SonyGuy

I started messing around with the settings in the bios tonight. The stock setting was FSB- 133 Multi.- x13 and voltage- 1.60v

Here's what I have now using PC2700 set at 166mhz and a Volcano 10+ on the processor-

CPU FSB- 160mhz
Multiplier- x14
voltage- 1.625v

Which makes my processor go from xp2100+(1.73ghz) to 2.25ghz.

What do you think? I did mess around with the DDR voltage any, or the timings because I am a little unsure about those. Off the top of my head I remember the voltage for the memory being something like 2.52v. Don't remember what the timings were. I need to look around for a PC hardware monitoring utility so I can watch the temps as I have it in Windows...

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AMD Athlon XP2100+(1.73Ghz)@XP2800+(2.25Ghz)
Abit KD7 Raid
512MB PC2700
80GB WD 8mb
Abit 256mb 9600XT @ Core- 575/500 Mem- 320/300 VGA Silencer and Copper RAM Sinks

SnowSurfer

nice overclock, what kind of motherboard do you have, you can try either speedfan or if u have an asus motherboard they have the "asus probe"...you can google both.

also i would try running prime95 in torture test mode to make sure the computer is stable, thje last thing you want is the thing to freeze up when you are working on something important.

i am curious to see what kind of temps you are getting but still good work!!!

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SonyGuy

I'm running an ABIT KD7 RAID(KT400) board. I went to the Hardware Monitor in the Bios and it had 3 different temperatures on there. System Temp, CPU Surface Temp, and CPU Core Temp. System and surface temp we not much different from each other. Both were about 40C/108-109F and the core was somewhere around 58C I believe. I tried out SpeedFan 4.20 but it kinda confused me. I saw all of the voltages were layed out nicely, and the fan speeds, but when it came to temperatures, it has Temp1(Is this CPU surface temp?), Temp2(Core temp?), Remote, Local, HD0(I know this ones the hard drive), and another Temp1....?

bachviet

You should try to lower your multiplier and up your FSB even more.

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SonyGuy

Whooaaaa. I hit 2332mhz at the post screen. What I did was I was looking at the Ratio of FSB/AGP/PCI, it was set at 4:2:1. I couldn't get the FSB stable at 160, or even past that. So I set the ratio at 5:2:1, and then it let me set the FSB up to 166. Then I started raising the multiplier up x.5 at a time until I got to 166x14= 2332Mhz!! The only problem was when I saved, exited, and was letting windows come up, it blue screened me with an error stop code. So I set everything back to default and that's how I have it now. I was going to just leave it at 166x14 too because the next jump on the multiplier was 166x15 and I think that is just a little risky for my well being to attempt... So why would windows be acting up? First it told me it was missing a file- C:Windows/System/ntfs.sys or something like that. What's that mean? Whatever it was it's gone now that everything is back to default settings.

brainsmile

is overclocking necessary or is the risk too high?

SonyGuy

Was that supposed to be funny or meant to be a joke?

shocky123

I had a similar issue when overclocking a P4 2.8C (which is actually identical to the 3.2E only it has a smaller multiplier and the L3 cache on the 3.2 is locked on the 2.8) anywho, I didnt have any problems getting it up above 3.4 Ghz at all, everything was stable, and performance was great. The reason I had to settle for like 3.3'ish was, that anything much more above this required me to up the FSB to a level where the ide bus was affected.

This is where you're problem lies: When you up the FSB, keep in mind that other bus speeds are also affected by this.

I'm sure you have an option to lower the 'gain' in clock frequency on the pci bus as well as agp bus, but the IDE/ATA bus is not always so user-interactive. Also, keep in mind that if you up the frequency/voltage too high, you're likely going to blow out some of the 'cheaper' components that were built in to the motherboard. (great example is onboard LAN, which is usually the first thing that goes out when you piss it off)

When you up the FSB enough, this causes changes in the frequency of your ide/ata interface, here is the reason windows will no longer boot correctly.
It's not likely the case that your cpu, ram, or motherboard cannot take the boost, they probably can deal with it for a while, however your hard drive(s) is NOT meant to be overclocked much, if any at all. So your HD interface get's f'd up and windows encounters 'corrupt' sectors where data is stored, which in fact may not be corrupt at all, it is just windows not knowing how to deal with a non-standard HD bus speed.

Unfortunately, there isnt a whole lot that can fix this issue. Some REALLY high end motherboards allow you to change these settings on a per-bus level, as well as some really high end drives and/or scsi ( i havnt tested scsi w/ this though ) i'm sure will be able to handle these higher voltages and frequencies.

Your system is only as fast as your weakest component

Another problem you may also want to address is the fact that with increasing frequencies, the physical components of the cpu tend to lose efficiency, which creates an upper limit on how high you can crank your system before it actually becomes 'slower'.. Like I said earlier, (well, didnt say this part.. but) run some CPU benchmarks, not graphics card benchmarks! then re-run these tests with your different configurations to see where your best performance is coming. My guess is it will be ~100-200Mhz slower than your highest stable(bootable) config.

good luck,
find your bios jumper on the board though, you'll likely need it

Kyle

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SonyGuy

Well that was really helpful. Thank you Yeah, I've been using the clear CMOS jumper quite a bit, lol.

TERRIBLETOM

I have almost the same set up, it's been running at that speed for 20+ months without any problems...

johnnymk

Are you sure about this? I have never read anything about other busses being affected by overclocking, although it makes sense.

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LegendKiller

Yes, it is true. Busses operate on dividers that are fixed (except for newer motherboards with fix the bus speed or allow different dividers). Thus, you are OC'ing your PCI and AGP bus at the same time, which is where OC's usually fail since PCI or AGP cards might not be able to take the added speed. However, its not going to hurt anything.


LK

shocky123

Yes, this is very true. The interface between the different bus' logically should/does flow in and out through the front side bus of the cpu. This is just how computers work. When you tweak the fsb, the interface here is also ever-so-slightly tweaked, and variances here can result in changes occuring in the frequencies of the other bus'.

For example, do a google on how to set the pci bus when overclocking, this should give you an idea of how things interface with the fsb.

~Kyle

johnnymk

Isn't the common belief that the CPU is overheating when it is overclocked, causing failures elsewhere?

I believe you, but isn't that what most people conclude is the problem when everything locks up? Because I seem to recall that a CPU can take a lot of overheating cycles before it fails.

shocky123

Yes this is the easiest explanation, and is the 'common' belief because it's easy to place blame on overheating the processor..if you lower the settings..it should work fine, etc., afterall it is the thing that was changed, however, in his specific case, this is more than likely the cause. The CPU is not always the culprit here, though more often than not... i.e. most people dont overclock to the point where these would become serious issues.

~Kyle