Overclocking the Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 on a Slow Monday

I’m back! Hope everyone had a great holiday season! I apologize for the hiatus, it’s been a crazy past few months, with a lot of time committed to both work and personal life. With things finally settling down,  I plan on posting my thoughts about tech related subjects more frequently.

To start off, as Monday was a bit slow today, I decided to overclock the Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 inside my work PC.

The specifications for my work PC are as follows:

Processor: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 2.7 GHz, 65W, Socket 775
Heatsink: Standard Intel Socket 775 Aluminum Heatsink
Motherboard: Gigabyte G41MT-S2PT
Memory: 2 x Samsung 2 GB PC3-12800 DDR3 RAM
Graphics Card: HIS Radeon HD 5450 1024 MB
Hard Drive: Hitachi HTS72500A9A364 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD
OS: Windows 8 Pro

Not the fastest PC out there, but it serves it’s purpose for IT administration duties. However, we can do better. With the system being in a slim-form factor mATX case and the heatsink being a standard Intel aluminum heatsink, our options are limited in how far we can overclock this system. Fortunately, the Pentium Dual-Core E5400 (with it being Wolfdale) is a rather cool chip that doesn’t produce much heat.

As the E5400 has a rather high multiplier (13.5X), it is very easy to overclock this processor. I initially raised the bus speed to 333 MHz and dropped the multiplier to 12X to aim for 4 GHz. I raised the CPU voltage and termination voltages up to 1.4v. While it booted into Windows fine, it crashed on the LinX (aka IntelBurnTest) stress tests. After some minor fine tuning and adjustments, I ended up with this:

For a system in a slim mATX case with a standard Intel aluminum heatsink, a final overclock speed of 3.75 GHz (in comparison to the stock 2.7 GHz) isn’t too shabby for a quick OC. With voltage settings at 1.4v and 20 passed runs of LinX, the temps maxed out at 83 C. While 83 C is a bit high, I will fine-tune the settings and voltages to get load temps down to the 60s range.