Help Overclockin a P4 Northwood A

[Nitro350Z]

I've been having trouble overclocking my P4 Northwood A 2.2Ghz past 2.53Ghz. the regular fsb is 100/33 (CPU/PCI) and Vcore is 1.5V and I can get it up to 115/38 at 1.675V without any stability problems.

If I go to 118/39 my systems boots and runs fine with good stability but when I restart, sometimes it'll give me a post error "boot failure due to cpu overclock." Any higher and it crashes at post.

I know I can push my system farther, since I have another P4 Northwood A 2.0 that overclocked nicely at 2.96Ghz (148 fsb & 1.7V) on the asus P4S533

If anyone knows why I might not be able to get past that speed please post suggestions, or am i gonna have to live with 2.53Ghz till the next big build? :?

I at first thought that it was my ram holding me back but i lowered the rdram/fsb ratio and its within the specs of the ram

My System Specs are:
Intel P4 Northwood A 2.2Ghz OC'd to 2.53Ghz
Asus P4T533-C
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
1GB PC1066 RDRAM (4X256MB)
SoundBlaster Audigy 2
Promistech UltraATA PCI adapter
~1TB combined HD Space
550W Enermax PSU
Windows XP Pro

 

[Redline24]

- Pull out the audio card for now; watch your PCI clock.

- Find maximum bus overclock without failure
- Find maximum mem overclock without failure
- Find maximum proc overclock without failure

Keep in mind, some procs are simply better overclockers than others, even if the are the same core/stepping/revision/etc...

Post results?

 

[Nitro350Z]

Thanks - Will do that, but for now I have to go on a Music Tour so i'll be back in 11 days and post my results

 

[Crashman]

The problem is, your 2.2A has a 22x multiplier, and you aren't getting the FSB high enough to force the lower PCI divider. I believe Asus uses something like 128MHz and up to drop the PCI divider from 1/3 to 1/4, but 128x22 is probably farther than your CPU can overclock.

You should have used a 1.8A instead!

We saw the same problem on PIII's.