Novice overclocking question - FSB

[geeky]

Hi all, I've enjoyed tinkering around with PC's for abit and started to read up about overclocking.

I've read quite a few articles from the web and this has increased my enthusiasm. I currently have a Core 2 Duo E4400 and understand since the multiplier is locked on these that to achieve an overclock I need to raise the FSB.

I tentatively did a very small overclock to wet my feet by increasing the FSB by 20 MHz. I understand that this is quad-pumped so my FSB is now running at 880 MHz.

My question is related to the supported FSB of any particular motherboard in relation to overclocking. My current board will get replaced with a more OC friendly version but in the meantime I want to educate myself further.

My current board supports 533 / 800 / 1066 MHz FSB. Does this mean the board should, in theory, comfortably run at 1066 MHz if I overclock to achieve that? That is, from what I've read the E4400 should be able to run at 266 x 4 giving 2.66 MHz because I read that overclocks over 3.0 Mhz are quite common. I'm running PC5400 so the memory should be fine.

If my motherboard can run at 1066 MHz with say an E6600 shouldn't I be able to run an overclocked E4400 at the same FSB with no trouble as the board has been tested at stock at this speed?

 

[jwolf24601]

Should have no problem with that.

Set your PCI-E to 100mhz and PCI to 33mhz so they are not overclocked.

Set your memory to 1:1 or 2.0 depending on your bios brand. DDR2 works at 2x your FSB so running at 266fsb would set ram at 533mhz, not really any benifit running higher ratio.

 

[geeky]

Thanks for that jwolf.

I will change this cheap motherboard soon as it does limit my options. It came with a free utility called Warpspeeder III which allows me to change settings via software and then runs a brief test to check if the system hangs.

I used it to get to 2200 MHz but anything higher than that and it fails that test. However this is well withing the 1066 MHz FSB that the board will support at stock.

One thing I've noticed is that the utility automatically adjusts the VGA clock so in this case it adjusts to 110 MHz. The PCI bus remains at 33.3 MHz.

What exactly is the VGA clock and is this what is causing the test failure/limiting my OC?