Athlon 1600+ @ 2000+

[IceCanuck]

Here are my specs.

Abit KR7A-R
Athlon 1600+ OEM
Coolermaster ATC-210-AX2
Thermaltake Volcano 7+
Arctic Silver 3
512 PC2400 2.0 Corsair (with heat sink)
ATI Radeon 8500 128 (not the LE)
Maxtor D740X-6L (X2)

Now here are my noteworthy bios settings:

CPU FSB: 160MHZ
Ratio: 4:2:1
Multiplier X10.5
Core Voltage 1.775V
DDR Voltage: 2.65V
(And no, my processor is not unlocked)

I haven't really put any strain on my system yet, although I have played about 5 intense games of Aliens Vs Predator 2 at the highest possible settings (needless to say it looked great and I have had no problems so far). My question is, am I in any way hurting the system by doing this? I have monitored my temperatures and the CPU has never gone over 40 degrees celcius. I'm not really worried about the processor since it is basically a temporary one until some decent Thoroughbreads come out. But I want to make sure that my motherboard, ram, and graphics card are going to be alright. Well? Any comments?

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by icecanuck on 05/30/02 12:33 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[10GHZ]

any overclocking attempt will dcrease the components life span in this case you'll probably decrease your cpu's lifespan, but most of us these days dosn't keep a computer for more than 3 yrs anyway. and since u are able 2 get the system 2 run stable, then i reckon it's worth the attempt.

 

[IceCanuck]

Ok, I managed to overclock it to 1793 MHZ and am still stable. Weird, it's almost like a brick wall barrier. 1793MHZ (163FSB and X11 Multiplier) seems to run perfect with no lockups or errors. Anything over that konks out. Anyways, I ran 3DMark2001 and got a score of 8449 which isn't all that impressive really. But I still haven't overclocked my card yet so I'll give that a try next.

 

[FiL]

your temperatures are certainly impressive, i run a AthlonXP 1900+ and without overclocking it's running at 55 C after about an hour.

I've been unsucessful at overclocking, my Soltek 75DRV2 mobo only seems to have a FSB setting, increasing that also pushes the RAM and i think it's that which causes the problem, perhaps i should replace my PC2100 with the new PC2700.

 

[IceCanuck]

Okay, I managed to stabily overclock (by playing around with other BIOS settings) to 1733 MHz which is equivilent to an Athlon 2100+ correct? Anyways, after monitoring temperatures during system stress times over a few hours, I found that my max temperature is around 47.5 degrees with an idle temperature of around 40 degrees. I bumped up my FSB to 165 while leaving the core voltage at 1.76V. This is all while having my volcano 7+ fan on high speed. The noise isn't too bad, I can barely hear it over my air conditioner. But I would imagine that it would suck in a small quiet room. Anyways, I managed to push out a 3DMark2001 score of 9110. Still looking into overclocking the Radeon 8500. I will post the results when I'm finished.

 

[IceCanuck]

Here's an update for those who are interested. It seems as though my system wasn't as stable as I had originally thought. It ran flawlessy through a few hours of Toast but crashed consistently during a few intense games of RTCW. Lowering the FSB from 165 to 163 and increasing the Core and DDR voltage seemed to take care of the problem. I get the feeling that Toast isn't all that great of a utility as it's cracked up to be when it comes to testing a systems stability. Anyways, I'm running with a FSB of 163 (1712Mhz) now and since I raised the voltage I'm getting higher temps as well. 40 degrees at idle, and around 54 degrees after a few hours of intense processing (with the air conditioner in my apartment off, and a room temperature of around 78 degrees). I want to try running a different OS to see if it was really my overclocking that caused these errors or just the game/OS combo. I'm thinking I'll load Debian and perform the same test with RTCW with the FSB raised back up to 165 and lowering the Core and DDR voltage again. I'll post back with results.