Before trying anything of that sort, make sure you have 1. a very good cooler, like SwiftechMC462 or OCz Gladiator, 2. have a good accurate temperature monitor onboard, or if you dont have that try touching bodies at different known temperatures to get an idea how hot is xx°C! May not be too accurate, but you can then judge by touching the HSF how hot the processor is getting! Continuosly monitor the processor core temperature. Update the BIOS to the latest version if possible.
1. how do i know if i have to raise the cpu core voltage and to what voltage do i raise it to?
<b>A.</b> If you increase the frequency and learn that the system isnt quite stable anymore or isnt booting at all, you have to increase the core voltage a bit, until you get a stable system. But dont overdo it, almost all of the times, it will be just a 0.1~0.2V increment over the previous setting. If you cant get a stable system even after increasing the voltage significantly, say about 1~1.2V over nominal rated value, you probabely are at the end of it. your CPU will not overclock more than that. set the voltage to lowest value at which the system is stable at that speed.
2. Raising the FSB is a way to overclock, but what effects does it have on the other components (memory, AGP, PCI, etc..)? how fast is too fast when increasing the FSB?
<b>A.</b> Raising the FSB can acheive limited results, because <b>a.</b>raising it too high will make your other devices that are dependent on the FSB run faster than they are rated to, like the PCI and AGP bus. and <b>b.</b>The increment in FSB is multiplied by the multiplier to get the core frequency. That means, with every MHz you increase the FSB, your processor will run say 10 MHz faster with 10x multipler. This increment may be too high for the processor although your memory and other parts might run quite well at still faster speeds. This is a condition when you might need to lower the multiplier in favour of faster memory subsystem!
PCI bus runs at a fraction of the FSB, FSB/3 for 100 MHz FSB and FSB/4 for 133 MHz FSB. Its nominal speed is 33 MHz, but it can work at a bit higer speed. If you are working with FSBs higher than 133 MHz, check if your motherboard supports FSB/5 divider. As far as possible, try to keep the PCI clock to 37~40 MHz, your PCI-IDE (hard disk controller) might fail with >40 MHz FSBs, although many modern controllers can work well at even 42~45 MHz.
The AGP bus works at 2/3 or 1/2 of FSB for 100 MHz and 133 MHz respectively. It should be run at a nominal value of 66 MHz. If your motherboard supports manually setting 2/3 ratio its good, else it will run at speeds about 89 MHz which most new cards will take, but almost all older cards will fail.
Some chipsets supports asynchronous memory, operating at a different speeds than the FSB. FSB=memory speed is desirable for best performance, so run the memory as fast as the FSB. Even a slow bad noname memory cannot work at higher speeds, so make sure you have good branded memory preferably rated at 133 MHz or better (for all types of memory, RDRAM for P4 is poor at overclocking)
If you are using AMD processor, unlock it and lower the multiplier to some lower value so that you can get the memory to work at its best, while the processor runs nearabout its rated speed. And then try cranking up the processor speed. You can get the unlocking info from a number of sites like <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com" target="_new">Anandtech</A>, <A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com" target="_new">THG</A>, <A HREF="http://www.athlonoc.com" target="_new">athlonoc</A> etc.
Hope its enough. Keep posted on your results.
girish
<font color=red>Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>
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