Overclocking Wolfdale Celeron E3300?

[dpk33]

Since I have no knowledge on how to overclock Wolfdales or just overclocking in general, I'm wondering what is around the maximum I can get out of the chip on a Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L board. And what's the highest voltage I should get to before it gets dangerous for 24/7 use? Do the Wolfdales get hot and would a Hyper 212+ be enough cooling for it? I'm aiming for 4 ghz if that's possible.

EDIT: One more thing: Is this CPU capable of playing games such as League of Legends, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source, assuming it's paired up with an appropriate video card?

 

[borisvodofsky]

AT this point, just don't bother.

 

[Arkaign]

AT this point, just don't bother.

That's not helpful. OP asked a simple question, although his CPU is hardly an equal to a 2500k or even a BD, it's still a workable budget CPU for many uses, and overclocking will bring truly significant improvements.

OP, check through this article :

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/celeron-e3300.html

You should be able to bring it up from 2.5ghz to at least 3.3ghz, and many have taken them to 4ghz. After all, it's a 45nm CPU. The low cache amount of only 1MB is a bit of a problem, but it's still immensely helpful to get the clock speeds up there a bit.

At pure stock voltage, 3.3ghz is probably about the limit. Set the FSB from the stock 200 to 266. If you can locate the memory divider section in the bios, set it to so that after raising the FSB you're not running your memory out of spec.

And finally, yes, the games you list at the end should work well with that CPU, provided you pair it up with at least a moderately decent video card (460, 550, 5750, all kinds of budget options that you can often find used in the $50-$70 range would all work very well as a match to that CPU for those games). On the other hand, more demanding things like Metro, BF3, just don't waste your money on those without a major system upgrade away from S775. If you got a *very* cheap Q9450 or something like that used, it would bring it up to considerably better performance, but again I would recommend starting even with an i3-2120 and new buildout before doing that unless you get it almost free.

 

[dpk33]

Well, I'm building this rig for a friend, and he mostly plays league of legends, so I'm sure a better cpu isn't needed at the moment. Would a 8800 gts be a suitable match for this cpu? And how does the newer Wolfdale Celeron compare to the old Conroe Core 2 Duos?

 

[nenforcer]

And how does the newer Wolfdale Celeron compare to the old Conroe Core 2 Duos?

Intel Celeron E1500 vs. Intel Core 2 Duo E4500

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/101?vs=65

This is as close as a comparison I could make at identical clock speeds but in reality the gap is even less since you have a higher clocked E3300 Celeron with more L2 Cache.

An 8800 GTS 320MB is probably the bare minimum for those games and you'd be much better off with the 8800 GTS 640MB or even better a full fledged 8800 / 9800 GT 512MB.

 

[dpk33]

Intel Celeron E1500 vs. Intel Core 2 Duo E4500

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/101?vs=65

This is as close as a comparison I could make at identical clock speeds but in reality the gap is even less since you have a higher clocked E3300 Celeron with more L2 Cache.

An 8800 GTS 320MB is probably the bare minimum for those games and you'd be much better off with the 8800 GTS 640MB or even better a full fledged 8800 / 9800 GT 512MB.

Yes and the E3300 is wolfdale 45nm as opposed to the E1500 which is conroe 65nm, if i'm not mistaken.