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Overclocking Tool for the Mac Pro

BongoBanger said:
The Mac Pro uses Xeon chips running at 80w. The iMac uses modified Centrino chips running at 55w. In other words the iMac chip has already been boosted but uses less power and therefore generates less heat. In saying that, 55w is pretty heavy for what is essentially a notebook CPU. The Mac Pro obviously has much better cooling (because of case size and fan size) so you can do more with it.
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I wasn't comparing the iMac processor to the Mac Pro processor.

I was saying that the people that purchased the faster processor for their computer, aren't going to get less life out of it, than someone who purchased the same model with a lower clock speed. For example a person who purchased a 3.0GHz iMac should and most likely will get the same life out of their Mac, as someone who purchased a 2.4Ghz iMac.
 
At first it didn't work with my 2.8 Ghz Octo. Then I removed all the 3rd party ram, and 3.2 Ghz worked. Then I started adding more and more ram, and it worked at 6 GB ram and when I added the last 2 chunks to 8 GB it didn't work again, then I replaced the last 2 chunks with some random chunks and it again didn't work and I decided the last 2 chunks are "somewhat" broken although memtest didn't find anything wrong with them. So right now I'm running my 2.8 Ghz octo at 3.2 Ghz for half an hour but I lost 2 GB ram :)
 
powermac_daddy said:
the current Mac Pro is not liquid cool. right? so overclock is going to be hot.
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It's air cooled, doesn't need LC. You'd be surprised how far good air cooling can take you if it's well-designed, and (in this case) the chips run cool overall. I've an 8-core at home and at work both, and neither ramps the fans up much, even under a decent load. (Say, multi-threaded video encoding).

I imagine mine will keep me happy for a while - it's more powerful than some supercomputers I was working with 10 years ago. Hell of a lot cheaper, too.

(I remember after the purchase of a then really-powerful Sun E10000 turning to a coworker and saying, "Probably in 10 years this will fit under your desk." Yep.)
 
FF_productions said:
The Mac Pro has a very good cooling system, it doesn't need liquid cooling, and the liquid cooling in the G5's SUCKED.

Next Mac Pro won't be around for a while, it will be a hell of an update with Nehalem.
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indeed, i sold my G5 2.7 on ebay last year for $2100 (with graphic and modeling softwares). It was a heater... good for the winter.

i need a desktop. when i say i need it i mean i need it. But i don't need the 173 days old mac pro. $6.5G is not going to that one for sure. Nehalem... god. When. Don't tell me it's January.
 
Every time i use the tool it freaks out my audio. Is there a tool for overlocking the computer on the windows side?
 
frankfurter said:
Most people who have used PC's and switched to Mac's did so to avoid crap just like this from the PC world.
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Amen to that - its why I switched. The 2.8 is MORE then enough for all but the greediest of apps/users.

Stay on the safe side and dont bother. Leave the overclocking ot the PC peeps.

(besides FBDimm systems really hate overclocking and have a nasty habbit of erroring/failing just when you thought it was all good)

nice simple tool tho..
 
Makosuke said:
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?
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This behavior is specific to Mac OS. Even though all Macintosh computers have a sophisticated HPET-Timer-Chip, Apple has decided to use the bus clock as a real time source, which is generally not a good idea.

However, you can do the following:
  • Overclock your Mac Pro about 10 %
  • Reboot it without shutdown or power off
  • Your system clock now runs at normal speed and benchmarks should give 7 to 10 % better results

A reboot may be unsuccessful, if you overclock too much. Try 3.1 GHz for a 2.8 GHz processor. Rebooting an overclocked machine also doesn't work with the first generation Mac Pros (2006 Model, MacPro1,1). Detailed infoformation can be found here.

-Christoph (Author of ZDNet Clock)
 
powermac_daddy said:
indeed, i sold my G5 2.7 on ebay last year for $2100 (with graphic and modeling softwares). It was a heater... good for the winter.

i need a desktop. when i say i need it i mean i need it. But i don't need the 173 days old mac pro. $6.5G is not going to that one for sure. Nehalem... god. When. Don't tell me it's January.
Click to expand...

January is the expected date I think...But I think it may take even longer.

The First Mac Pro took from August of 2006 all the way to January of 08 to finally be updated (minus the Octo in April 07).
 
Wow software overclocking for a mac? Never thought I'd see the day.
This is brilliant, although users have to keep in mind that the mac pro probably doesn't have any pci/pcie locks as its not designed to overclock (unlike most retail motherboards for pc's).

So your not gonna get any massive speed increases. But still, it sounds like users are seeing 10%, which isn't bad.
 
I tried this out safely. I downloaded SMCFancontrol and turned it up a bit to keep the CPU cool.

I have a 3.2GHz Mac Pro and I tried 3.4GHz. I looked at the console and it said the system had "1 Recoverable class Fbd error." Can anyone explain that to me?
 
Enzobot24 said:
I tried this out safely. I downloaded SMCFancontrol and turned it up a bit to keep the CPU cool.

I have a 3.2GHz Mac Pro and I tried 3.4GHz. I looked at the console and it said the system had "1 Recoverable class Fbd error." Can anyone explain that to me?
Click to expand...

Ram usually seems to cause the errors, as noted from post above, I removed the OWC ram i purchased and was able to clock my 2.66 at 3.1 ghz.
 
FF_productions said:
Ram usually seems to cause the errors, as noted from post above, I removed the OWC ram i purchased and was able to clock my 2.66 at 3.1 ghz.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have 12GB of OWC with the original 2GB from Apple.

So should I see any problems if I keep the OWC RAM in there? I'm not seeing any other errors in the console. And I've been running this app for about 25 minutes.
 
slackpacker said:
No you have to use Windows executable overclockers. this is for the OS X side of things
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The first generation Mac Pro (2006 model or MacPro1,1) can be overclocked under Windows using SysTool:
  • Download and run SysTool
  • Navigate to "CPU overclocking"
  • Select ICS935401 as the clock chip
  • Press the "Read" button
  • Move the slider to the right, try 350 MHz at first.
  • Press the "Write" button

This cannot be done with the new Mac Pro (Early 2008 or MacPro3,1), because SysTool does not support its ICS932S421 clock chip. If you have the latest Mac Pro:

  • boot into Mac OS X 10.5.
  • Run ZDNet Clock.
  • Overclock to a "Bus Clock" (!= CPU Clock) of no more than 454 MHz.
  • Reboot into Windows without shutdown or turning your computer off. If rebooting the machine fails, try overclocking to a lesser speed.
  • Use Everest or CPU-Z or run a benchmark to verify that overclocking has survived the reboot.

-Christoph (Author of ZDNet Clock)
 
Enzobot24 said:
Yeah, I have 12GB of OWC with the original 2GB from Apple.

So should I see any problems if I keep the OWC RAM in there? I'm not seeing any other errors in the console. And I've been running this app for about 25 minutes.
Click to expand...

If it's gone 25 minutes without a panic,then that's good.

I'd do a stress test to make sure all is well.
 
Enzobot24 said:
I tried this out safely. I downloaded SMCFancontrol and turned it up a bit to keep the CPU cool.

I have a 3.2GHz Mac Pro and I tried 3.4GHz. I looked at the console and it said the system had "1 Recoverable class Fbd error." Can anyone explain that to me?
Click to expand...

Immediately after overclocking some "recoverable fbd errors" or "parity errors" cannot be avoided. This is due to the fact, that when you change to clock chip's frequency, the FSB and the MCH (memory controller hub) get out of sync for a couple of nanoseconds. So this is normal and the ECC machanism of the FB-DIMMs corrects it. You don't loose any data.

You should then run some form of stress test, e.g. a longer running benchmark. If additional erorrs occur, this indicates, that your RAM is overclocked a little bit beyond its limits.

Best practice is to run a stress test like mprime. If you don't see any RAM errors, your CPU may also do some false calculations. The torture test of mprime does complex floating point calculations and compares the result with known ones. If any errors occur, it displays an error message.

Also see our section Safe overclocking with the Mac Pro.


-Christoph
 
costabunny said:
Amen to that - its why I switched. The 2.8 is MORE then enough for all but the greediest of apps/users.

Stay on the safe side and dont bother. Leave the overclocking ot the PC peeps.

(besides FBDimm systems really hate overclocking and have a nasty habbit of erroring/failing just when you thought it was all good)

nice simple tool tho..
Click to expand...

Yes, only FB-DIMMs "hate" overclocking by posting nasty messages in the system log, whereas Standard DDR2/DDR3 DIMMs don't. ;-)

The reason for this is, that FB-DIMMs have 72 bits for representing 64 bits. The remaining 8 bits are for error correction.

Standard DIMMs also have the effect, that bits switch randomly from 0 to 1 and vice versa, when you overclock them. However, there is no ECC-mechanism to detect this. So you may feel safe with Standard DIMMs, but you aren't. If this happens for instance in some memory area, where your HFS+ driver resides, this may corrupt your entire harddisk.

This won't happen with FB-DIMMs, because they either correct the error or immediately stop the kernel.

If you get spurious FB-DIMM errors, we strongly recommend to reduce the speed of your bus clock. If that means you can overclock no more than 1 or 2 percent, you should probably replace them or let your computer run at stock speed.

Unfortunately, there is not much, you can do about it. If you buy DIMMs specified to run at 800 MHz, you cannot return them complaining they don't run at 900 MHz, just because other FB-DIMMs do.

We just realized, that Apple RAM (mostly Hynix) runs rock solid at about 900 MHz. Transcend and Kingston run even better.

-Christoph
 
kornyboy said:
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.
Click to expand...

I remember overclocking on older Macs, but it was extremely rare. One method required soldering.
 
christoh said:
The first generation Mac Pro (2006 model or MacPro1,1) can be overclocked under Windows using SysTool:
  • Download and run SysTool
  • Navigate to "CPU overclocking"
  • Select ICS935401 as the clock chip
  • Press the "Read" button
  • Move the slider to the right, try 350 MHz at first.
  • Press the "Write" button

This cannot be done with the new Mac Pro (Early 2008 or MacPro3,1), because SysTool does not support its ICS932S421 clock chip. If you have the latest Mac Pro:

  • boot into Mac OS X 10.5.
  • Run ZDNet Clock.
  • Overclock to a "Bus Clock" (!= CPU Clock) of no more than 454 MHz.
  • Reboot into Windows without shutdown or turning your computer off. If rebooting the machine fails, try overclocking to a lesser speed.
  • Use Everest or CPU-Z or run a benchmark to verify that overclocking has survived the reboot.

-Christoph (Author of ZDNet Clock)
Click to expand...

Is there one that supports Vista 64? That tool was discontinued over a year ago.

My Imic-USB is freaking out with any type of overclock.

I look in the log and i get this error:

kernel[0]: WARNING: AppleUSBAudio has detected that clock_get_uptime () value changed radically from previous values

The sound brakes up constantly.
 
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