Throttlestop overclocking Desktop PCs

[KLiKzg]

If you are using this CPU Cooler on one of the CPU then you need to replace it first with the copper heatpipe one.

View attachment 166506

like this one (Dell 0U016F) View attachment 166507 or this one (Dynatron G17 )View attachment 166557

I use Nidec M35105-57 fan attached to he back of the cooler (it costs $2.4 on Aliexpress) ......... you can go through the post on Page 24 & 29 of this thread.

7.78US $ 10% OFF|TA350DC M35105 58 NIDEC 92*92*38mm 9238 9cm 12V DC 1.8A 21.6W 130CFM 5700RPM Schneider Inverter Axial Cooling Fan|HVAC Systems & Parts| - AliExpress

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In case of T3500, I use extra fans to cool the NB & SB, but T5500 already have active chipset cooling.

Recently I bought one cooler on eBay.
Unfortunately, it came:
- bent:

- corroded

So asked for a return of money & purchased another one.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Recently I bought one cooler on eBay.
Unfortunately, it came:
- bent:

That doesn't look too bad, just gently bend it back.

 

[unclewebb]

So asked for a return of money

If it worked OK I would not have bothered.

When you get the new one, remember to cable tie a case fan or similar to the side of it. Those coolers work great with a little bit of airflow going through them.

http://imgur.com/Ft1cXJz

 

[ManGupta]

Recently I bought one cooler on eBay.
Unfortunately, it came:
- bent:

- corroded

So asked for a return of money & purchased another one.

Although with some effort it was workable but since you already returned ...... so when you get another one .... remember to lap the bottom of HS to get rid of any corrosion. just add a 90 mm or 80 mm fan to it for airflow, and it will work fine.

 

[KLiKzg]

Just wondering, did anyone experiment with a original cooler from extra slot, to be on MBO?
Or put sthg else, from later years T76xx series on T5500?

 

[Retrorockit]

The 2nd slot cooler is the same except for no notched corner to clear the wiring harness. The t7500 had a taller cooler that would require removal of the HDD tray and might not fit inside the T3500 case anyway. At various places in this thread there have been other coolers/fans installed in these. But I just did the physical installation to see what would fit and didn't test them.
The T3xxx, and T5xxx are thin mid towers designed to be rack mounted. The T7xxx are monstrous in all dimensions.

 

[KLiKzg]

The 2nd slot cooler is the same except for no notched corner to clear the wiring harness. The t7500 had a taller cooler that would require removal of the HDD tray and might not fit inside the T3500 case anyway. At various places in this thread there have been other coolers/fans installed in these. But I just did the physical installation to see what would fit and didn't test them.
The T3xxx, and T5xxx are thin mid towers designed to be rack mounted. The T7xxx are monstrous in all dimensions.

Was thinking more of these:

has anyone tried to fit them into Tx500 cases?

 

[Retrorockit]

In post#584 here the similar Dynatron G17 was installed with a bigger fan mod.
Dell stayed with the LGA1366 footprint on the T3500 but went their own way with mounting hardware.
There are not a lot of people modding these computers. So in many cases you will be the first one to try something. But that looks like a very good choice. Basically Dell created a different heatsink for almost every system they sold, and sometimes more than 1 depending on the CPU options. Sometimes they interchange easily, sometimes they don't. It usually doesn't cost very much to try one.

 

[Nisargadatta]

Hey guys, I have a W3680 on a Z400 and wondering if it's possible to increase multiplier by .5 increments through .ini file or registry. Btw, theres a way to also increase fsb using setfsb to at least 136 on the HP Z400:

Hopefully you guys on the Dell's have already found a way to do this, if not maybe someone has time to find the right pll on the list...

EDIT: The person above has since posted video at 138 fsb speed, where I was only able to get mine up to 136.

 

[Retrorockit]

Throttlestop can increase multiplier easily on a W3680 to any setting the CPU provides, and with a little tweaking of power settings raise the voltage also. Around page 4 of this thread Unclewebb goes through the process. If you want to you you should be able to use Throttlestop to raise the Voltage and maybe get more out of SetFSB. The Z400 follows the ATX layout more closely than the T3500 but has a borked PSU MB pinout that you need to be careful of. They stayed with a 4 pin CPU connector and added a couple extra 12V. leads to the 24 pin cable. Throttlestop deals directly with the unlocked CPU through Windows and doesn't need the PLL number to do so. This thread is not a Dell only forum. It seems that way because of my own personal hobby of overclocking Dells, and their ready availability. But your Z400 is very welcome here. Throttlestop software should produce a very good result on that. Especially if you get some aftermarket cooling installed.
For SetFSB I would look at the X5687 4C/8T which has 3.86GHz turbo speed to start with. The Voltage and multiplier are locked, but the 4 cores may allow the FSB to go higher.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Hey guys, I have a W3680 on a Z400 and wondering if it's possible to increase multiplier by .5 increments through .ini file or registry.

That would be a hard no. Unfortunately, the 1366 platform was not made with any way to do fractional increments to the multiplier.

 

[Retrorockit]

The fractional increments probably applied to LGA775/771 where the FSB was already higher in the 266/333 range. At 133 BCLK it's already the same thing.
I would suggest TS for the main overclock and tweak with SetFSB for incremental tuning.

 

[Nisargadatta]

I forgot to mention I am already using Throttlestop but thanks for the reply Retro. And thanks for clearing that up for me Lex!

I agree with what you mention about using SetFsb for incremental tuning. And since that method also increases both ram and cpu uncore speeds, it makes sense to find how high you can go with that first...if available ofc. Though it seems like the fsb increases one gets on oem platforms are very very small

EDIT: reading this over maybe it's not clear I agree with you to use both ThrottleStop and Setfsb along side each other. Just saying to increase fsb speed as far as you can before increasing the multiplier with Throttlestop on unlocked cpus like the W3680/W3690. This of course if one in interested in squeezing every last little bit of performance on a locked oem platform.

 

[Retrorockit]

My approach would be to see how far you can get with TS because it's so easy and so stable due to not changing a lot of other settings.
Get whatever cooling mods you need working,then I would start dropping multipliers and see what you can get back with SetFSB.
Sometimes with SetFSB it's lack of Voltage, sometimes the chipset just doesn't cooperate. Each system will respond differently to FSB vs Multiplier overclocking.
We would all be interested in seeing what results you are getting with that system.

 

[Nisargadatta]

I don't do any crazy 24 hr stress testing or anything like that, but I have yet to crash during any gaming at 4,080 mhz(((TS multiplier of 30 + Setfsb 136mhz))) . I run a tweaked windows with dwm disabled so I can't take screenshots without re enabling it first. But I have managed a score of 932 on Cinebench R15, but that was at a clock speed of over 4.1ghz. At those speeds a game like BFV will just close so I don't ever go above that. The performance in that game is not great either with this old system, going under 60fps whenever there's a lot happening on screen. Understandable of course since it is a decade old platform and that game is quite cpu intensive.

I will try to get some screenshots and pics of this old set up when I have a bit more time. I got a Deepcool Gammaxx 400 on the cpu and it never goes into 60's, a 90mm delta fan on the vrm and a similar 80mm fan on the northbridge heatsink. Forgot to mention I use a Rx 580 on this thing powered by an extra psu...it's quite a monstrosity. The main/original psu is 475 watts so I don't wanna be pushing it to its limits since it's so old.

 

[Retrorockit]

You didn't mention your RAM setup. Some of the Z400 MB had 4 RAM slots, But I think with the W3680 yours should have 6.
They all should support 3 channel RAM. Sometimes this gets overlooked,and it makes a big difference.
But you're getting about the same speed as Dell T3500 users, and have that advantage of using aftermarket cooling solutions that many people may already own.
Could you do a run at userbenchmark.com. It's not much of a stress test, but it shows how your system compares to about 3000 other Z400 computers. The other overclocks I saw there were 3.9GHz, so you might have the highest CPU score.

 

[Nisargadatta]

6 slot triple channel ..12 gb ram.

Its mixed ram, I think the userbenchmark didnt like that....just ran that right now:

HP Z400 Workstation Performance Results - UserBenchmark

The cpu clockspeed was at the mentioned 4,080mhz but it doesnt seem to show that.

 

[Retrorockit]

Sometimes software overclocks aren't detected correctly. It depends on when they load relative to what's being sampled. It may be SetFSB that's getting undetected.
With userbenchmark you could probably run it at the highest clock speed. But it looks like 83% CPU is what those systems do.
The RX580 equals a GTX1060 6GB, so the midrange GPU is holding it back. But there is a huge price jump to get anything better, so probably the right choice for an old budget gaming rig.
The memory score may be based on latency which would be average and not take into account the 50% bandwidth increase 3 channel provides.
They're all scoring at that level. Even the ones gaming at 116%.
These things don't tend to have any bottlenecks. An expensive GPU can be moved forward to a later system. I think 60fps is pretty reasonable for a mid range GPU.
A GTX 1070 would help a lot, but it would want 18GB of RAM to support it. Turning off Hyperthreading may allow a higher speed for single thread gaming.
Thanks for bringing your Z400 to the forum. i don't see any reason they shouldn't be as popular as the Dell T3500.

 

[unclewebb]

Sometimes software overclocks aren't detected correctly.

Windows calibrates some of the timers it uses when you first boot up. After using SetFSB, you have to make sure that your Windows timers are still in sync. If the timers are not in sync and a benchmark program does not compensate for this, it might show zero improvement even when there was an improvement.

@Nisargadatta - If you want to test for this problem try running WinTimerTester for about a minute. It will show you if your internal Windows timers are running in sync or not.

WinTimerTester 1.1
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0dpSo9k93jDZlZ6NWNlV0RTcUU/view?usp=sharing

Run the program for about a minute. This should be long enough to test if your timers are working properly. Both timers should measure an equal amount of time so the ratio between these timers should quickly trend towards 1:1.

 

[Nisargadatta]

Retro, thanks for the tips. I would probably have HT off is it wasn't for battlefield games loving all the cores and threads it can get. The max fps may be higher with HT disabled, but the 1% and .1% lows are lower in those games.

Hey unclewebb, I just remembered that I have HPET disabled so it's probably that messing things up along with setfbs. I did run WinTimerTester and it shows a frequency of around 3.2 mhz with a ratio quickly switching between .99999 and 1. I have also forced a timer resolution of .5 using ThrottleStop which is probably affecting things as well. Reason for all these shenanigans is that I find my pc to be far more responsive with all these tweaks. I even have an alternate shell on windows that makes the system run nicely with the lack of dwm in the background.

I probably wouldn't have bothered with all this on a more modern platform tbh. The lack of AVX support also means some applications will run poorly or will just not run at all. Horizon Zero Dawn, a game that came out on Pc this year won't even launch on any x58 chip. Don't get me wrong, I love this old hardware and it can do very well in many applications. I know you regulars on this forum are very aware of it's limitations but just felt I should leave this here for those with less experience.

 

[Retrorockit]

Throttlestop supports newer CPUs, and Intel XTU with support form HWBOT becomes a similar option also. This looks like a Dell/X58 forum because that's what users have chosen to pursue. HP Modders have overclocked the Z420 with XTU. So later CPUs can be overclocked on locked BIOS computers. Dell threw a couple curves on the T36xx series by using a 2 cpu chipset, and CPUs on the single CPU workstations. Plus a proprietary server style hot swappable PSU. So HP may become more popular for newer CPUs. There are many unlocked V series Xeons out there. There are also some firmware updates that will lock some of them back up. So AVX support is available to anyone who feels the need for it.

 

[Nisargadatta]

ThrottleStop is an awesome tool and I use it on my 8th gen intel laptop as well. From my experience, it is way better than what I've ever been able to do with XTU...even raised the temp limits on my laptop thanks to unclewebb's latest versions.

I think old x58 Oems are still great if one can find them either for free or for a very low price. The chips are dirt cheap and since there's a large surplus of them, the Chinese have been putting together "new" motherboards just to get rid of them. The same can be said for x79 and x99 chipset, though those processors still demand higher prices...especially the unlocked versions. You see a few youtubers shilling these things, and it just doesn't make sense when you can find 1st and 2nd gen Ryzen on the used maket that will outperform these for not much more cost.

This thread is great and I know its not limited to any particular brand or platform. Personally, I think people should stay away from these Frankenstein Chinese motherboards and go with an OEM as long as the price is right.

 

[Retrorockit]

The Ryzen is a game changer for budget computing. I haven't priced the many unlocked Sandy/Ivy Bridge Xeons, too many to keep track of. Unofficail unlocked CPUs can be a bargain compared to the extreme series CPUs. The workstations that run them still bring a few hundred dollars though.
Thanks for the comparo on TS vs. XTU.
I just didn't want anyone new to the thread to think TS overclocking didn't support AVX due to the focus on X58 that exists here.

 

[Nisargadatta]

Yeah sorry, what I meant to say was that the x58 processors do not have the AVX instruction set. And its very possible more and more games and applications will require AVX/AVX2 to run. Just something to keep in mind for those looking through this thread, wanting to get into the 1366 platform at this point in time. Even though it is old, it's still amazing at what it can do in certain applications.

Maybe now that Ryzen has gotten a lot better, Intel will become the new budget option.

 

[lexluthermiester]

And its very possible more and more games and applications will require AVX/AVX2 to run.

This is true. I haven't seen it personally, but it's only a matter of time.