Date:
Sunday , February 08, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Overclocking the Prescott 2.8E

Our first over-the-counter Precott CPU yields different results on different boards and the overall results end up being better than we predicted.

continued...

Overclocking the 2.8E

OCing our CPU was a bit of a mixed bag. We decided to go at it from two different angles. We did test the CPU with the stock heatsink and fan unit provided by Intel at default voltage. Then we also tested the CPU using a Koolance Exos watercooling unit at varied increased voltages.

100% Stable Air OC

We figured testing like this would allow you to pretty much see results of OCing like some you might experience it "right out of the box."

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As you can see, we were able to obtain a very respectable 500MHz overclock (14*235=3.3GHz) using the stock air cooler at stock Vcore. This OC was obtainable on the ABIT IC7-MAX3 and the MSI 865PE Neo. This OC was not obtainable on the ABIT AI7. In fact, we were lucky if we could pull off a 215MHz stable OC on the AI7. Our buddies at Azzo were able to verify this using several other 2.8E CPUs and another AI7. At first glance it would seem the AI7 does not have the needed power to push the Prescott while OCing. The AI7 did pass our 3.2GHz Prescott compatibility testing with flying colors though.

100% Stable H2O OC

Many enthusiasts have moved to watercooling in one form or another. We have utilized the very simply Koolance Exos system for cooling our 2.8E. We also used an increased Vcore in order to obtain our stable overclock.

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3.5GHz (14*250=3.5GHz) was rock solid at 1.56v and the motherboards really showed no increased stress symptoms than they did at stock settings. With this 700MHz OC, we were able to record 3DMark2001 scores in excess of 20,000.

Increasing the voltage beyond 1.56 did not net us any rewards and on the MSI board, the CPU would not even post with such a high Vcore. We were able to get the CPU to post and load WinXP at 260MHz FSB but we were not able to get the CPU stable. At 3.5GHz, our 2.8E is running at a 250MHz FSB, which allows us to utilize a 5:4 memory frequency ratio. Doing this will let us run our DDR400 low latency memories from Kingston and Corsair at a spec DDR400 speed and also allows for some pretty big benchmark numbers.

On our AI7, we were only able to maintain a 238MHz stable bus speed with the Exos.

Conclusions

After seeing how hot our 3.2GHz Prescott engineering sample ran, I was not counting on very OCable retail and OEM Prescott CPUs in the market. On that I stand corrected. This 2.8E is truly carrying on the legacy left by the 2.4C. Of course, the increased power consumption of the Prescott does make watercooling almost a necessity for enthusiast operations in our opinion.

The one thing that bothers me most that we have yet to see and will not be seeing for a while is the toll that will be taken on these motherboards by having to deal with all of this heat. It was not uncommon for us to see capacitors at 235F. That is certainly enough to burn you quite quickly. How are those capacitors and other motherboard components going to react to being baked for days at a time...or better yet, months at a time. I have a gut feeling that we are going to see a lot of Prescott related failures on the current motherboards that are in the market even if they are "Prescott Ready." Certainly we hope to see board temperatures come back down with the advent of Grantsdale, Alderwood, and PT880 chipset boards on the market that are built with the Prescott being at the forefront of the engineers' priority list.

Bottom line is this. A 2.8GHz Prescott can be a promising enthusiast CPU if you have the right equipment to overclock with. 700MHz OCs are nothing to take for granted and we are glad to be seeing them on this new core. As the motherboards get stronger and the cooling systems become more mature, we may be in for a great 2nd half of 2004 while playing with our Prescotts.

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Hopefully you guys will see some results that we have not. Maybe like those above or better. Remember, to let us know your experience so we can share it with the others out there.

Thanks to our friends at Azzo for securing us a OTC CPU as quickly as they did.