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A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130? 288

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the power-on-a-budget dept.
joshmo97 writes "Tom's Hardware has found that the Pentium D 805 runs stable at 4.1 GHz and outperforms Intel and AMD's flagship offerings in many benchmarks. From the article: 'The Pentium D 805 is a budget CPU, but it puts lots of processors from AMD and Intel to shame. Although it is not based on the latest 65 nm core, this CPU remains stable even when operating at amazing 4.1 GHz. The Pentium D 805 ascends to the throne as the new King of overclocking, knocking out the AMD Opteron 144.'"
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A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130? More

A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130?

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  • Longevity? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @06:50PM (#15304763) Homepage
    Ok, so you can overclock it to 4.1Ghz.. but how many weeks will it last before it burns out and you need to buy a new one?

    • Re:Longevity? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:08PM (#15304856) Homepage
      Who says it's not damaged already. That's one of the problems with these hacks. You could break a transistor and instead of getting a 1 in 10^-20 chance of error it's now upto 10^-9. Once in a while you'll get an error, probably not notice it yourself but something your doing could be affected.

      This hack may be ok for a gaming rig, but I wouldn't do it to my workstation.

      Tom

      • Re:Longevity? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) * <mikemol@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:10PM (#15304860) Homepage Journal
        Tom, you really should have mentioned this in the article...
      • instead of getting a 1 in 10^-20 chance of error it's now upto 10^-9.

        I believe you mean "1 in 10^20" or "10^-20% chance" ;)

      • Re:Longevity? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jerry Coffin ( 824726 )

        Who says it's not damaged already. That's one of the problems with these hacks. You could break a transistor and instead of getting a 1 in 10^-20 chance of error it's now upto 10^-9. Once in a while you'll get an error, probably not notice it yourself but something your doing could be affected.

        It's pretty hard to create a problem like this. The manufacturers (with a few notable slipups) test and rate the CPU up to some given temperature. Intel puts a couple of thermal diodes in each chip, to shut the

        • Re:Longevity? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @08:34PM (#15305231) Homepage
          You'd be surprised how much "wrong" can happen before you crash. I had faulty ram a while back [well more so it had the wrong timing] and it would boot, run for a while then randomly something would segfault. Then the kernel would panic and lock up, etc.

          A simple op like

          MOV EAX,[EBX+13]

          could excute as

          MOV EAX,[EBX+14]

          and not result in a significant problem.

          As for the self-checks and diodes. You don't have to overheat a circuit to kill it. Over volting a transistor can denature it and you'd never notice. Just like ESD could "partially break" a circuit.

          In fact if you looked at a comp lab with open computers chance are at least one IC has some form of ESD damage.

          Tom

    • Re:Longevity? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:21PM (#15304909)
      Raise your hand if you've "burned out" a chip that ran stable but was destroyed by overclocking. My Celeron 566 still runs 24/7 at 850 mhz after all these years.

      • Re:Longevity? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        *raises hand*

        Again, the problem is you never know unless you are extremely careful to check results. The desktop processors most likely do not use much self-checking circuitry, so it will require software or human result checking. Since nobody writes desktop software that expects the CPU to be broken and no human should be expected to check every single operation of a computer, there's no reasonable way for anyone to notice that an error has ocurred.

      • Re:Longevity? (Score:2, Informative)

        by kabloie ( 4638 )
        big hand here

        Took a working Athlon XP 2600+ to 3200+ speeds for a few weeks with aggressive cooling. One day, the machine simply wouldn't boot.

        It does happen.
        • Was it the chip itself, or something else? I've seen many dead Socket A boards (most were not even overclocked), but no problem with the chips themselves. Not to mention quite a few problems with power supplies too.
          • Yeah, I saw a dead Socket A board about a week ago. The cheesy little chipset fan on the VIA KT266A northbridge died, rendering the board dead. The CPU was surely not overclocked as the owner is very vocal against overclocking. Maybe his master's in EE taught him something the middle-school gamers don't know...

        • Re:Longevity? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @10:06PM (#15305745) Homepage
          Took a working Athlon XP 2600+ to 3200+ speeds

          2600+ or 2500+ ?? There is a big difference. The 2500+ overclocks much better because of the FSB speed, you cannot correctly overclock a 2600+ to 3200+ due to the FSB...

          Either way, did you identify that the chip was in fact the problem? And if so, how much did the damaged chip cost versus the same chip in a 3200+ version? In the case of this article, you can buy at least 8 of these Pentium 805 D chips for a single 3.8 Ghz Extreme... And the 805 D is faster...
      • /me raises hand

        Stupid software-controlled clock circuitry...

      • Re:Longevity? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by UncleFluffy ( 164860 )
        Far more interesting is overclocking a monitor - the increased frequency can make the flyback transformer more efficient, increasing the final anode voltage by lots of kilovolts. I'll leave you to imagine the results. Don't try this at home, kids.

    • Re:Longevity? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:32PM (#15304961) Homepage
      Ok, so you can overclock it to 4.1Ghz.. but how many weeks will it last before it burns out and you need to buy a new one?

      What is it with you people?

      Here on slashdot no less, a bunch of people decried my overclocking of a Celeron 300A to 450... FYI, its still running right now...

      You decried my overclocking of my AMD Barton 2500+ to 3200+... I am still using THAT as my primary machine...

      I am aware of the risks of overclocking, but I am also aware of the benifits. I weigh those considerations carefully before doing so. Overclocking not for you? Fine. No problem.

      However, it has been working just great for me thanks - and people told me my celeron would just *EXPLODE* or catch fire... or... Whatever...

      If you don't like overclocking, don't do it. However, stop whining about the chip frying. If it works, and you keep it cooled, it will probably work for a long time to come.

      • Re:Longevity? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Spy Handler ( 822350 )
        You got lucky, that's all. Some chips barely meet 300mhz and some chips actually rate 500mzh but get stamped as 300mzh because they needed more 300's. There is no way to tell which of these you get when you bought your Celeron 300. If you got the barely-300 chip and overclock it, you fry it. If you got the 500 chip, it runs great.

        • Re:Longevity? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Firehed ( 942385 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @08:37PM (#15305247) Homepage
          Have you ever overclocked before? Going 1MHz over the limit won't fry it, you'll get at worst an unstable system. You'd have to go well over the limit (probably 10% over or more), and often overvolt it by a good amount too, in order to actually damage the thing. And before you counter with the argument of shortening the lifetime - yes, you will, but a processor will far outlast its usefulness, unless you've got it cooled to absolute zero running at 40ghz in which case the lifetime is probably shot. When you're talking about a chip lasting eight years instead of ten... well, how many of us have systems from 1996 (or 1998 for that matter) that we still consider useful?
          • Don't ceramics start behaving like reflectors at around 40 GHz? Nevermind that some ceramics also would become superconductive at absolute zero. I wonder what effect that would have... I'm sure it would be cool!

        • Re:Longevity? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @08:53PM (#15305352) Homepage
          You got lucky, that's all. Some chips barely meet 300mhz and some chips actually rate 500mzh but get stamped as 300mzh because they needed more 300's.

          Maybe I got lucky... However, I also did my homework first too. I knew my odds. And the odds of overclocking a celery 300A were VERY high. Could mine do 466? No. However, for the price to performance ratio, it was well worth the risk.

          If I want a gaming machine that I don't care too much about the power bill, then this overclock "as dangerous as it may be" is worth my time. Besides, do the math, how many low end intels will I have to burn though to equal a chip that is ALMOST as powerful as the overclocked?

          HINT, where I buy my chips:
          Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHZ $1,318.24

          Intel Pentium D 805 2.66GHZ Dual Core $171.74

          Do the math.

      • Re:Longevity? (Score:5, Informative)

        by SacredNaCl ( 545593 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @10:05PM (#15305735) Journal
        What is it with you people?

        Here on slashdot no less, a bunch of people decried my overclocking of a Celeron 300A to 450... FYI, its still running right now...

        You decried my overclocking of my AMD Barton 2500+ to 3200+... I am still using THAT as my primary machine...

        I am aware of the risks of overclocking, but I am also aware of the benifits. I weigh those considerations carefully before doing so. Overclocking not for you? Fine. No problem.

        I'm not that shocked by their results to be honest. I do question the overvoltage they are using to get there, however. On air with a completely unimpressive cooler I've taken my Celeron-D 2.93 Ghz chip to 3.6Ghz, just raise the bus up a knotch to the next memory setting. Now the onboard graphics doesn't work at that setting, so you have to have an AGP card - but the board works fine, and at least in the winter & spring temps here can be kept from overheating (though it gets a little hotter than I would like). With summer rolling around I'm going to swap out the heatsink and go with larger intake and exhaust fans. After rebates, I paid $30 for this CPU, and its worth every penny. Considering the Pentium-D 506 is basically two Celeron-D's slapped together, I would fully expect most of them to get to 3.6Ghz with a little care in the right motherboards, at least 3.34Ghz. Of course, this wont happen with the stock cooler. You need to get one with at least partial copper and a bigger fan that runs a little faster.

        On the downside of OC'ing, I killed a motherboard overclocking. The chip was fine, everything else was fine, but the drive controller went snap crackle pop. So YMMV, that was in a K6 system (which were poor OC'ers to begin with), I expected the chip to heat up a bit and was prepared to deal with that - I didn't expect the drive controller to die on me. That was at a trivial 20mhz overclock as well, which tells me the components in the board were not up to snuff.

        Celerons I've OC'd with impunity. They have been great chips for it, and I've never gone out and purchased a water cooler or any of that nonsense. I've still got a Celeron 300 OC'd, running what, 8-9 years? I've still got a PIII OC'd running 6 years (that I've owned it). I don't expect my current system to last 10 years, I'll likely replace it in 2 as even at 3.6ghz its less suited for the way I actually use my computer than a dual core chip would be. Seeing this does give me another option. Though I'll likely save a little extra money and get a 4400X2 anyway.

           

  • Article overclocking! (Score:5, Funny)

    by cr3ative ( 881393 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @06:51PM (#15304768) Homepage
    With minimal alterations, you can also perform mad overclocks on your articles!

    They watercooled this 10 page story up to an incredible FORTY FIVE pages, using only duct tape, a small iceberg and tons of adverts. Wow!

    SET YOUR CLICKING FINGERS TO STUN, LADIES!

  • and oh, boy, the heat... (Score:5, Informative)

    by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @06:54PM (#15304783)
    Instead of Athlon64+ 3200 and X2 3800s, we built a few machines at the office with P-D 805s. Every user has complained about how hot it gets under their desk with the machines. You reach down and put your arm under the desk, and it's like a sauna. We haven't had any complaints with the AMDs.

  • 260 Watts. (Score:5, Informative)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @06:56PM (#15304800) Journal
    This processor, when overclocked to 4.1 Ghz, draws 260 Watts.

    That will run up the electric bill just a little.

  • Trading one cost for another (Score:5, Informative)

    by HoneyBunchesOfGoats ( 619017 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @06:57PM (#15304805)
    Too bad that "free" 1.5GHz comes with a 216W increase in power consumption [tomshardware.com], totalling nearly 500W for the system.

  • How long till Intel fixes this... (Score:3, Funny)

    by meatflower ( 830472 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:00PM (#15304819)
    I'm not really ready to upgrade my entire rig at the moment but I'm almost tempted to buy a Pentium D 805 now before they're

    A) Out of stock everywhere
    B) Intel releases Revision B that makes overclocking this particular CPU impossible.

    Buy em while they're hot folks...(no pun intended, or was there?)
    • B) Intel releases Revision B that makes overclocking this particular CPU impossible.
      Actually this processor IS the B Rev. From TFA - it was the B0 stepping of the 805.
    • Well, that's the thing. The clock multiplier is already locked at 20x. The reason that this CPU is such a big overclocker is that it is set up for a bus clock speed of only 133 MHz, while most motherboards that support it are designed to run at 200 MHz. As long as the motherboard BIOS is willing to ignore the CPU's requested FSB speed, and most of them are, you can crank this baby up to 4 GHz without trouble. (Of course, as the article discusses, having the CPU remain stable at that speed is a bit more

  • Total system cost is so low! (Score:5, Informative)

    by asliarun ( 636603 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:00PM (#15304820)
    The best thing about the 805 is that the motherboards are so cheap as well! There are definitely bigger and better CPU to lust after, even in terms of price/performance. But then, picking a decent motherboard for say a Dothan or Core Duo that is stable usually takes you to the enthusiast territory and the total system ends up costing much more than you intended. Athlon is an exception, of course. However, overclocking a 805 is like buying a dirt cheap supercompact or hatch, modding the engine, and getting a kick out of everytime your 10k car stays neck to neck with 50k sporty cars :-D

    Sorry for adding to the cesspool of odious car similies!

    • However, overclocking a 805 is like buying a dirt cheap supercompact or hatch, modding the engine, and getting a kick out of everytime your 10k car stays neck to neck with 50k sporty cars :-D

      which is precisely never, since 50k race cars go 80 in the turns and you never upgraded your suspension. You probably also have nasty crank walk, so you have to turn the wheel to one side to keep a straight line.

      Should've bought a V8 (Miata).

    • There are definitely bigger and better CPU to lust after, even in terms of price/performance. But then, picking a decent motherboard for say a Dothan or Core Duo that is stable usually takes you to the enthusiast territory and the total system ends up costing much more than you intended. Athlon is an exception, of course.

      Actually, I think the Core Duo platform is now a reasonably priced option since Asus released their sub-$150 microATX "digital home" Core Duo motherboard:

      Asus N4L-VH DH [asus.com]

      Sure, that's

  • ARTICLE TEXT (or, "Bite Me, Tom's Hardware") (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:02PM (#15304827)
    [Note: this is the first 10 pages of the article, with images removed. The charts are given as tab-delimted text.]

    There are still some situations in life that are guaranteed to put a grin on anyone's face, even hard-boiled technical skeptics like us. This particular story borders on being a sensation unmatched in our last eight years of hardware reviews. The news, for those who just can't stand the wait any more, is this: Intel has offered a budget Pentium as part of its processor line-up for a little while now. With a simple modification, however, this CPU can outperform every top-of-the-line processor around.

    The bottom line is that the Athlon FX-60 and the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 have both met their match - there's simply no escaping this conclusion! This is bound to cause lamentation among the elite circle of users who've invested big bucks in their high-end systems, if not outright wailing and rending of garments. The basic stats for this insignificant-seeming budget processor read as follows: Pentium D 805 clocked at 2.66 GHz, equipped with two processor cores both with 64 bit support. At your friendly neighborhood retailer you can pick up this secret weapon for pocket change - right now, for example, it's available at newegg.com for just under $130. We were quite amazed as the first performance figures emerged from our test labs: stable operation was possible at 4.1 GHz, and without even the need for substantial boosts to cooling!

    As one of our more enthusiastic readers wrote to us a few years ago, when we were chasing new overclocking records on what seemed like a daily basis: "I'll knock your numbers down to the ground." In this case, he was referring to the video encoding performance numbers that a heavily overclocked system could post when compared to a stock PC. We've also seen another similar phenomena in days of yore, which ambitious (but older) users probably remember. For example, the Intel Celeron 300A, for which a 300 MHz clock rate was specified, worked flawlessly at 450 MHz. Foreshadowing our current champ, this low-cost offering also knocked a much more expensive Pentium II 400 into the back seat.

    The Pentium D 805 gives Intel an unassuming budget CPU for its processor portfolio, but simply overclocking the device to 4.1 GHz puts it ahead of top-of-the-line high-dollar processors. For overclocking aficionados this means one thing: the AMD Opteron 144, which led the overclocking pack until just recently, has been dethroned by the Pentium D 805. This latter processor is not only easier on the pocketbook, it's also a noticeably better performer, thanks to its dual core architecture - the Opteron offers only a single core.

    The Pentium D 805 is based on the first Intel dual core processor, the Pentium D with the Smithfield core. Its predecessors in this family were rated at clock speeds of 2.8 GHz (D 820) to 3.2 GHz (D 840). Both cores in this CPU family come equipped with a 1 MB L2 cache, whereas the most current dual core processors in the 900 series make 2 MB available to each core. For the last year, Intel has brought no new models in the 800 series to market, because the company has switched its fabrication from a 90 nm process to a 65 nm one in the meantime, and has used this smaller building block size only for processors in the 900 series. But then out of nowhere, the old Smithfield core put in another appearance in the form of the Pentium D 805.

    By comparison with all the other processors in this series, the D 805's relatively low clock speed of 2.66 GHz doesn't make much of an impression on store shelves. At 133 MHz (533 QDR), its front side bus clock rate is laughable when compared to state-of-the-art CPUs with 200 and 266 MHz speeds.

    The Secret Of The Multiplier

    The multiplier expresses the ratio between the processor clock speed and the FSB clock. For the Pentium D 805, the combination of FSB and processor clocks results in a multiplier value of 20x. By comparison with other CPUs with 200 MHz or 266 MHz FSB, this is a very high valu
  • Let me guess, a hand picked review sample? the best of the best sample chip?
    • Doubtful-- I checked the reviews on Newegg to see what people were saying, and everyone seems to be able to overclock it quite a bit without extra cooling.

    • Re:Hand picked sample? (Score:5, Informative)

      by meatflower ( 830472 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:15PM (#15304875)
      If you had RTFA you'd see that overclocking this card to 4.1 isn't actually a big strectch because of the unique way this chip was designed by Intel.

      Normally the clock multiplier is in the 10's but on this chip it is 20x. That means that a relatively small change to the FSB clock increases the overall clock speed greatly.

      The default FSB speed is 133mhz. 20x133 = 2.66ghz (the original speeds)

      By raising the FSB by only a bout 70 mhz to 200 we get a huge change. 20x205= 4.1ghz

      It's a relativley low increase in FSB speeds that translate to a much higher clockrate.

  • More underclocking/undervolting articles! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phoenixhunter ( 588958 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:11PM (#15304865)
    Honestly I've been there and done that, I think I still have my Celeron 300mhz running at 450mhz somewhere around here. But these days, all I really want in a computer is something that has decent performance and doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner. I'd much prefer to know which CPU's I can undervolt/underclock, and reduce the DB to a minimum.

    • Re:More underclocking/undervolting articles! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:26PM (#15304936) Homepage
      Actually I've been running my old Linux server underclocked for a couple of years now. Athlon 1.4ghz, running at 1ghz. It's much cooler, uses less power, and solid as a rock - even though it lives up in my attic. Apart from a bit of web/database development, and archiving stuff once a week, it really doesn't need much horsepower to serve files and route. Couldn't get it to boot at a lower clock speed though.
    • It's not a problem to run a processor, memory, or whatever at less than the rated max, it's just more that can be a problem. Just take any CPU and reduce the bus speed, it'll work. The only trick is to do it to an incriment that the board can evenly divide to get a correct PCI bus speed. So for example declock an 800mhz bus P4 to 533mhz, since 533mhz is a legit bus speed for P4 busses.

      However, realisticly, you are better just getting a more efficient processor. Get yourself a Core Duo processor. They are cu
    • Ok, you remember how easy the Celeron 300 overclock to 450 was? Well, this is just as easy. And THAT's why it's news.

      You don't have to take it to the M4d extreme and go to 4.1ghz. If you have a good motherboard and some good memory, you can up the FSB on your motherboard and easily get to 3.2ghz (from the stock 2.6ghz). And you don't need to touch the voltage to do it or watercool. Just change the setting and there's a damn good chance you won't have a problem.

      It's a $130 processor [newegg.com] that, with a
      • yea but with the 300A i used the box cooler and got it to 750.. this one you have to use massive cooling.. (not fun) remember the artical noted that when they went over the stock speed that the box can couldn't handel anything but stock speed under full cpu load

  • Sample size (Score:5, Insightful)

    by l2718 ( 514756 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:17PM (#15304884)
    The article seems to claim that one chip could be overclocked to 4.1GHz. That's a far cry from saying that all such chips will work at that clock speed. A sample size of one isn't very informative about a population.
  • And how much would one need to spend on the cooling system for this baby ?

  • Thats nothing! (Score:5, Funny)

    by 192939495969798999 ( 58312 ) <[info] [at] [devinmoore.com]> on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @07:31PM (#15304958) Homepage Journal
    I have my IBM PC XT overclocked to 5 GHz, unfortunately it costs 50 KiloWatts to run, but on the plus side I can use it in my kiln to cure pottery.

  • NO need for 4.1 GHz (Score:2, Insightful)

    by hike2 ( 550205 )
    Nobody said you need to run it that high. You can run that CPU with slightly higher FSB with a slitghly better cooler and get it at 3.6 GHz which is damn close to one of the $1,000 EE chips. I'm off to buy a combo at Fry's for $150 ... can't beat that

  • i can imagine (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @08:08PM (#15305123)
    US military to Intel "your latest shipment of Mil-Spec CPU's are not up to standard"

    Intel to US military "That's strange, we sent you our very best core's"

    Somewhere at Intel after reading Slashdot " $@&#$%&!!!, is that where they went"
  • Finding one out a million doesn't make the sort of sweeping generalization true.

  • Old news from a new company. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @08:29PM (#15305214)
    It's been known for a while that AMD's Opteron 165's ($330) will o/c to at or above the performance of an FX-60 ($1000).

    All this article really says is that the ultra-high-end isn't worth it.

    I'd like to see a comparison between this thing and the Opty-165 o/c. The Pentium may be a bit cheaper, but factor in the power and cooling bill and (I expect) the higher performance of the Opteron, and it's probably about even.

  • Diminishing Returns (Score:4, Insightful)

    by maximthemagnificent ( 847709 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @08:35PM (#15305237)
    I notice that while the clock rates climb quickly, the performance levels on most real world benchmarks level out pretty quickly. So why bother waste all the time and electricity?

  • Well... It does make sense. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Think about what the whole point of dual core was.

    Chip heat output increases exponentially with clock speed. Heat output means power consumption and loud fans and... well, heat.

    Everybody was bitching about heat output of chips (OMG Pentium 4 is teh sux0r is sooo h0t)

    Take two cores. Essentially underclock them. Now each runs at less than half the heat output (remember that exponential heat curve.... ) and you have two of them so you have more total computing power in a SMP configuration.

    Now somebody overclo

  • Yeah, $130 + the cost of water cooling (Score:4, Informative)

    by custompccases ( 904255 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @11:09PM (#15305933)
    And a hefty power bill to go along with it.

    I picked up a 805 myself and just like Tom's I could do 3.33 with stock vcore. Read any other ocing articles on the 805 and 4ghz can only be achieved with water cooling. Even if you shoot for 3.8 you are going to need a $60 heatsink and pray it gets the job done.

    He also says: "It's noteworthy that the core voltage levels of 2.7 volts didn't read out correctly here."

    This isn't true according to my testing. CPUZ shows the correct voltage, well close to it anyways. For some reason currently shipping intel motherboards and nf4 intel motherboards have a hard time supplying the correct voltage when oced and under load. The voltage always drops by a substantial amount, for example at 3.33 it drops from 1.337 to 1.25 while under load. I broke out my multimeter to make sure since I was contemplating upping the voltage in the bios to compensate.

    At any rate I would say ocing it to 3.33 is good enough considering the price.

    Oh and why fsck did this article need 45 pages?

  • What the summary doesn't mention. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11, 2006 @12:51AM (#15306245)
    1) Using the Standard Intel CPU cooler the processor wasn't even stable at 3.3Ghz, so they put on a zalman cooler.
    2) The zalman cooler wasn't good enough and would throttle after 3.8Ghz
    3) The 4.1Ghz was achieved using water cooling. The CPU is rated at 1.4v max and they had to run it at 1.56v to make this work.

    The headline says "A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at $130?" - but you'll need water cooling to make it to 4.1 ghz and that will at least double the price. Not to mention you'de probably need a new power supply.

  • You're Forgetting (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GmAz ( 916505 ) on Thursday May 11, 2006 @10:52AM (#15308330) Journal
    Dont' forget you need a pretty good set of RAM to do this. RAM that will most likely cost you over double what the processor is worth. A motheboard that can handle those speeds isn't cheap either. Plus, you need a power supply that is reliant and can deliver a steady stream of power. Cooling is another must for this. Expect to pay at least $60 for a cooling unit if not more and go with watercooling. You will end up looking at around $500 just for the few main components. For the enthusiast, thats great; for everyone else, its not worth it.

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