Abit IS7-M Overclock

[phecksel]

I'm new to overclocking, just built my first computer in about 20 years.

Abit IS7-M
P4 800 FSB 2.8G
Crucial (2)512M
120G SATA

How do I overclock and is it worth it?

 

[Crashman]

I believe the -M is Micro ATX, using the 865G chipset right? I don't think the Micro ATX version supports the same overclocking settings as the full sized versions. In fact, I believe I actually checked on this for someone else a while back.

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[phecksel]

You are correct about the 865

 

[Crashman]

All I can say is, see if your BIOS supports increasing vCore (CPU core voltage), vDIMM (RAM voltage), and CPU FSB.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[phecksel]

"The SoftMenu utility is Abit's exclusive and ultimate solution in programming the CPU operating speed. All the parameters regarding CPU FSB speed, multiplier factor, the AGP & PCI clock and even the CPU core voltage are all available at your fingertips."

 

[Crashman]

Cool, my mistake, I thought someone told me they'd bought the -M and it didn't have voltage adjustment. Perhaps they had the feature missing in an earlier BIOS revision.

Your chip should do 233MHz FSB easily (based on bus clock, 200MHz provides the 800MHz data rate Intel advertizes, using Quad Data Rate technology). That would get it to 3.26GHz. What kind of memory are you using?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[phecksel]

crucial PC3200 (2)512 MB

 

[Crashman]

You'll want to set the memory clock slower than the CPU bus in order to get a reasonably good overclock from the CPU, since you're limitted to PC3200. Most boards are giving you the actual CPU bus clock, but the DDR data rate, in BIOS, so 200MHz bus clock for both is usually listed as 200 CPU bus and 400MHz memory. To set the memory slower than the CPU bus, you'd choose the next setting down, which actually provides a 5:4 CPU:RAM bus ratio. The number used depends on the motherboard maker, they could call it 320MHz or 333MHz.

Starting with the CPU at 200 and the memory at DDR333 allows you to overclock your CPU from 200 to 250 while raising the memory from DDR320 to DDR400. That way your CPU is overclocked 25% and your memory is stock clocked.

But you probably won't get that high on stock cooling. The 2.8C should do 3.2-3.3GHz on stock cooling, so I'd try CPU at 233 using the previous mentioned memory setting.

You may need to raise CPU core voltage slightly.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>