Pentium 4 Overclocking

listen i know that this is a oldschool cpu but its one of my favs. I just want to know if a p4 is a good platfom to overclock on. its a 2.66Ghz stock and its at 3.0 right now

mine was rubbish. what socket? they vary a little

just give it a go i guess. keep upping it till you can get stable at voltages you are comfortable. and test it for stability and heat.

my p4 3ghz HT 478 socket. ran at 3.3ghz (10%) on stock volts and around 3.5 max OC. which isnt particularily good compared to other chips i had.

hopever as yours is a different socket you might be able to get more. check on Ripping.org for the max OC people are getting with your chip and then see what you can get. then do a write up to let us know

Well it will only be stable up to a certain point. Adding voltage can increase stability but also increases heat output and slightly lowers the CPU's lifespan.

I'm assuming you have a good aftermarket CPU cooler, otherwise you wont be able to go too far as you'll overheat the processor quickly.

Use RealTemp to read your core temperature, and use Prime95 on SmallFFT to test temperatures and on 'Blend' to test system stability overall. Both are free tools you can get off the net.

If this is your only computer be careful.
If you change settings and it wont boot, being an old motherboard, you will probably need to move the Clear CMOS jumper to reset it to factory defaults to get it to start again, so make sure to find this and know how to use it before taking things much further.

If you get the money to upgrade though, I went from a P4 3.0Ghz to a Core2 Duo at 3.16, was instantly 4 times as fast (did some quick benchmarks, same board, same RAM, different CPU), and the new chip easily overclocked over 4Ghz.

I only got my P4 3.0 to 3.5 in the end, but that was on a bad board, I've seen people do much higher.