 year old technology. I do have a PS3.

Take the game I'm interested in: BF3. It's gonna look so much better on the lead platform: PC. Plus I'm a keyboard+mouse player.

PC: Full HD (and higher) PS3: 720p HD, hopefully
PC: 64 player servers PS3: 32 player servers

[Steve Lampkins]

I need at least 500Gb for a boot drive these days, and SSDs that size make Baby Jesus' bank account cry.

I still don't get this by the way. I have about 100GB free of a 500GB OS drive currently. But most of that is the many gigs of music, videos, and photos I've accumulated. I know some games weigh in around 5GB, but how many do you need installed?

[Tony]

Bearing in mind that I'm an old fart but I don't get it, graphics cards costing £600 

Okay so I understand that this is to play games with fast frame rates and with loads of detail and all that but £600? SIX HUNDRED POUNDS?

I have one on my work machine that cost around that, but then that's mainly used for editing video so in reality the price is minimal compared to the time and frustration it saves me - in fact it pays for itself.

Of course if it's just for a bit of one off fragging action then it is a bit OTT.

[Dom]

I need at least 500Gb for a boot drive these days, and SSDs that size make Baby Jesus' bank account cry.

I still don't get this by the way. I have about 100GB free of a 500GB OS drive currently. But most of that is the many gigs of music, videos, and photos I've accumulated. I know some games weigh in around 5GB, but how many do you need installed?

Well for example, I had about five games installed on my 160Gb drive, and had about 20Gb free. Star Trek Online was about 15Gb, Mass Effect was around 8Gb, Crysis 2 was about 10Gb, and I had a couple of others on there too.

Then factor in the windows page file, the space that gets taken up to create restore points (which happens at least once a week on my PC) and the fact that the bare minimum HDD space you need to defrag a drive is about 15% (but more is better) then it all kind of adds up.

Plus things like music, video, and anything else that needs to be constantly read from the drive when playing it should be kept on a separate hard drive to your OS and programs so that the read heads don't have to chop and change between reading program files and reading the files you're working on. Less moving about means a less knackered drive. (And it means if your OS drive goes tits up, you won't lose all your files as well).

I don't suppose I'll be using 500Gb up any time soon, but that's the whole point of me having it... not to use it all up any time soon!

[Steve Lampkins]

Star Trek Online was about 15Gb

There's your main problem. In general really.

factor in the windows page file, the space that gets taken up to create restore points (which happens at least once a week on my PC) and the fact that the bare minimum HDD space you need to defrag a drive is about 15% (but more is better)

Bada bing http://techgage.com/article/disabling_windows_pagefile_hibernation_to_reclaim_ssd_space/

Bada bang http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5482/make-system-restore-use-less-space-in-windows-7/

Bada bong http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/03/should-you-defragment-a-ssd/

 

[Dom]

Har har!!

Too much reading for my liking, so just get one of these and boosh!... all my reading woes are answered!

[Dom]

(I might have to look into an SSD drive though.)

[Steve Lampkins]

It actually seems like there can still be hassles with them, if you're building yourself. I'm hoping the prebuilt package I'm looking at will have had issues ironed out - and if there are problems, they can handle it. I'm not gonna go digging into BIOS settings, clearing CMOSs, or changing voltages. I have a life to get on with.

[Dom]

Me too, hence paying for all that to be done for me.

[JasonD]

Har har!!

Too much reading for my liking, so just get one of these and boosh!... all my reading woes are answered!

Why are 500GB drives so expensive? I paid about £60 for 2TB a few weeks ago.

[Dom]

£60 is pretty good. The last one I bought was £72 I think. That was a little while ago though.

[Steve Lampkins]

So what are your voltages for your OC? And what temps are you seeing?

I have a similar set-up actually, and am looking into bumping it up a bit.

Asus have an auto overclock which took my machine up to 4.4 - but I wasn't so keen on the temps. I reckon a manual overclock could keep my temps down a bit.

And what do you do if you accidentally reset your BIOS to default settings? Or mess something up. Do you have a list of all the BIOS values and settings that the manufacturer used?

[Dom]

I don't do or know any of those things.

I can't say I monitor the temperatures at all to be honest, but the Antec 902 will adjust fan speeds as necessary to keep things cool, plus there are manual fan controls on the case itself. Compared to my last machine, which had fewer fans in it, this machine is far quieter, and the only time I notice the noise is when I've been playing a graphics-intensive game for a while.

I really should go into the BIOS and and make a note of the voltages and settings though. If it all went belly up I'd have to contact the seller on Amazon and ask for the settings he used. Other than that I'd be screwed. I don't tend to mess around with BIOS settings at all, and the only reason I bought this kit was because all the messing around had been done for me.

[Steve Lampkins]

You should check out Core Temp.

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

Check your speeds when idling on the desktop, then after playing a heavy-duty game, see what it maxes out at.

I've been doing so much reading, I'm just a bit paranoid recently.   

[Steve Lampkins]

Why are 500GB drives so expensive? I paid about £60 for 2TB a few weeks ago.

If you thought they were expensive before... I was lucky to buy my hard drives just before the shortages became apparent due to the floods. My mate built his computer about a month after me, and the price had doubled.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/11/03/disk_drive_prices_may_double/