Our friends over at Tom's Hardware have recently released an unbelievable guide on how to turn your cheap-as-chips Pentium D 805
into the fastest CPU on the planet.
For some, overclocking is far too financially demanding to be a viable hobby but this little project may change all that. Here’s a blurb describing what they did:
"Those who first break this bit of news to their circles of friends can count on some surprised looks - in fact, they might even find their credibility getting questioned! But it is true: a cheap CPU that costs £79.95 outperforms the fastest processors from AMD (
Athlon 64 FX-60) and Intel (
Pentium Extreme Edition 965), each of which costs over £700.
We bought an Intel Pentium D 805 from a local retail outlet and overclocked it up to 4.1 GHz, even though this part runs by default at just 2.66 GHz. This represents a heretofore-unattained clock rate increase of just over 54 %, for which only some additional cooling is required. The secret is in the FSB clock rate, which is raised from 133 MHz to over 200 MHz; the system remains completely stable, because modern motherboards with Intel 9xx chipsets are laid out to handle FSB clock rates of up to 266 MHz. In language that overclocking enthusiasts will love to hear, the Pentium D 805 ascends to the throne as the new King of overclocking, knocking out the AMD Opteron 144."
The massive guide shows a performance increase of 54% over the original clock speeds. According to Tom's Hardware, that is the best they have ever seen. Intel released this chip to bring dual core computing right
into the mainstream, because the company is expecting dual core processors sales to overtake single core sales this year. It means that budget overclockers will have something to shout about too. All of you who bought your Pentium Extreme edition - I'm sorry.
What are your thoughts on this overclock?
Let us know in the forums.
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