Research your Processor

Having never overclocked a PC in my life the first step was to do some research. Just entering overclocking into Google gives plenty of resources for you to read up on the topic. To narrow it down trying entering the name of your processor as well, chances are you will find plenty of people giving reports on how they overclocked your exact processor.

I found several people that had overclocked the QX9650 to around the 4Ghz level without much difficulty. The more serious overclockers have managed 4.5Ghz using just air cooling. While I am not interested in trying to reach such record breaking levels, if there is some free extra processing power available then I might as well grab it.

Overclocking Tools

Getting started means downloading some tools. Start with the excellent CPU-Z utility which gives detailed feedback on your machines setup. Next you need a tool that can be used to stress test the processor and memory to check if your new settings are stable. I used OCCT which was created by a group of French overclockers and is really simple to use. It thrashes all four cores and memory and when it detects a stability problem gives a nice sound effect to alert you.

The bane of all overclockers is the processor temperature, I used SpeedFan to monitor and graph the temp of all four cores. No point in running fast if that expensive silicone is being turned into cheap charcoal.

Baseline

As all good programmers know, measuring performance requires a baseline set of data to use as a point of comparison. Here is the default setup of the hardware via CPU-Z…

To measure the real world performance of the machine I am going to use my build script. There are plenty of synthetic tools to measure the raw performance of memory, processor, graphics and so forth. But as far as I’m concerned I want to see the benefit in real work and not just some theoretical benchmark. Running the build of Krypton game a time slightly over 36 minutes…

Note that I only ran this test just once. To be more accurate I should have run it half a dozen times and taken an average of the different times. But frankly I am not bothered with that level of accuracy and don’t want to spend 3 hours gathering the data.

Updating the BIOS

Doing the actual overclocking is simple. Enter the BIOS at startup and then modify the cpu multiplier. You can see in the CPU-Z picture above that the default multiple of 9 gives a 3GHz speed based on the base 333Mhz speed of the bus. I can increase this in 0.5 increments via te BIOS and so did just that. Adding 0.5 and then running the OCCT stability test for 30 minutes to ensure it was stable and watching SpeedFan to ensure the processor was not cooking.

Repeating this process I managed to get a stable system with a multiple of 10.5 giving a cpu speed of 3.496Ghz with the temp peaking at around 63c. Going above this caused the system to become unstable with regular crashes.

In order to get stable again I increased the voltage to the cpu. Usually this will solve the instability at the cost of running the cpu hotter. Slowly increasing the voltage caused the temp to increase markedly and too much for my liking. Once I was getting 75c I decide to stop as I don’t want to fry a very expensive processor. 

Note that I am using the stock Intel cpu fan that comes with the processor. Switching to an aftermarket cooler/fan would probably have reduced the temperature enough to get a higher stable multiple. I did buy a Zalman fan for my machine but it was far to noisey for me to tolerate listening to all day long, so I switched it out for the stock fan before starting the overclocking.

I now changed tack and tried overclocking the bus speed, giving a boost to the FSB and the processor at the same time. This has the added benefit that you can make small increments in the cpu speed rather than having to jump in large increments.

Starting from the default of 333Mhz I upped the value a little at a time until the system become unstable. Then backing up to the last good setting I managed to achieve 340Mhz. This gives a FSB speed of 1360 and ups the processor to 3.570Ghz. You can see the settings here…

This seems to be about the best I can manage. If the cpu is any faster the temperature goes to high for my liking and making the bus faster results in an unstable system. This is someway short of the 4Ghz that others report but the I am using a stock Intel fan for cooling and bog standard DDR2 memory.

Real world performance

But how does this impact actual real world performance? Running our build script we now get just under 31 minutes…

This represents an improvement of 16% which is very close to the actual processor overclocking of 19%. Given the build process includes a fair amount of reading/writing to disk this is very respectable. I then ran the OCCT stability test for 9 hours overnight and it didn’t crash. So I feel confident in leaving these settings alone and running with them all the time. After all, why turn down a free speedup of 500Mhz!

Intel Observations

It seems strange that Intel are releasing processors that seem to be capable of running so much faster. Why would you sell processors rated at 3Ghz when clearly they can run much faster? Obviously they are going to sell them with a safety margin but the difference between the rating and actual maximum speed seems odd.

I don’t remember previous generations from either AMD or Intel having this level of overclocking ability. Are Intel deliberately holding back because they already have a big performance lead over AMD? If AMD start to catch up would Intel suddenly start selling faster rated processors? I wonder.

Computer Dementia

Although my main development machine has only recently had its second birthday we all know that computers age even quicker than dogs. Working on a single core machine with XP feels like living with a black and white TV when all your friends have color. So time to send the old boy to the great kennel in the sky and take on a new puppy.

Custom Build

Normally I would just go online to Dell and choose a reasonably high spec machine, but not this time. Instead I’ve been inspired by a Scott Hanselman blog post into building a PC from components instead of just ordering a fully built system. It sounds more fun with the added benefit that you get to build the exact spec you want without compromises.

Dream Development Rig

My first decision is to forget about being sensible and ignore any attempt at creating a value for money machine. If you want value for money just go ahead with Dell/HP/Lenovo etc who work on razor thin margins. No, instead I am going to create my dream development rig. Something that will be a pleasure to use and last for at least a couple of years.

Intel Core 2 Quad Core Extreme QX9650 3GHz

I firmly believe you can never have too much processing power. If two cores are better than one, then using the same logic, I deduce that four cores must be better yet. So lets pick a nice fast four core processor from Intel which is unlocked so we can overclock for even better performance. I’ve have chosen the QX9650 which is only a little below the fastest processor they make. It also has good reviews from overclockers that indicate we should be able to improve on the 3GHz stock rating.

Gigabyte GA-X48-DS5 Motherboard

Looking at the cost of memory it seems that DDR3 is much more expensive than DDR2 even though the performance advantage it provides is currently marginal. So I went with a motherboard that supports DDR2 and has two PCIe x 16 slots with the latest X48 Intel chipset.

Corsair Dominator Memory DDR2 4GB

I am going to install Vista Ultimate 64bit Edition so that I can take advantage of the entire 4GB of memory I will be installing. Although Vista 32bit can in theory access 4GB of memory it does not work that way in practice. Because of the way the operating system reserves some of the address space it means you cannot get much above 3.25GB for use.

Samsung 22′ LCD Widescreen Monitor

Currently I have two 19′ 4:3 monitors. I will add to this by getting a 22′ widescreen that will become the main monitor, placing the existing 19′ displays on each side. I worked out that a 22′ widescreen would give me about the same display height for all three so that dragging windows between them would feel natural.

2 x Galaxy GeForce 8800GT

Having three displays means having two graphics cards to drive them. I opted for a pair of nVidea 8800GT cards from Galaxy which are at the high end of the mid-market. I don’t often play games so going for the latest and greatest seemed a pointless expense. 

Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Seagate Barracuda 500GB

A fast hard drive can really help with overall system performance. So the main drive with be a Raptor 150GB that spins at 10,000RPM. Even the code bloat that is Vista should fit easily within that. Data will be kept on a 500GB second drive running at the traditional 7,2000RPM.

Antec P190 Computer Case

Finally we need to have a case that is worthy of the latest hardware. I just hate those nasty plastic cases you get from Dell. Instead I want something that looks cool and also runs cool. Looking around the Antec P190 fits both counts and comes with high spec power supplies as well.

The Build

All the hardware arrived last week but I needed an extra hand with actually putting it together. With one hand in plaster it meant calling on the services of my brother-in-law. Nick is great with hardware but also a self proclaimed Linux fan boy and so needs watching carefully. It wouldn’t have surprised me to turn my back and find a extra 20GB partition installed running Ubuntu. Needless to say we don’t want to sully a new machine with that kind of virus.

Luckily it went nice and smooth and after about 6 hours we had Vista up and running Crysis. There was only a single gotcha in the whole process. It turns out that the CPU fan is so big it overlaps two of the memory slots. I had ordered 4 x 1GB sticks and so could not install half the memory. So I ordered 2 x 2GB sticks and will use them instead in order to get the 4GB required.

Performance

Looking at the Vista performance numbers I can see that all the settings are rated at 5.9, which is actually the maximum number that Vista will display. As a more real world test I performed a build of Krypton using my custom msbuild script. It took just 35mins when it used to take 1h 15mins on my old machine. My old machine was not slouch either with a Xeon 3GHz processor and 2GB of memory.

Considering none of the applications in the build process are designed to use multiple cores it shows that the new machine is significantly faster even when using mainly just the one core. So far I have not played around with trying to overclock the processor. Once I have some results I will let you know.

The guys at 10Tec have taken their excellent .NET grid control and added some support for drawing with Krypton colors. Here is a quick screenshot…

This control takes over where the KryptonDataGridView stops. It has fixed columns, grouping, tree-list capabilities and much much more. In fact this has given me an idea I would like your feedback on. A good data grid control like this would really compliment the Krypton controls. Would it be of interest if I licensed this control from 10Tec and the fully Kryptonized it?

You can download their demo from here if you want to take a closer look.

Let me know.

Can you work out the following formula?

Yep that’s right. I fell off a kid’s scooter whilst going downhill and managed to break my hand. But not your average simple break mind you, oh no, instead the right scaphoid is broken into three pieces and requires a quick operation to pin it all back together. And the reaction I get from family and friends?

To be fair this is about the reaction I deserve for trying to race a 9 year old nephew down the street. Still, the end result is 8 weeks of trying to work on a keyboard/mouse left handed when I’m right handed. So forgive the terse responses to forum/email messages. Remember, those two sentence replies actually took me 15 minutes!

Krypton 2.8.0 Released

Your favorite WinForms toolkit is now better than ever before! The free toolkit has grown to include 21 controls, 5 components and 1 form. And that does not include the 9 different elements that can be added inside the context menu component. Here is a summary of the new features…

New Controls/Components
    KryptonDropButton
    KryptonColorButton
    KryptonListBox
    KryptonCheckedListBox
    KryptonCommand
    KryptonGallery
    6 x KryptonContextMenu Elements

Download 2.8.0 Now!

Note that the KryptonGallery is a standalone version of the gallery element that has been added to the KryptonRibbon. Also note that you need a ribbon serial key to use the gallery control, it is not part of the free toolkit.

I recommend you check out the KryptonContextMenu, KryptonCommand and KryptonCheckedListBox examples to see some of the enhancements in action. If your using the Ribbon then check the out the gallery examples to see them in full glory.

P.S. Please read the change list documents contained in the Resources section of the Krypton Explorer. There is a small breaking change for some uses of the KryptonComboBox as well as a line of code the needs removing from all generated code use of the KryptonComboBox.