Category: technology

Introduction

The Intel G2358 has wow-ed the world with cheap and solid 2 Core no-frills prestanda for gaming and day to day office work. However the fact that it overclocks really well has peaked the interest for this little cpu even further. Actually it’s not that great UNLESS you overclock it from the stock 3.2 GHz.

The problem with overclocking the G3258 is that it previously required  motherboards with Z87 or H87 chipsets, (or better) the not so cheap ones that is.

In this review we are looking at combining the cheaper G3258 with a Gigabyte H81M-HD3 micro ATX motherboard, and trying to overclock the CPU.

Let’s see how it goes shall we?

Prerequisites – BIOS Update

To start off, we need to upgrade the H81M-HD3 with the latest greatest bios we can find. Namely (at the time of writing) the F6.

F6 added support for intel K-processors, which is, as far as I can understand it, what I have bought. Now I won’t go in to how flashing is done in minuscule detail, but basically you download the updated BIOS file from gigabyte’s homepage, put it on a usb stick and load it into the BIOS and restart.

First startup – No Luck

The first startup with BIOS F6 gave me the UEFI bios interface, that seriously confuses me, however I managed to find what I was looking for, the overclocking settings. What I immediately knew was that I needed to up the CPU voltage to 1.2V and above to overclock this chip, and 1.2V was maximum what the H81M let me achieve. That’s a roof, and a problem.

I started with Vcore 1.2v and left all other voltage settings on AUTO. I upped the clock ratio to 40, (which would give me 4.0GHz) and rebooted. – Nothing happened, it did not start, but after a while it booted to fail safe settings.

Okay, so that was no good.

After this I tinkered a bit with lower clock speeds and managed to get some overclocking going, but not near 4GHz or above.

Crap, maybe I should have bought a more expensive motherboard…

Then I had a brilliant idea

The BIOS had some other voltage settings besides VCore, namely something called VRIN and CPU Ring Voltage.

I figured it was worth a try and I let the…

– VRIN settings stay at AUTO, and I maxed the…
– CPU Ring Voltage to 1.149V
– Vcore still maxed at 1.2
– Clock ratio 40

Low and behold! The thing started, booted up to windows and was running at 4.0GHz! At least that´s something (800MHz overclock).

I ran the Intel burn test and it made it trough 10 times with no BSOD. Goodie!

So I wanted to go higher

Of course I wanted to go higher! I figured I’d max out all the voltages I could change that had to do with the CPU.
– VRIN at 1.9
– CPU Ring Voltage to 1.149, and
– VCore 1.2
– Clock Ratio 42

With the clock ratio to 42, it worked! It booted to windows and the 4.2GHz (1GHz overclock) was achieved! Not bad since it is a 30% overclocking of the CPU.

The Intel Burn Test was also successful and the machine was for all intents and purposes stable.

So I wanted to go even higher

More then, perhaps? Well I had to find out!

I set the Clock ratio to 44 and it booted at 4.4GHz, but during the Intel Burn Test, it BSOD:ed with error 124, same thing with clock ratio 4.3

It seems with the stock cooler and this chipset, 4.2GHz is the practical limit.

I’m going to upgrade my cooler a bit to a Zalman CNPS5X and see if that helps, so stay tuned for updates to this post. I will also try to lower VRIN and CPU Ring Voltage to see how much further I can go with those settings while still keeping the CPU happy.

Conclusion (On stock cooler)

The G3258 can be overclocked about 1GHz on the Gigabyte H81M, but for higher speeds at least a better than stock cooler is needed, and considering the motherboard was maxed out as far as cpu voltage settings goes when the cpu reached 4.2GHz, this seems to be the limit for this motherboard/cpu combo. Since some CPU’s clock easier than others, your mileage may vary. If you have tried to overclock the G3258 on H81 motherboards, by all means post a comment on your settings and success/fail in the comment section below!

Have a good one! (and stay tuned for updates and pictures and all that)