That must be one seriously resource hoggin application to put that CPU down, if you had said you had any other system i would have said get another CPU as there are lots of very fast CPUs you could upgrade to, but that CPU is a very good overclocker and i know the motherboard is solid from my own experience with it.
Have you tried using the dynamic overclocking function, its pretty good, when it detects the CPU is running near its full capacity it speeds itself up and then slows down again when the speed isnt needed. What to try is go into Bios and make sure agressive timings are off, and go to the cell menu section of the Bios, it is there you will find the agressive timing option you want to turn off and the dynamic overclocking options.
Now you want to turn on the dynamic overclocking at corporal or sergeant, then leave that menu and boot up to windows and run your software or any other heavily intensive software you have and see if it is stable and what the temperatures are like, i assume you have corecenter installed and have used live update to make sure all the drivers and the bios is fully up to date, if not thats something to do.
If with this overclocking it is stable you can turn the dynamic overclocking up one and then test the system again, if this stable you go up one and so and so forth until it becomes unstable at that point you stop and you can either stick to the next setting down from the one it crashed at or you could try loosening the ram timings a little in BIOS it should help the memory go faster.
I wouldnt want to reccomend manual overclocking for you as it is something quite tricky and since it is a working PC you dont want to much to go wrong, i would test the system on dynamic over4clocking thouroghly before you attempt to use it at those settings for work, if possible you might want to make sure you can get hold of a backup system just in case.
I will warn you dynamic overclocking is only a slightly safer smarter way to overclock it is still a very risky thing to do and you would be voiding some warranties by doing it. Im also assuming here you are using the 3000+ venice core cpu any other core at that speed wont overclock as well either.
In terms of upgrading there is plenty of choice in faster CPUs, the next one up that i think would work for you would be a 3700+ san diego core cpu, or if you have the money there are dual core processors that would work quite well. I would also reccomend another Gigabyte of ram if you are upgrading, since it is a continous data feed you want plenty of low latency high quality RAM, I would stick with corsair but replace the value stuff you are using now with the proper XMS memory range and get a 2Gb matched pair(if you can afford it of course, it is usually not alot more than the value ram and the difference in the latencies is good and it comes pre fitted with the RAM sinks and a lifetime warranty that guarantees it will overclock to xxx speed usually 250Mhz which would be equivalent DDR500 compared to what it runs at DDR400 but that varies on the ram you buy.
If you are going to be upgrading the CPU anyway i would say overclocking is worth a go over the weekend at least, just remeber if it doesnt hol you will want to put the bios settings back to the optimised defualt mode before you put it back to work.
Edited by warriorscot, 09 December 2005 - 06:48 AM.