Core i3 550 3.2 ghz, all-stock overclock?

J

jjz-

Limp Gawd
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Nov 18, 2008
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My girlfriend is building a computer for herself for christmas, which naturally means I am the one who is building it. She got an i3 550 3.2 ghz, and I was wondering what would be a safe fast overclock for it on all-stock settings. She doesn't game or anything, so I don't care about spending the time or money squeezing out every last mhz, I just want a fast 5-minutes-of-effort overclock for it so she sees some speed benefit.

Anyone have any experience with the i3s and know, roughly how much I can get out of one stock?
 
I wouldn't bother with an overclock. The i3 is fast out of the box IMO.
 
Well, if I can get some out of it for absolutely free (no massive excess heat or stability issues), why not? :)

drescherjm, so 3.8 ghz is reasonable to expect then? I won't push it beyond what the minimum expected overclock is.
 
jjz- said:
Well, if I can get some out of it for absolutely free (no massive excess heat or stability issues), why not? :)

drescherjm, so 3.8 ghz is reasonable to expect then? I won't push it beyond what the minimum expected overclock is.
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Because if she doesn't game or stress the CPU otherwise, what's the point? I doubt she'll feel the 600mhz bump.

Does overclocking kill the ability for the CPU to downclock? Will it stay at a set 3.8?
 
These days, for general webbrowsing, overclocking is totally useless. Even the slowest, cheapest CPU's are more than fast enough.
When surfing the net, I honestly can't tell the difference between my uncle's OLD P4 Prescott and my own Core 2 Duo.
 
I honestly can't tell the difference between my uncle's OLD P4 Prescott and my own Core 2 Duo.
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You must not have any antivirus or antispyware products running on the P4. Or the P4 is a > 3 GHz P4D and the core2 is 2.0 GHz or less.
 
No, he has NOD32. I admit, app loading times are longer, but I think that's more because of a shortage of RAM and the slower HDD. Once loaded, scrolling through webpages feels about the same as my C2D...
 
A few months back I had to convince a friend to get a new i3 based machine because his 2.8 GHz single core P4 was not fast enough to run the latest Symantec + some antispyware protection at the same time. And the machine was definitely too slow to run windows 7. I had already upgraded the ram to 1 or 2GB and swapped out his disk with a SATA drive and reinstalled the OS but things were still very slow.
 
Well, I know someone who still runs an old P4 2.8 Ghz laptop, and I can confirm that the performance of that thing plummets once you install AVG free 2011. It does have only 512 MB RAM, so again, what is the bottleneck for those virusscanners? CPU or RAM?

Just for fun I recently installed Windows XP SP3 on my old 1.2 Ghz Thunderbird / 256 RAM. I couldn't believe how fast it felt... Until I installed the virusscanner. Those scanners are Evil resource hogs for older machines.
 
Drop 30 bones on an aftermarket cooler. Set it to 3.6ghz with everything on stock and reboot. GG
 
I would still get an aftermarket cooler for noise sake. Oretty much any 120mm cooler with 3 or more heatpipes would be good. (Hyper 212+ comes to mind for cheap, might be able to get a used Thermalright Ultra Extreme on ebay for around $30 or so as well).

The i3 is pretty low powered and fast at stock, but I would shoot for a "low" 3.4-3.8ghz overclock just for single threaded apps and free-performance though :)
I would also try to keep it at stock volts for power consumption and heat. Keep EIST/Speedstep on and it will downclock at idle.
 
not to thread crap but just sharing my exp. with my core i3

i also overclocked on the stock cooler to 3.6 and ran stock voltage and it never went over 55c so it can be on the stock cooler i have done it.

overclocked core i3 540 to 4.0 1.25v 200 blk stable on prime 95 never hits 50c on a corsair a50 with as5 i am thinking of trying for 4.4

The core i3 is a awesome overclocker
 
Set it to 3.6ghz and reboot. Dont need to touch anything else. Stock cooler will be fine.
 
I also agree, stock cooler is more than ample for that CPU, but a 120mm cooler can probably get way with an 800-1000rpm silent fan easily. But I hear the new intel heatsinks are pretty good and not too loud (according to frostytech, I have no personal experience)
 
Original Poster - Whatever became of your setup?

Well, my trusty dusty old LGA775 HTPC crapped out on me today. So, I just ordered the i3 550, an Asus P7H55 mATX board and (8) gb's of DDR3 1333. I'm an overclocker at heart but I'm not too sure I will need to do any OC'ing when HTPC parts come in. @ 3.2ghz, you would think that would be plenty for a HTPC. But the OC'er in me wants to play around with 4ghz.. haha.

As long as I can hit 1333mhz speeds on my ram, keep my voltages at "factory" settings and watch my bluray movies, I don't think it would matter much going from 3.2ghz to 3.6ghz.. or heck, even 4ghz. I'll be using the Intergrated graphics and no video card.

:(
 
3dfx_zombie said:
Well, I know someone who still runs an old P4 2.8 Ghz laptop, and I can confirm that the performance of that thing plummets once you install AVG free 2011. It does have only 512 MB RAM, so again, what is the bottleneck for those virusscanners? CPU or RAM?

Just for fun I recently installed Windows XP SP3 on my old 1.2 Ghz Thunderbird / 256 RAM. I couldn't believe how fast it felt... Until I installed the virusscanner. Those scanners are Evil resource hogs for older machines.
Click to expand...

I noticed a virus scanner kills celeron and p4 (single threads). 2x slower or more.

Is it sufficient to run malware antibites and spybot scan and destroy without an antivirus scanner? I find antivirus somewhat useless as it has not found anything when i do general browsing and never run apps or have email connected to the machine.

Doing so keeps the computer running very quickly.

When the PC does get a virus, the anti virus can't even handle it in some cases and the computer crashes...which means i have to install the OS anyway.
 
change the settings on your virus scan - for sched scans skip zip files all together - leave real time alone. The latest Norton is actually very fast after the first full scan. It builds a white list of known good files and the next scan it checks those files - if they have not changed it skips them.
 
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