Xbox overclocking????

maddog

Anybody know of anyone overclocking the xbox yet?? Or any sites on the subject?
Regards,
Maddog

Saruman

Jesus its only out and you want more speed?
Is it any good?

maddog

Very very very sweet.... as much as I hate MS they have a really good console in the xbox and Halo is just a cracking game.

Inspector Gadget

Well, what's under the bonnet? A mobile PIII/733EB soldered onto the board, which itself is powered by an Nvidia NForce chipset (the one with the GF2MX-equivalent onboad graphics), connected to a 10GB IDE hard disk and DDR RAM. Sound familiar yet? Yup, it's a PC in console's clothing. So, in theory, with a little (intricate) soldering, FSB overclocking should be possible...

Gadget

Oeneus

How well does Halo play with a Control Pad? I mean as opposed to Mouse and Keyboard

maddog

Originally posted by Oeneus
How well does Halo play with a Control Pad? I mean as opposed to Mouse and Keyboard

As we all know nothing beats the mouse/keboard when it comes to playing games... the pad on the xbox is chunky but it takes a bit of getting used to.... but you just don't get the response or accuracy using the pad.......oooooh what a game Halo is.... the co-op is just the dogs.....

Gerry

Originally posted by Inspector Gadget
Well, what's under the bonnet? A mobile PIII/733EB soldered onto the board, which itself is powered by an Nvidia NForce chipset (the one with the GF2MX-equivalent onboad graphics), connected to a 10GB IDE hard disk and DDR RAM. Sound familiar yet? Yup, it's a PC in console's clothing. So, in theory, with a little (intricate) soldering, FSB overclocking should be possible...

Gadget

Afaik, the nforce in the xbox has a more powerful graphics core than that on the nforce mainboards. Yeah, it would be possible to overclock the fsb, theres a faint chance that the clock generator might be programmable, or you could just solder on a different crystal. You'd want to be slightly stupid to want to do it though.

Shinji

The board is a bit different from NForce - it's closer to the original Crush spec, if anyone remembers that. The GPU is different as well - it's an NV25 core, same as the GeForce 4 Ti range, but with an extra vertex pipe to compensate for a lower core speed.

Yes, they can be overclocked. However, you won't get any performance benefits and a lot of games simply stop working. These aren't PC games, built to run as fast as the machine can; they're console games, built for a very narrow specification and unlikely to work on anything that strays outside that spec. Overclocking an Xbox will effectively give you a €500 hunk of useless black plastic.

(Oh, and Halo is pretty dull imo. It's got some nice bits in it, but if it had come out on the PC we'd all be going, "hmm, so what?". It's only getting accolades for being a massively hyped console game...)

maddog

Originally posted by Shinji

(Oh, and Halo is pretty dull imo. It's got some nice bits in it, but if it had come out on the PC we'd all be going, "hmm, so what?". It's only getting accolades for being a massively hyped console game...)

I think Halo is not bad on the xbox, I've being following the development of this game from the beginning when Bungie where making this game for the PC. I even own the domain name www.HaloSquads.com but then MS bought Bungie and screwed everything up and decided to relase it on xbox first, I think if this game had to come to pc first it would have been a hit simply for the multiplayer aspect alone.. but it looks damm good on my 28" stadium screen.

Inspector Gadget

Originally posted by Shinji
The board is a bit different from NForce - it's closer to the original Crush spec, if anyone remembers that. The GPU is different as well - it's an NV25 core, same as the GeForce 4 Ti range, but with an extra vertex pipe to compensate for a lower core speed.

[Expletive]. I was thinking that was the case, but the article in this month's PC Pro said otherwise - I should have known they'd fsck it up...

Gadget.

chernobyl

The muliplier is locked and the bios is encrypted so how do you up the speed with those walls infront of you?

saik

nurds listen up!
you CAN get more performance out of your xbox! No i don't have one and i haven't tried this ever, and yes you do void your warranty, and no i am not responsible if it doesn't work. you're getting second/third hand info here. basically, microsoft the big cheapskates implemented 40 pin cables for the hard disk drives. not all x-box hard drives are the same. in fact, some of them are capable of 100 udma. which is nice. to avail of this all you do is replace your 40 pin hdd cable with the nicer faster, cleaner , more expensive 80 pin one. the performance boost in loading times is apparently ~10% (GASP), and afaik it's just the trick to help with halo's really really long load times. (must be really long for 10% to make a difference)
of course.. i haven't done it.. it was some bloke on a site.
linked from www.tweak3d.net monts ago.....
i'm sure it'd turn up on google or somet.
good luck

chernobyl

Creating a succesful clone of the original HD image and partitions has been impossible so far, again many dongles and security features.

Giblet

Why bother?
This reminds me of the time when I was talking about the version of RE:CV on the ps2 and that had borders and was slower than the DC version because of the lack of any 60hz option, and he told me that it didn't bother him as he overclocked it....with a Pentium 4. I tried so hard not to laugh. The funny thing is, I think he believed himself.

PPC

Originally posted by chernobyl
Creating a succesful clone of the original HD image and partitions has been impossible so far, again many dongles and security features.

Copies can and have been made with Norton Ghost.
You can't access the drive form the pc though but you can back it up and start again if needs be.

chernobyl

As far as i was ware, no one has managed to boot the Xbox up with a HD other than its original, i stand corrected.

Thanks for the info.

JustHalf

Originally posted by Shinji
The GPU is different as well - it's an NV25 core, same as the GeForce 4 Ti range, but with an extra vertex pipe to compensate for a lower core speed.

Not correct.

The GPU is not an NV25 core, particularly not with an extra vertex pipe. It's only got two vertex pipes. If it was an NV25+extra vertex pipe, it would have 3 vertex pipes.

I suggest you read this:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1561&p=3

po0k

I played the X-Box in Smyth's in Galway today.
Played the snowboarding demo and the racing one.
Not much cop tbh.
The Halo thing was only a rolling presntation, with very noticible framerate issues as it sweeps around the planet ring at the start.
the measily 64megs is 200Mh DDR too isn't it?
Would it have killed them to put in 128megs, especially since it's shared.
I won't be buying one.

chernobyl

I would not trust a thing Anandtech posted in those articles, they made so many errors about the Ps2 hardware/software, its a joke.

the core is a Xbox customised core, somewhere between 20 and the 25.

po0k

It runs on what can be called a modified nForce mobo doesn't it?
If so, do you reckon the graphics sub-section would make use of the cross-bar mem tech?

Inspector Gadget

From what I've read in the last ten minutes or so, it would seem that it's a high-end NForce chipset (not the 420 we're getting in PCs these days) with an NV2A (= modified NV20; NV20 = GF3 Core, apparently) providing the pretty pictures. So, hopefully, I think that means yes...

Gadget

po0k

It's a Tuatulin P3 733 isn't it?
It only has a big Aluminium heatsink.
Wonder how loud the system fan is?

Gerry

afaik its not a tualatin. I'd say they might move to it though.

PPC

Why would you want to oc it in the first place?
Nobody bothered doing the PS2 or Atari 2600.
The games run at that speed and anymore and they more then likely won't work.
At most i'd change the heatsink and put a bigger one on the CPU and GPU to give better cooling and that should help preformance.
Also if theres a northbridge i'd put a cooler on it as it helps preformance.

saik

i don't get it. i don't understand how the hardware can be made to run faster by just putting a fan on it. surely this doesn't make data move around faster..... ? afaik cooler system => bigger overclock => more speed. seeing as the xbox isn't clockable ... how will cooler parts make it go faster? i mean in benchmarks, they don't go and tell you the temperature the machine was running at, do they? also you don't see people posting the likes of "i went up by 20 fps by putting on a different fan" (well i don't.) please explain!

chernobyl

Xbox has so many lock out features that if you screw with it, im sure the games will either crash or refuse to run.

PPC

Originally posted by saik
i don't get it. i don't understand how the hardware can be made to run faster by just putting a fan on it. surely this doesn't make data move around faster..... ? afaik cooler system => bigger overclock => more speed. seeing as the xbox isn't clockable ... how will cooler parts make it go faster? i mean in benchmarks, they don't go and tell you the temperature the machine was running at, do they? also you don't see people posting the likes of "i went up by 20 fps by putting on a different fan" (well i don't.) please explain!

Originally posted by PPC
At most i'd change the heatsink and put a bigger one on the CPU and GPU to give better cooling and that should help preformance.

Never said anything about it going faster. You'd get better stability thats about it.

Also some benchmark sites do tell you the temps

Inspector Gadget

There's a point here that many of us seem to be missing; that is, we can't see what the XBox is; in many ways, it's not a console, but possibly the PC Game developer's holy grail; a standard PC. All the parts that matter (CPU, Graphics & Sound chipsets, etc.) are standard, so their features and capabilities can be known in advance and exploited to the maximum, whereas the same can't be said for PCs. Even if you have all the right hardware installed, the fact that you can quite often be running other software at the same time as the game can cause embarrassing and/or annoying glitches in gameplay - that sort of thing is eliminated if all the thing does is play games, and run other, known, system -related processes.

With standard hardware will, most likely, come less of a need to tie all visual and audio events into a centralised timing system; the speed of the processor, being fixed, will prove good enough for most things. If this proves to be the case, overclocking could cause synchronisation problems.

Just my 2c...
Gadget

cerebus

>
> i don't get it. i don't understand how the hardware can
> be made to run faster by just putting a fan on it. surely
> this doesn't make data move around faster..... ?
>

Oddly enough it does (with current MOS technology anyhow)

It all comes down to semiconductor physics:

The speed of a MOS device is strongly dependent on junction
temperature - a MOS transistor will run faster at lower
temperatures, mostly due to the way that the mobility of
electrons and holes depends on temperature.

If you can get more heat out of a device (by using a more
efficient cooling mechanism, for example) the junction
temperature should be lowered - and the theoretical max.
frequency should increase.

Not sure how noticeable this effect will be on a commercial
part (I can probably dig up some numbers if you're *really*
interested)

Bosco

Originally posted by cerebus
If you can get more heat out of a device (by using a more
efficient cooling mechanism, for example) the junction
temperature should be lowered - and the theoretical max.
frequency should increase.
[/B]

To say the device's max. usable frequency will increase is not to say the frequency at which the device is actually being used will increase. Extra cooling will not in itself make a device run faster.

DeadBankClerk

Originally posted by saik
i don't get it. i don't understand how the hardware can be made to run faster by just putting a fan on it. surely this doesn't make data move around faster..... ? afaik cooler system => bigger overclock => more speed. seeing as the xbox isn't clockable ... how will cooler parts make it go faster? i mean in benchmarks, they don't go and tell you the temperature the machine was running at, do they? also you don't see people posting the likes of "i went up by 20 fps by putting on a different fan" (well i don't.) please explain!

if you overclock something, when it runs it gets hotter than it did prior to overclocking. Overclock it enought and it will melt. Slap a big fan on and you can overclock more without it melting.

the bigger the fan the more you can overclock.