Ya know... when you clearly don't have the best system around, or rather even if you
do have a badass rig but no chance in being any competition for "Professional Overclockers"... Going the opposite end of the spectrum is always fun too!
Like I know my 555 can't clock for shat, and I noticed this ASRock 890FX board has A) the ability to clock below 200MHz HTT & B) CPU multipliers all the way down to 0.5x lol SOOOO I slapped 1.5v on the CPU (required? likely not, but wanted to ensure stability) and dropped it to that 0.5x multi for a SMOKING end result of a Phenom II X2 555BE @
100MHz
First attempt I had the memory, CPU-NB and memory speed set pretty low. After an hour or two of the Win7 boot screen not changing, I went back and upped those three to normal speeds and tried again. This time worked and let me tell you, Win7 takes just a
wee bit of time to load at 100MHz lol Don't think I stopped there though! I utilized that sub-200MHz HTT ability and brought the CPU down to 75MHz before the system hung
I was in the middle of a CPUz screenshot when it happened, but I believe I managed one of 85MHz. However, I think that was on my other drive where I had a bit of a HDD hiccup, so it's likely lost
I tried recovering my Oblivion saves and they were corrupt, only my save folder copy wasn't and I got set back 20hrs of game play
Rambling aside... Overclocking is fun, but can get frustrating when you know what you have should easily surpass what it's achieving, so going the opposite way can be just as fun since it can sometimes still pose as a challenge
Even if it's leaving things stock and trying to get a pathetic benchmark score
BTW If it's fair game, I'll downclock the hell out of this T3400 in the laptop and run Vantage haha I already know it's stable at default clocks with 1.0375v (from 1.275, which helped temps obviously, thank you ThrottleStop!), and I know it happily bounces between full speed (2.16GHz) and 6x Multi (997MHz), so I could try and run Vantage at 6x