ASUS A7V333 with AMD Athalon XP 2100+ 1.7 Overclock or ?

[DoDfreakJKM]

Hey All

I play a game called DoD:S or if you like Day of Defeat Source. Most of the maps use HDR rendering but my card cannot do that (GeForce FX5900XT) so I bought a stick of 512 DDR to total up to 1280mb and I gained some better performance but not much. Don't get me wrong, I am not looking to get the HDR quality but the issue is with the maps. They are graphic intense and although I can play most of them, some of them cause huge FPS loss to as little as 9fps. So without going into tweaking this and that, I simply want to know the following:

Next step:
Should I overclock my CPU or upgrade the CPU?

If I upgrade what can upgrade to for this board?

If I OC instead, how do I do that?

Thanks for the help
8)

 

[ShortyNumber45]

there's a sticky thread in here for OCieng an AthlonXP chip.

 

[DoDfreakJKM]

Ok fair enough but i did not get the main answer. Also if there is a thread in here about OCing an Athalon then instead of telling me about it why not post the thread link to help me find it. I did look but then could not find the link and thus I posted my question.

Should I overclock or upgrade the chip? If upgrade then what chip can I get for my board?

<edit>Ok I surfed some more in these forums and discovered I really know less about this OC then I thought. I want to gain performance but have no clue about stuff like FSB and RAM at 6-3-3-2 etc. Here are my specs and any help is greatly appreciated:

CPUID: AMD Athlon(TM) XP 2100+
Motherboard Asus: A7V333
RAM Crucial XR-DDR-32X64-333: 1280mb
DRAM Slot #1: 512 MB (DDR SDRAM)
DRAM Slot #2: 256 MB (DDR SDRAM)
DRAM Slot #3: 512 MB (DDR SDRAM)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900XT

8)

 

[Scout]

Do you know if you have the Palomino or Thoroughbred core? If the Palomino, you don't have much room to overclock, but the Thoroughbred may be pushed a bit with overclocking possibly to around 2 GHz. Download CPU-z and it will tell you which model you have.

Also, what speed are you running your memory at? If you have it at a 1:1 ratio with your processor FSB, that means you are only running your DDR at 266. You can change the ratio so your memory is running at 333 MHz.which should give you some performance improvement.

 

[DoDfreakJKM]

Do you know if you have the Palomino or Thoroughbred core? If the Palomino, you don't have much room to overclock, but the Thoroughbred may be pushed a bit with overclocking possibly to around 2 GHz. Download CPU-z and it will tell you which model you have.

Also, what speed are you running your memory at? If you have it at a 1:1 ratio with your processor FSB, that means you are only running your DDR at 266. You can change the ratio so your memory is running at 333 MHz.which should give you some performance improvement.

Thanks Scout - cool tool that CPU-z, anyway I have Palomino so I guess I need to upgrade. Do you know what I can upgrade to?

Ok about the MEM, how do I change it. It is running at 1:1.

Thanks
8)

 

[ShortyNumber45]

AthlonXP OC

Ok, you're asking for a link. here it is....

if your mobo can support an FSB up to 400Mhz then go for an AthlonXP 3000+ or 3200+ Barton since these chips are much cheaper as of now.

on your MEM, at the start-up whlie your PC is checking your RAM press the delete bottom so that you can access the bios settings and go to the advance settings and change whatever you wanna change. that's it..

 

[Scout]

That board isn't rated for a 400 FSB speed, but it will take any of the XP chips that have the 333 FSB speed. The Barton would be your best bet. However, they are a bit expensive now for what you get - Newegg has a Barton XP2800+ for $125.

I think you could also put in a Semperon socket A chip, however those all tend to be downclocked so there wouldn't be much point. You'd want to check with Asus to make sure their BIOS would support a Semperon if you wanted to try one of those.

The very best option however would be to try and find one of the Athlon XP Mobile chips. Based on the Barton core, they had unlocked multipliers so you could run them at their top speed of about 2.2 GHz. and keep the FSB at 333.

On your memory, look for a 4:5 memory divider that will push your memory to 333 even though your FSB is at 266 on that Palomino.

 

[DoDfreakJKM]

Thanks Scout, I'll let you know what happens.

8)