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can overclocking a cpu be bad for music?


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Guest WoggleBug

Well recently i've become a speed freak, and after reading about how the chipset i have p4 northwood 2.4ghz, w/mobo msi 845g max can be overclocked to 2.9, i've been pondering attempting overclocking, and throwing in maybe a water cooling system(mainly to reduce noise, prefferably in geforce4600, it's supposed to be noisy::o...or maybe i'm just drooling over how sweet some of these heat sinks look...and should leave it aloe...?:o...maybe i can break upwards of 3.5ghz if i throw some wicked heat sinks+water cooling in there?:o+fans?=O...get one of those digital thermometers on the front...control the fan speed maybe from the front of pc...;O ahhh the funs...i feel like i'm entering extreme nerdom tho : )

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Guest Andreas of Amygdala

Overclocking can indeed be cool - but I really don't see the gain, when your CPU is that fast anyway... The main benefits will be faster endless loops, a lot more busy-wating-loops, where all them extra clock-cycles are completely wasted - especially when the I/O's steal your bus-cycles, waiting to get/deliver data. All that traded for a hotter processor, more prone to error.

Since your processor is way ample to deal with the speed of the memory and the buses, there's no real reason to overclock. If the memory-bus and the I/O-buses could be overclocked though - that would be neat :)

 

In the good old days, overclocking was really an issue, when the bus and mem where quicker done than the processor - I heard this (probably whack) story about some engineers, who overclocked a 286-8mHZ processor, and actually played doom on it... for 25 minuttes, since the 30-or-so mHZ was a *little* too fast for the poor 286 :)

 

Anyway, what do you need extra speed for? You must be playing some real messy-programmed games, if you really need it :) - so far...

 

I don't know about the PCI's acting up, the only thing I can imagine should be the problem, is some synchronization-issues with the buses - it's possible, that the PCI-bus is tricky that way.... Dunno :) - but I don''t think it should be a problem, for all it's worth.

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The only problem that overclocking can do is burn your cpu.

Even if you put some more coolers you will never know when it will happen. It can happen in a day or after some months or can never happen.

Anyway if you don't have any problem spending money on a new CPU than go ahead. :) But at the end I don't think that the extra 0.5 ghz will make the difference.

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Guest DeeperNETWERK

Yeah... If you gotta Northwood processor, you have no need for more speed. That's an expensive chip you have there and by overclocking it, you'll probably fry it, or at the least most, it'll have a very short lifetime. If you really really want more power just get dual processors and then you'll be a "speed freak". Overclocking does reduce the stability of your system as well, it's really not worth it for audio purpuses. You'll end up frying your own system.

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I have heard rumours of P4s not being able to handle high heat. I would prefer stability over a small increase in speed. Sounds like a nice system you have. Watch out for the Serial-ATA hard disks coming out soon, hopefully will be a worthwhile upgrade.

 

Actually a convenient overclock is video card overclocking. When you want to play games, you can tweak the drivers and then switch it back later. Though with a geforce 4600 it is probably pretty maxed out.

 

You are better off examining your system to see if there are bottlenecks. Hard disks can be a bottleneck, it is good to have one hard disk on one IDE and another on the second IDE, both as master. Then have your system files on one disk and your swap file on the other. The swap file can be in a seperate partition which is defragmented regularly for best audio performance. Or even have dual boot, one os for music and one to abuse, installing lots of crap. Also certain OS services can be unloaded from the audio OS if you are not using them.

 

Although case modifications are very interesting and much more obvious than overclocking to the people who see your comp. Probably lots of fans, neon, digital displays etc increase interference with your soundcard but i dont know about that.

 

Regarding PCI bus / memory speed / cpu, with your board, I believe you should be able to adjust each seperately to avoid overclocking the one you dont want to, better to do some research though to find optimum settings which work.

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Guest wogglebug

yea igot the neon lights inside the case already wit the window;D...well maybe i could add one of those digital thermometers to the front to make sure it don't overheat?:D...

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Ehrm? not the main thing?

 

Well it certainly depends which kinda setup your using.

I agree that if your using a midi setup,

the cpu would not have to be more than a mere regular pentium.

But if your into using Vsti/Vstfx you'll use quite alot of cpu,

and would most likely be best of with a monster cpu (p4/athlon).

 

But it all depends on your setup.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Guest thesoul

welll; you've made me jealous buddy!

jesus; if i was told by anyone that he had a p4 2.4 ghz; i would've killed him and snatched his pc.

but seriously; i think that you already must be getting the best perfomance in music software anyway with such a good pc; so why bother?

of course; if you're a gaming freak; like me; then nothing is good enough.

i have a 450mhz p3 [yup; call me prehistoric] and i can still use programs like cubase running a lot [and i mean a lot] of vst's all running nicely; with no problems at all.

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