Bob F wrote:
Not exactly an overclock yet, but maybe??

I am considering buying a used E5472 processor to use in this P5K Premium board
with a 771 to 775 adapter sticker. My memory is a pair of 2GB PC2-6400 samsung
M3 78T5663EH3-cf7. This processor has a 1600 MHz FSB. The motherboard seems to
be
speced for 1600 FSB.

Does anyone have any knowledge or opinions about this kind of project? Is it
likely to work? Will it overclock?

Looks like a fun project. Note that it involves damaging the LGA socket
by removing two pins, which may affect resale to others, unless you
sell mobo+CPU as a set. (I have such a hacked board here, where it's probably
worth leaving the current CPU in the socket, and never changing it out :-) )

http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-7...sb-tdp-warning

I don't think "overclocked" is the word. The chipset is FSB1333,
the FSB1600 BCLK is already an overclock for the chipset. Expecting
more than that, isn't going to leave you much room to work with.
Sure, it might overclock a tiny bit above FSB1600, but
how stable will it be ?

You'll be getting something close to Q9650 performance, hopefully
stable at FSB1600, that's a little hard on the VCore circuit. You
have a nice heatpipe on that board, so have some options for cooling
VCore if it is getting a bit warm. This is a problem I have with
a current Asus board, too-small cooler on VCore, means extra
noisy airflow needed. My corrent LGA775 board has a massively
overdesigned cooler, and I wish I could swap it with the new board
that actually needs a cooler.

You might be a tiny bit memory starved with that setup, with the
best RAM available for it (say memory bus is 67% efficient or so).
And those CPUs, which use two silicon dies and cache coherency protocols
that run on the shared FSB, it causes 87% efficiency when all four cores
are running flat out. Four cores gives 4 * 0.87 or ~3.5 cores worth of
horsepower. Really no worse than some other current day designs (6 core
processors starved to 5 core performance). Just a footnote when
benchmarking or something.

If you previously had a dual core, and did a lot of movie editing,
this would be a nice upgrade. If you already have a Q9650, this
would be a pointless project. Maybe you'd get a slightly
higher Stream benchmark or something. But the board will definitely
be worth keeping for a while, as at that performance level, you're
well past any reasonable minimum for the bloated OSes of today.

*******

Only question I have, is Microcode. Will you be getting an
unknown CPU error at startup ? That's the only risky part of
stuff like this. My first motherboard, there was a tool you
could load a Microcode, into the Microcode cache in the BIOS
chip (of the several BIOS makers, like Award, AMI, Phoenix, one
of them had this Microcode cache feature). That's how I stopped
the BIOS from claiming I was "running a Pentium II" or such like.
But if that delidded page claims it works, and you have nothing
to lose, it looks like a good project for a rainy day. Just don't
expect the FSB to go to infinity and beyond :-) FSB1600 is already
technically an overclock, so your headroom is harvested.

I'm sure one of the enthusiast web fora, has records kept for
how far a P35 Northbridge can be pushed. It would probably
take at least a day of thread-reading, to get a good answer
for that.

Paul