Tech Reaction

For my first blog, I am going to write about my latest overclocking endeavor.  Eager to snatch some more hardware points over at HWBot, I decided to take a Celeron 450 for a spin.   I first tried it in my Asus Rampage Extreme but as I have discovered in the past, these boards dont play nice with 200Mhz FSB CPU’s.  So I swapped to a Gigabyte P45-UD3R, and I was all set to go.  Cooling was accomplished via a TRUE 120 coupled with a Sanyo Denkai 220 CFM Monster Fan (a cool night and an open window didnt hurt either).  RAM used was Crucial Ballistix PC6400 4-4-4-12 2×1GB Kit.  They are the 16FD5’s which have Micron D9GMH IC’s and love the volts.

I started with my favorite bench, SuperPi 32M.  The vcore was set to a safe 1.55v (overkill most likely but thats my style) to get to 3740Mhz.  Temps were around 40°C loaded.  Ended up with a nice Gold cup beating the previous record holder by about 3 minutes.  Thanks for AndreYang for his very efficient Chinese Windows Server 2k3 OS Of course the obligatory screenshot… (cpu-z was freaking out and not displaying anything.  It went away after changing FSB speed)

After that I took it up a notch to 3905Mhz by bumping vcore to 1.57v.  I ran Super Pi 1M and Hexus Pifast.  It required minimal tweaking to get the golds, so I didnt spend much time on the RAM.

Since 2k3 is definitely not the best OS for wprime I had to bump up clocks again to manage the golds… 3949Mhz @ 1.62v in bios.  Cpu-z reading 1.648 WTF?!  All good though since temps never exceeded 50°C.

Last up for the night was getting a CPU-Z valid.  Wasnt hard at all, and that wrapped up my night on Server 2k3, since I needed to run vista for PCMark 05.

I didnt feel like installing vista & setting up RAID arrays with I-RAMS @ 2AM, so this was done the next day.  Turns out I didnt need more than 1 I-RAM to take gold though.  I did forget to overclock the processor though .  Ran the 4890 @ 1000/1050, no point really pushing the gpu since its bottlenecked by the cpu.

That wraps up this session on the Celeron 450, an easy, no-frills cpu to overclock (with the right board at least).  Got a little over 14 hwpoints for the bot, and now its on to an E5200 and some LN2 fun.  Thanks for reading –Karmakazi