Help me on my way (please)

[Timbo55]

Here's the deal - I just finished putting together my system as follows -

Athlon XP 1700
Volcano 7 HSF + 3 x 80mm case fans
Asus AV7333 mobo KT333
ATi Radeon 8500 (retail)
Kingmax DDR PC-2700 256MB
Maxtor UDMA-133 40GB 7200rpm
Pioneer DVD... yada yada...

I figure this thing should be reasonalby "tweakable".

What would you recommend as good settings for overclocking this baby. (I'm not confident (in my ability) at "unlocking" the CPU so I'm talking about thru BIOS settings)

I played with the FSB setting (from 133 up to 145) last night and got an increase in CPU speed, but I need to know how to adjust the other settings like MEMORY timings and VOLTAGES to get the best out of it right ?

I don't want to go nuts, just crank it up as far as she'll go with what I've got, and then drop the settings back a few steps so I have a nice stable system and live happily ever after.

Thanks for your expert advice.

Timbo.....

 

[Victory]

well where you are sitting is in a real good place already. As for BIOS settings, other then upping your FSB which you've done already, the two most important 'tweaks' you can on are the CAS setting for your ram and the interleave setting for your ram as well. I'm not sure if your board does(my Abit does) turn on the bank interleave. You'll have a 2 channel or 4 channel setting for this. Also if you can run it like that, turn the CAS setting to 2.0. If it runs stably you'll see another 3-5% boost in overall system performance based on RAM timings. Also turn all the timings down to it's lowest denominator and disable ECC. I can get my my Corsair ram to 150 FSB stable for an effective clock rate of 1.640Mhz. This is also with no voltage upping beyond factory specs.

As for what you may need to step up. Well that varies from board to board and add in card to add in card. Only you can truly say. Run in up step by step via frequency until you lose stability. Then try cranking a little more voltage on the CPU and/or ram. .25 increments each step. Unless you can lock your PCI/AGP divider, you may not get much above what you're at now. Go slow, watch your temps and play with it. It's time consuming and can't be rushed, just do a little at time to find your max stable setting.

Me personally, I haven't been able to get beyond 150 FSB. I can get so far into Win ME before a crash. I've tried voltage's and no avail. So something is holding me back. As for me though, I bought an XP1700+ and now run for well over a month at 1900+. With extensive tweaking I could probably break 150, but I'm content with what I've got.


Save heating costs on your home, overclock your PC!!!

 

[Timbo55]

Thanks Victory. A great reply. Very helpful.

I can see what I'll be doing over my Easter break

Cheers Tim.......