Overclocking Pentium D 805 или как я стал "злым хакером"

HD takes copious amount of time to transcode. Thus my first urge was to get a new more powerful computer, but mine are less then a year old. So I started looking what will be coming and realized that Yonah (Core Duo) was the shortest product lifecycle in Intel history – less then a year. Another thing I realized is that crappy emachines box that I got for Christmass for $350 is actually pretty cool box for $350 that is. There are two things about it

• Pentium D 805 processor (2x2.6GHz, 2x1MB L2 on 533MHz FSB). I did go for it because of two cores, but I never realized it is instead two Pentium 4 Prescott processors glued together and are highly capable of overclocking. With 20 multiplier simply sticking D 805 into 800Mhz motherboard would increase the clock from 2.6GHz to 4GHz on both Pentium 4 inside (yeah, it would need to be cooled to run that fast). Did I mention EM64T? On top of it all it is a 64 bit processor.

  I wanted to get D 830 instead (2x3.0GHz, 2x1MB L2 on 800MHz FSB) but that would have only 15 multiple yet would come with 800MHz FSB motherboard. They wanted $400 for it and were sold out, so it didn’t work out and looks like for better.

• Intel D1102GGC2 motherboard with ICS 951417 PLL that ClockGen and such almost understand (should use ICS 9541xx like ICS 954119 to set ICS registers). With build in ATI graphics (and thus ATI chipset and ATI was bought by AMD) I was thinking that the motherboard would come from some cheap sweatshop somewhere in China especially considering that it was inside $350 computer, but it did come from Intel. By no means it is the best motherboard around, but Intel has support (new BIOSes and such like a toolkit to “cook” your own BIOS) and this motherboard is well capable of running at 800MHz.

What this all mean is that $350 junk computer is well capable to beat anything that was available last Christmas for over $1000 including Pentium D 960 ($549 3.6GHz 2x2MB L2 on 800MHz FSB) and T2700 Yohan ($637 2.3GHz 2MB L2 on 667MHz FSB) and would be on par with the best Core 2 Duo in 667/800 MHz FSB like T7700 ($530 2.4GHz 4MB L2 on 800MHz FSB Socket P) released in May 2007 or T7600 ($637 2.3GHz 4 MB L2 on 667MHz FSB Socket M). LGA 775 Core 2 Duos all running on 1066MHz FSB would probably be a bit faster. On 800 MHz FSB the only Core 2 Duo available and released in May 2007 is $133 E4400 (2.0 GH 2MB L2 on 800MHz FSB) that D 805 would beat without any problem running faster then 2.8 GHz despite 40% Core 2 Duo improvement compared to Pentium D.

What this all also mean is that it should be relatively easy to overclock that junk $350 computer. And it was indeed. Popping the hood open (yeah it did involve the use of a head-mounted flashlight) I learned that PLL is ICS 951417. Talking to emachines clueless support and googling I got to know that the box has Intel D1102GGC2 motherboard and while hanging up the phone I was already downloading genuine Intel BIOS that let me set RAM speed to 667MHz out of the box. Changing FSB speed would require “cooking” new BIOS using Intel Toolkit, but I just downloaded ClockGen and randomly selecting ICS 954119 (instead of ICS 951417 that I have and they didn’t list) I set FSB speed to 667MHz and computer didn’t blink. D 805 felt very relieved to run at 3350 MHz with all clocks matching up at 667MHz. 25% increase in performance came in no time.

We are now running at the top of Core Duo range and at the bottom of Core 2 Duo. Let’s go faster. 800MHz FSB (4GH processor clock) crashed the computer right away. After about an hour of playing with memory speeds etc I learned that anything above 170MHz (680Mz FSB) would make system unstable, so I left it 2*3.4GHz, 680MHz FSB and 667MHz memory or about what I would get from most Core 2 Duo systems apart from $533 E6700 (2*2.67GHz) and Core 2 Quad Q6600 (4*2.4GHz) that would go "on sale" at the end of July 2007 at $266 vs. $530 currently (reduced in April, 2007 from $851)

Вот как я стал “злым хакером“. HD or not, I doubt I would be buying another desktop in the next 5 years again because really there is no point, except if it is Q6600 on 1066MHz FSB. $350 could sure buy a lot of fun.