Overclocking Tool for the Mac Pro

[MacRumors]

ZDNet.de has posted a new tool called ZDNet Clock Tool 1.0 for Mac Pro which allows you to overclock your Mac Pro. The process of overclocking uses software to increase your computer's processor speed and bus speed, potentially leading to higher performance. Boost the speed too high, however, and the computer may crash as either the processor or some of their components are unable to keep up. Still, ZDNet.de claims to have achieved some impressive results:

ZDNet uses three Mac Pros as test machines. One comes from the first Intel/Mac Pro generation (Mac Pro 1.1) with 65-nanometer processors and 1333-MHz front side bus. The others come from the third generation with 45-nanometer processors and 1600-MHz front side bus, as sold by Apple since January 2008 (Mac Pro 3.1). The first computer is equipped with two 2.66 GHz X5355 processors, and runs stable at 3.10 GHz, see figure 2. The other two have two 2.80 GHz E5462 processors. These can be overclocked up to 3.24 GHz and remain stable, see figure 1.

The multi-page article (be sure to click on 'weiter' for next page) describes their results including stability tests over 24 hours. There are a few caveats as well:

If you carry out benchmarks such as Cinebench or Geekbench after overclocking, the benchmarks do not indicate any improvement in performance at first. But if you resort to a stopwatch, the higher performance resulting from overclocking can indeed be verified. You also notice that the system clock runs significantly faster after overclocking the computer.

The application is available for free download from ZDNet.de (click on "Jetzt herunterlade" to download). Some MacRumors readers have already had some experience with this tool, but readers should proceed with caution.


Article Link

[ckurowic]

Thats pretty cool. I've been messing around a bit with my PC in this arena.

[Toe]

Now the Mac Pro can claim some true cred as a gaming machine.

[BillyBobBongo]

I always use to overclock my PC back in the day...great to see this out for Mac Pro!

[jonkemerer]

I think it's awesome, although it just sucks Apple's other computes are so compact that even if an overclocking tool became available for an iMac or Mini, it'd overheat anyway. Cool for the Mac Pro's, though

[yzp]

Originally Posted by jonkemerer

it just sucks Apple's other computes are so compact that even if an overclocking tool became available for an iMac or Mini, it'd overheat anyway. Cool for the Mac Pro's, though

so wouldnt work for mac book pros?

[jbrown]

Originally Posted by yzp

so wouldnt work for mac book pros?

Ahmen to that!!!

[frankfurter]

Most people who have never used PC's don't know what this even is.

Most people who have used PC's and switched to Mac's did so to avoid crap just like this from the PC world.

Personally, I use both on a fulltime basis, and can hardly recommend this. The potential to hose up your Mac or even potentially permanently harm it far outweigh the barley noticeable speed increase.

[thevofl]

<sarcasm>What is a Mac Pro discussion doing on an iPhone board? </sarcasm>

[OS X Dude]

:O an EFI overclocker?

Impressive!
Now make it available for all macs!

[ManchesterTrix]

Originally Posted by Toe

Now the MacPro can claim some true cred as a gaming machine.

Did it drop in price by 1000.00 and get better video card selection?

[BornAgainMac]

To make Safari more snappier(tm).

[FF_productions]

Originally Posted by BornAgainMac

To make Safari more snappier(tm).

Ah beat me to it...

In all seriousness, to be able to up a Quad 2.66 to 3 Ghz is plain amazing to me. Considering last year it would have cost me like $800 to add 3 Ghz, now I can just overclock it to that speed.

It doesn't harm the machine unless you tweak with things like voltage, which is not happening. The Mac Pro has plenty cooling and you can always monitor temperatures.

I tried OC'ing my Mac Pro to 3 Ghz, and it panicked. It must be the ram giving me the errors.

[kabunaru]

Originally Posted by ManchesterTrix

Did it drop in price by 1000.00 and get better video card selection?

Are Nvidia 8800 GT and ATI Radeon HD 3870 not good enough for you?

[slackpacker]

Originally Posted by FF_productions

Ah beat me to it...

In all seriousness, to be able to up a Quad 2.66 to 3 Ghz is plain amazing to me. Considering last year it would have cost me like $800 to add 3 Ghz, now I can just overclock it to that speed.

It doesn't harm the machine unless you tweak with things like voltage, which is not happening. The Mac Pro has plenty cooling and you can always monitor temperatures.

I tried OC'ing my Mac Pro to 3 Ghz, and it panicked. It must be the ram giving me the errors.

Never an exact science...but XBENCH does not show any improvement at all...

[bobertoq]

OMG NON iPhone news?! I'm glad to see some MAC news on MACrumors.

This is cool. I'm just wondering if the new Nehalem Mac Pro's will have octo-core processors. When will we see 4GHz processors? I've seen one on an alienware, but it was overclocked

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

Is this the first overclocking tool available for any mac? Just curious since I've never seen one before.

[Full of Win]

How exactly does this relate to the 3G iPhone? I was under the impression that all news had to relate, even tangentially so, to the 3G iPhone.

[cxc]

Originally Posted by kabunaru

Are Nvidia 8800 GT and ATI Radeon HD 3870 not good enough for you?

Half a year ago, maybe. But not now and not with the Apple markup.

[bobertoq]

Originally Posted by Full of Win

How exactly does this relate to the 3G iPhone? I was under the impression that all news had to relate, even tangentially so, to the 3G iPhone.

I know! I was thinking the same thing! I'm shocked! Really, if you look at the Mac Rumors main page, the only news that's not archive, that is related to the Mac, is this post. There are two stories about Adobe, and Microsoft, which is not related to Apple at all, the rest are about the iPhone, then, there is one Mac one.

[r.j.s]

Originally Posted by Full of Win

How exactly does this relate to the 3G iPhone? I was under the impression that all news had to relate, even tangentially so, to the 3G iPhone.

If you read the article that isn't linked to by anyone anywhere on any site, it says that a 3G iPhone overclocking tool is under development. This is just the first step.

[Makosuke]

If you carry out benchmarks such as Cinebench or Geekbench after overclocking, the benchmarks do not indicate any improvement in performance at first. But if you resort to a stopwatch, the higher performance resulting from overclocking can indeed be verified. You also notice that the system clock runs significantly faster after overclocking the computer.

I admit to never having tried to overclock anything, but I'm a little confused; they seem to be saying that because the system's time clock has been sped up proportionally to the overclock that benchmarking applications don't report any change (since they're basing their performance numbers on the time elapsed on the system clock). Right?

Is that standard in PC overclocking apps? I was under the impression that that usually just involved messing with bus timing, and that the "real time" system clock was based on a separate internal clock, not processor clock speed. Not so, or is this doing something different?

[Killyp]

So users think they know what clock speed their MacPros should be running at better than Apple (who designed the computer) do?

[dizastor]

interesting.

Does this work for bootcamp?

[slackpacker]

Originally Posted by dizastor

interesting.

Does this work for bootcamp?

No you have to use Windows executable overclockers. this is for the OS X side of things