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Overclockable or no?

omnislash124

New member
Hey all, This PC right now is simply too shitty for me. It claims to be 2.8 GHz but seems slower than my older 1.5 GHz. I've tried to explore the BIOS, but found the FSB and multiplier locked (800 and 14 respectively). It's a Dell Dimension 4700. Any Suggestions?
 

dukenukem

lord freiza
Don't bother trying to oc that dell since the bios is locked as is with most oem brand computers.Your pc may be slow because it may only have 256megs of ram if it does buy more ram for it and see if that helps.
 

General Plot

Britchie Crazy
And make sure your ram is evenly spread on the dual channels (ie: 2x512 MB is what I use) so that you keep HT available. Definitely your ram is your bottleneck.;)
 

WhiteX

New member
generalplot said:
And make sure your ram is evenly spread on the dual channels (ie: 2x512 MB is what I use) so that you keep HT available. Definitely your ram is your bottleneck.;)

if you ain´t got dual channel ram the p4 can´t use HT?
 

Cönker1

New member
It allowed multi-threaded apps to run faster. They use more of the pipelines or some crap like that. Also I think you can run more things at once, but don't quote me on that.
 

General Plot

Britchie Crazy
cooliscool said:
Yes, you can. Dual channel has nothing to do with HT.
Except that the ram has to be evenly split among the 2 channels. otherwise HT wil not be available, as the bus will auto lower itself to 400 MHZ if I remember this right. The RAM sockets are color coded on my board blue-black-blue-black. So this means I put a stick of ram in each of the black sockets (eah stick of equal size of course) and if I wanted to ad ram later and keep HT active, I'd have to buy 2 equally sized ram sticks for the blue sockets. This may only relate to the bus speed, but I don't think it's possible to run HT on a 400 bus. Here are a couple screen shots out of my motherboards manual showing dual channel requirements.
 

DarthDazDC

An Alright Guy
i noticed when i installed my other 512mb memory yesterday, that the speed went down to 200mhz, even tho both of them are at 400mhz, is there anyway to get it up to 400mhz?
 

cooliscool

Nintendo Zealot
Um, you're mistaken generalplot. Dual Channel and HT are two seperate technologies and are not in any way reliant on each other.

HT allows one core to process roughly 1 & 3/4 threads at a time, instead of one as the average CPU. It's similar to dual/dual core CPUs at its core, but being one physical core, can't actually process 2 seperate threads as efficiently. This greatly helps multitasking and multi-thread aware applications.

Dual Channel physically wires the DIMM slots to different memory controllers on the MCH die, instead of sending data from across 1 channel, the signal is sent across to, effectively doubling data width from 64-bit to 128-bit. Nothing to do with HT.
 
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zAlbee

Keeper of The Iron Tail
For more proof, simply look at dual-CPU systems. They will work with single channel RAM.

Edit: omnislash, you say you have a GF 6600 GT in your "dead" computer. Why not take that out and put it in your P4 for a huge performance boost (in graphics)?
 
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General Plot

Britchie Crazy
OK, didn't think HT would work on single channel. But still, it's obviously a better option to use dual channel, since performance is significantly improved. I wouldn't want to run mine in single channel on a 400 bus.:p
 

WhiteX

New member
but if his mobo gives no support he could go on amount versus the speed, instead of buying a new mobo for dual channel he could buy an obscene :evil: amount of RAM.
 

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