Overclocking details for Bulletx

[rockstarsuck]

I dunno why the other thread had to be locked to be honest, there are plently of things on this forum, including myself bitching about R* that would deserve a lock when all this guy was doing was asking for some details on a procedure which may help him get better performance, so lock away with this thread if you wish but after spending plently of time composing a post in the other thread only to find its been locked, i dont care, im posting it up for him. So here we go...

 

Overclocking is a means in simple terms to make your CPU - Central Processing Unit (The one on your motherboard) or your GPU - Graphics Processing Unit (The one on your graphics card) run faster than it should, or another way to say that is to make it run faster than the manufacturers recommended specifications. Running them faster is like having a better CPU or GPU than you currently have in a sense which all sound great, but, there are pitfalls.

Running a Processor faster means generating more heat basically so something than needs to be considered is, do I have adequate cooling in my PC.

You should also make sure that your run something like ZCPU or SpeedFan freeware programs, to check on the performance and heat being generated under different scenarios

i.e. - how hot things are getting when running a very CPU or GPU hungry game for instance.

Overclocking can cause more problems than it gives you in better performance sometimes and different CPUs overclock better than others. So another thing to search for on the net is your CPU and motherboard, ram to see if there are any guidelines on what others have successfully gotten out of it, You should have no problems in finding benchmarks like these.

Now, some motherboards (like for example ASUS ) come with built in to the BIOS, overclocking technology making it very easy to overclock your CPU without much technical knowledge, but (theres always a but ) Most people agree that these built in programs are usually crap and the increase in performance in negligible.

Most overclockers would agree that the best way to get a practical boost would be to overclock the CPU manually, this does require technical knowledge and requires you to do it in stages, booting the PC at each stage to see if it will boot or just crash, you cant expect just to increase settings all in one go and have it work. You have to increase the mhz of

the CPU in 1% increments until it wont boot, go back to the last working increase then you need to star increasing the voltage to the CPU, speeding up the CPU requires a little more juice to run it correctly. Theres not usually a set way to do it, you may not get it to overclock as much as someone else did, many overclockers take great pride in what they are able to successfully get out of their rig, as I say there are guides on what you can expect though. I would suggest checking out somewhere like overclockers.com to see what help you can get there, they have guides, a cpu database and forums for specific help.

As for your GPU, AMD has an overclock facility built into the Catalyst Control Centre but again, many believe its negligible. There are better freeware programs available for NVidia and ATI cards that will allow you to overclock and alter settings for your card that you wouldnt normally be able to by just using the general control panels but these also require a little knowledge as many setting will stop your card from running at all and crash the game, its also possible to overclock the GPU to far and cause an overheat which will crash the game.

If you are gonna overclock, be patient and take your time, eventually you'll get there, Id also recommend getting a much bigger cooler for your CPU, or perhaps even a water cooling system installed and cleaning all the heatsink paste off and starting again with a high quality paste, dont use too much though...

So as you can see, youve opened a really big can of worms by asking this question and it may have put you off, but the results that you can often gain make it well worth it, overclocking has gained popularity over the years and many CPUs that appear on the market cater for this procedure, like the AMD FX chips for instance, now getting older of course but have the CPUs Multipliers unclocked specifically for overclocking purposes.

Good Luck

 

 

[CharmingCharlie]

You do realise this is the GTA 4 PC section don't you ? The section where you talk about GTA 4 for the PC. Now if you want to do a thread about overclocking then we have a PC and Tech chat for that.