Should I bother to overclock?

[unbiased4u]

Hello guys, this is my first post here, so try and be nice

So I have this computer, *ahem* main computer, and I won't be upgrading it for a while (6 months???). It's OK, but I can't play a lot of recent games...
Here it is:
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino
256MB PC2100 Crucial DDR 266Mhz
15GB WD ATA66 Hard drive
20GB Maxtor ATA133? Hard drive
400w Powmax PS
Biostar M7VIG Pro Mobo
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX-4000 AGP @ 4x

Other useless stats to show how cheap I am :?
Foxconn Case
MS IntelliMouse Pro PS/2 Ball mouse
1995? Dell Beige KB
Altec Lansing 2.1 Black Speakers (except this )

So anyway, should I try overclocking? I've never tried it before...

 

[Pain]

It won't give you any performance increase to allow you to play todays games any better than you can now. You probably would get a good performance increase with a new video card that you can get for under 200 bucks.

You could also try to find a new cpu and some faster memory, but then you're just throwing good money after bad and should just save your bucks for a new platform, IMO.

 

[unbiased4u]

Ok, but will currnet AGP cards work on an AGP 4x slot? I mean, it won't run at full potential will it?

Maybe I'll upgrade RAM...

Thanks

 

[unbiased4u]

bump

 

[Anoobis]

Dude...patience. 6 months is a drop in the bucket. If you don't upgrade in 6 months, then put money into this machine.

There is a lot of information about how and what to overclock. You've got 6 months, your equipment, and Google to play with it. My advice, don't take large steps when overclocking. Small increments, small increments.

 

[baracuda73]

Current agp video card will work just fine with your 4x AGP slot and they do not use enough bandwith to use but the 4x.

 

[unbiased4u]

So a 6600GT may work? just not full potential? I think I'll just overclock modestly maybe 1533 -> 1600. Any useful tools I need? Anyone have a good guide?

 

[unbiased4u]

Ok, I'll just have to settle. I just wanted to overclock for the experience

 

[XunokpaT]

Ok, I'll just have to settle. I just wanted to overclock for the experience

If you want so much do it ... but it woun't have any visible effect for acceleration

 

[unbiased4u]

Ok never mind

 

[denster]

Yeah I would wait for Quad 4's. Unless you wanted to spend like $200 now. The Pent D 805 is cheap and a cheap LGA775 would give you an awesome OC'ing experience!

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=79762

 

[I]

Hmm, where to start...

I welcome myself to the forum and bow. You will come to hate me because I know everything (LOL).

=================================================

The Biostar M7VIG is one of those all-integrated boards, it may not (does it?) even have sufficient o'c settings? If not, what you wrote about "bother" becomes a lot more of a bother.

It uses 5V based VRM so an o'c needs a beefy old-school PSU, 180W+ (better over 200W) combined 3V+5V rating. It has marginal capacitors and due to socket orientation, they may run a hot short life when overclocking.

The Via KM266 chipset has very limited FSB headroom before PCI off-spec causes IDE corruption, USB and PCI parts like the NIC to freak out. It's a poor candidate, but even so I'd have to disagree with another poster that it's a matter of shooting for the moon or noth bothering. Trying to extreme o'c at this point is a lot of work but just bumping up the FSB maybe 10Mhz may require nothing more than pressing the keyboard keys a dozen times. Not much, but it only took 30 seconds. Try it and see, just don't go pushin' the FSB much past 148MHz w/o making a HDD backup first.

400W Powmax PSU is unfit for this in general but the 10MHz FSB increase it can probably handle. HOWEVER, problem is supporting the video card upgrade too, it's just not the right set of parts to get the job done even in their era when the performance gain would've seemed good relative to other alternatives. Some (many) Palominos won't hit 1.8GHz either, not with air and/or 1.9V. Realistic ceiling is closer to 1.85V/1.7GHz unless you come across a silly-large heatsink, another expense unworthwhile at this point in time.

Given that CPU (or most up until recently) AGP4X was an insignificant performance hinderance to an 8X card. The KM266 chipset's other (PCI and memory effective throughput) weaknesses are more significant than AGP rate.

Not enough memory for modern gaming. Another reason to not throw $$$ into that system.

For future reference, the best time to o'c is not once the system is so odd it doesn't matter much, start o'cin' from day 1 so you reap the benefit of the work the whole while you own it.

"IF" I were determined to get the most possible out of that box, I'd look around for a used FX5700 video card, newer series has small lower-heat core that may be light enough of a load for your Powmax PSU to handle. Figure $35-45 USD for it or an additional $120 for a significantly better card plus PSU just to get minimal gain because of the memory and CPU bottleneck. FX5700 is no champion though, you can o'c it and Play Doom3, Farcry, etc but forget BF2 or Fear unless your monitor has the resolution of a checkerboard.

Buy yourself a nice case now with the $ you would've put into the video card, then you have a few months to mod the heck out of it and have a good platform for o'c the next rig and with the 2nd case you aren't in such a hurry to strip down your present one while building, testing, o'c and retesting the new build.

 

[unbiased4u]

Thanks for the lecture...LOL j/k

Yeah, thanks for the valuable info. You'd help me a lot. I guess I'll just skip the recent games and get an XBox 360 or something...

So yeah, I'll just try it for the heck of it, but it seems that the BIOS only has a Memory/PCI bus incrementer (or whatever it's called). So I guess I'll take your suggestion and get a case. What is a nice case? (Cooler Master Centurion 5 looks nice, WaveMaster is dazzaling but expensive, Thermaltake? Antec Sonata II?) I want a quiet PC; this one is loud...Hmm... I think I might bump my CPU/Memory up a notch.

Thanks for the responses guys

 

[angry_ducky]

that's my dilemma: upgrade my gfx card, or get the 360 and hook it up to the viewsonic.

 

[gpfear]

Hello guys, this is my first post here, so try and be nice

So I have this computer, *ahem* main computer, and I won't be upgrading it for a while (6 months???). It's OK, but I can't play a lot of recent games...
Here it is:
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino
256MB PC2100 Crucial DDR 266Mhz
15GB WD ATA66 Hard drive
20GB Maxtor ATA133? Hard drive
400w Powmax PS
Biostar M7VIG Pro Mobo
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX-4000 AGP @ 4x

Other useless stats to show how cheap I am :?
Foxconn Case
MS IntelliMouse Pro PS/2 Ball mouse
1995? Dell Beige KB
Altec Lansing 2.1 Black Speakers (except this )

So anyway, should I try overclocking? I've never tried it before...

Upgrade the memory to 512 and buy a 360

 

[unbiased4u]

Ok, Xbox it is then