Overclocked the Inspiron 531!

mew905

Thanks to a combination of Windows 7 and nVidia's Performance Tools, I have finally achieved an overclock on the Inspiron 531! I've supplied two clickable pictures so you can see the CPU-z screen, as well as what I run (although the CPU-z validator is in my sig running my higher (current) overclock, and the system specs are in my profile... or in the CPU-Z page)
Yes, I know its dusty in that pic, I cleaned it afterwards.

Only a couple problems with overclocking the Inspiron:
1 - No voltage control; meaning you have to deal with stock voltages
2 - No FSB:RAM ratio control; meaning what you OC to, your RAM will go up as well, leaving the RAM as a very possible limitation
3 - No F***ing clue what half the RAM timing options do... (there's something like 16 timing options)

anyway, on to the pics, I FINALLY did it! after almost 2 years

ledbetter

Very nice, sir! I have the same rig but gave up on the OC efforts a long time ago. I am upgrading my 8600GT in a few months and was looking at the GTX 260. Can you tell me how that card performs in your set up?

mew905

Really well, aside from major CPU bottleneck, I havent found a game yet that it cant play at 1680x1050. It's really a question of your monitor size and selection of games (example: Crysis wont run nearly as well as alot of games, simply because of its hard graphics)
OVERCLOCKED however alleviates the bottleneck, only by a bit. I'm upgrading to 4GB PC2-6400 soon to remove the memory bottleneck and unleash the 5000+'s full potential (albeit it wont be much compared to, say, an i7 or C2D), as well as give me higher overclockability. FPS stability improves as well but I'm going to be getting a sound card for that (the Realtek onboard sucks, I know it may not sound bad to someone who hasnt had better, but believe me when I say DSP's are the way to go, and you wont want to go back, they also alleviate the CPU usage by between 4-16% on a dual core)

Should be quite the adventure to put in the GTX 295 (if I decide against the GT300 when I sell my 260)

lordbean

The deal with adding more graphics horsepower to a system which is already limited by the CPU is this...


In games that make heavy use of the CPU to preprocess frames, you're not gonna see much of a performance improvement. In some (biggest example that comes to mind is world of warcraft) you may not see any at all.

However, having extra graphics horsepower in a system which is CPU-bottlenecked allows you to turn on such features as antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, and others which are designed to pretty the game up, without noticing a loss in performance. Since the graphics card has nothing else to do, you don't lose framerates turning those options on.



Edit for redundancy and proofreading.

ledbetter

Monitor size should not be an issue (1440x900.) But in all my previous GPU upgrades, granted all AGP until now, the performance increase was very noticeable regardless of my CPU. It almost seems like I would be better off investing in a new mobo and CPU versus just a vid card. Is that crazy talk?

mew905

ledbetter wrote:

Monitor size should not be an issue (1440x900.) But in all my previous GPU upgrades, granted all AGP until now, the performance increase was very noticeable regardless of my CPU. It almost seems like I would be better off investing in a new mobo and CPU versus just a vid card. Is that crazy talk?

Not really, depends on what you want it for, if just playing games, do you really need to go from 110fps to 150fps? If not, then just a video card upgrade will do. Faster RAM will also help, it's a big limiting factor for the Athlon CPUs. 1.8v is the only voltage that will work (or lower if you can find that...) You wont notice much of an improvement moving up to a 260, AA and AF are pretty much the only added benefits you get, because of the wider bus and more RAM