Difficulty OC'ing, PLEASE HELP

[Willamette_sucks]

hey, my new system is:
Athlon XP 1900 with Dragon Orb 3 (7000RPM)
VisionTek Xtasy GeForce 4 Ti4400
256MB DDR266 ECC CL=2.0 ...kingston
Soltek SL-7DVRV4
Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM ATA133

I thought OC'ing would be simple, but now that im trying, i cant seem to get it up very high at all. It runs perfectly fine with FSB at 140. 145 is unstable and freezes in UT.
There are alot of settings like CPU/DRAM/AGP/etc. skew settings, DRAM burst length, Dram Que Depth, Dram Command Rate, AGP Master 1 WS write/read, and also all the voltage settings for ram, cpu, etc.

Which settings are important for OC'ing, and which should i change. I had hoped to at least get the FSB to 150, and even thats not that much right? Should i be able to get it to 160? The multiplier is 12, because its not unlocked.
Im running Windows 98, and there are a few other problems to. Ill be upgrading to XP soon, so hopefully that will help. For instance, i cant run the geforce 4 Ti demos, except for the creature, because of some DLL.sound somthin or other.

Basically i just need help knowing what settings to change, and what to change em too. This mobo also has a feature called RedStorm OC'ing, where it changes the FSB for you, but so far it hasnt worked.

PS. Does anyone know how to create a demo in UT to find out the frame rate???
THX

The first LAN I went to was at a PETA convention. They booted me after I shot a zombie in HL DM!

 

[Guest]

From what I have heard, ECC Ram does NOT like to overclock. That may well be your trouble. Try running it at 2.5 CAS (although, you'll probably get better speed at 2) And of course, there is always the CPU... it is sure alot easier when they are unlocked because it's sometimes hard to tell what it is causing the trouble. One more thought, always try things one at a time when you run into trouble. Find settings that are 100% stable (i.e. Prime95=no errors after at least 30 minutes) then change things one at a time until you begin generating errors. then you know. The only problem is - with FSB o/c'ing it could be any number of things - since so many different things are run out of spec. at any rate - my guess is the RAM. If you can get non-ECC RAM on loan (or for that matter, send back the ECC - non-ECC is faster!) try it and see if you have some more luck. or better yet get 2400 or 2700 and try it.... good luck!

 

[niconx]

i have 256MB ecc cl2.5 crucial and 256MB ecc cl2.5 samsung sticks and i was easily able to OC to 145FSBx10.5 stable, i even had it up at 152FSBx10.5 but i cant keep the room temp low enough (33C) to keep the cpu cool at that rate.

CPU: Athlon tbird 1.4 oc to 1522Mhz @ 145FSB
256MB ecc cl2.5 crucial pc2100
256MB ecc cl2.5 samsung pc2100
mainboard Soltek SL-75drv2
geforce2mx cause i hate first person shooters =c)

What core chip do you have? Is that core good for OC? Are there even any different XP cores going around yet? I dunno.

 

[Quetzacoatl]

You gotta remember a couple things here. You already have a very high clocked CPU, 1.6Ghz if I remember correctly. You probably won't be able to get much higher than the levels of a 2100+ or 2200+, so maybe around 1.8Ghz if you are lucky.

There are several things very sensitive to the FSB increase here.
1-the PCI speed, normally at 33.33Mhz. If you incrase the FSB to 145, it would be running at 36.25Mhz which isn't that high. You generally max out at 40Mhz before you need to change the ratio from 1-4 to 1-5 or lower for FSB to PCI
2-The AGP is also sensitive in some cases, but not as much
3-The RAM has a hard time getting high, but mostly depends on the motherboard. Soltek not the greatest for overclocking, but you should be able to get up to 166Mhz FSB if you tweak and change settings.

ECC DDR shouldn't affect the overclock, just make sure that you turn of ECC in the Bios. You have absolutely no reason right now to upgrade the AXP to a 2000/2100+, you are better off waiting a month or two for the Athlon Thouroughbred. The new Nvidia drivers kinda suck, so try and find the older 23.11 drivers, they are more stable for the most part. WIndows 98, Se or original? Windows 98 doesn't like overclocking too much, you may need to upgrade your OS.

"When there's a will, there's a way."