[Solved] 2.8ghz cpu running at 1.4ghz. Dell dimension 4500

Yes, it is probably related to the jumper settings if there are any. On older motherboards there are jumper plugs that plug into things that look like pins. I can't explain it So looks in your Dell manual and see if it saids anthing.

Hmm... well thanks for solving my problem for me. I think I might try breaking the pin off my 2.2. Could you link me to a guide somewhere so I can get a better idea how to do it. My 2.2 looks a bit different from the one in that picture, does that matter?

Thanks again

Exact same mod correct? Wow your a genius joefriday thanks very much! It equals the 2.66Ghz 400FSB? or 533FSB?

If it isn't stable is the a way to up the voltages? BIOS overclocking is crippled on this motherboard running the P4.

I wanna know if it works for ya

I've seen a picture where it shows the pin being bent, but that pin was one pin left of the red highlighted pin shown in the picture? Which one pic is correct?

I've seen a picture where it shows the pin being bent, but that pin was one pin left of the red highlighted pin shown in the picture? Which one pic is correct?

Sorry^

Might have been a litte hard to understand what I was trying to say, anyways my question was, was I supposed to break off BSEL1 or 0?

Sucks to hear it didn't work for you. 2.93GHz is pretty close to the early Northwood C1 stepping clock speed wall of 3.0GHz. It seems usually those old northwoods could get to 3.0GHz, usually on stock voltage, but then sputtered out very quickly. You could try a voltage mod to see if it posts. There is a thing called sudden northwood death syndrome, that basically states over-volting a northwood can cause it to die very quickly. Some have had it happen, and others have been fine. It's worth a shot to try it out, as right now the cpu is virtually dead (you could always put a u-wire between bsel0 and bsel1 to get it to boot back at 400fsb and 2.2GHz if you need to).

Now, this next mod will boost the vcore of the cpu from the default 1.5volts to 1.7volts. It is to be used to see if it makes it stable and boots. If it does, then we can work on taking the voltage down a bit to 1.625 or 1.65. the 1.7 volt mod is just a quick and dirty to see if it just needs voltage.

make this u-wire from a single strand of wire. Usually an old IDE ribbon cable is a good source. just cut into the old ribbon cable, tear away one of the wire bundles, and after stripping off the insulation, you'll see several very thin wires. Take just ONE STRAND of wire. You only need like a quarter inch of wire. cut it with scissors, then in the palm of your hand, push on it in the center of the wire to bend it like a "u" shape. Try to make the u-bend in the center, so the two "legs" of the u-wire are about the same length. Then pick it out of your hand with a pair of tweezers, and ever so gently position it in your motherboard socket. It really works best when the case it laying on its side with the socket facing up at you. You want the u-wire's "legs" to each fit into the highlighted holes, so that the wire straddles the plastic socket and connects the two holes together. You'll need to have the lever up on the socket to fit in the u-wire. If the wire is too long, just shorten up the legs with the scissors. Once it is in, bridging the two holes highlighted in the above pic in blue, very gently put the modified 2.2GHz cpu into the socket and make sure it seats fully. There may be a very little bit of resistance, which is normal as you now have a cpu pin and a small strand of wire both trying to fit into the same hole. Finally, put back the heatsink, finish reassembly and attempt to boot the computer. It may just post after this. Dude, you've come this far, it's time you learn this last pin modding trick: the u-wire!

Alright, I have an old ide cable and some spare time, so I'm going to give this a try. What have I got to lose, right?

So the 2.0Ghz to 2.6Ghz do you think that'll need a voltage boost? I heard that putting 1.7v to a Northwood chip can blow it right away, just as you said.

No luck. I appreciate you trying to help me out though. Now it's time to gather this dead cpu up with the rest of my broken pc parts, take them up in the woods and shoot the hell out of them.

No, the pic I posted shows the right one to remove. If you would break off the other one, you would jump to 800 fsb. What that guy was doing was using a Celeron D, which runs at 533fsb at default, so his pin mods will look different from yours. What he actually did was access the little known and not always supported "hidden" fsb strap of 667MHz. It is what happens when both BSEL pins are "H". The table below shows the possible BSEL0 and BSEL1 combos that give different fsb. Note below that the setting "H", "H" is RESERVED. That is actually the secret 667 fsb that not all motherboard will pin mod to, but some will:

As you can see from the table, when BSEL0 is broken off, the chip boots at the 133 fsb (533MHz fsb when quad pumped). the letter "H" indicates no connection, or "High" resistance. "L" indicates a connection to ground, otherwise commonly known as "source" or "VSS" on Intel documents, so you can think of it as "Low" resistance. By breaking off a pin we change it from "L" to "H". By using u-wires, we can connect "H" pins to VSS or Source (aka Low resistance or "L" pins), making them both low resistance ("L" ). And that's the basis behind pin modding. All this information is found in Intel's datasheets.

I can guarantee that pin BSEL0 is located 6 pins in from the left and 3 pins down as shown in the picture, as evidenced by the following diagram in the Intel data sheets:

Keep in mind that in this pic you are looking "through" the cpu, as if it were transparent, to the other side. I could not fit the entire image on the screen, as I'm writing this on a netbook and the PDF program I use cannot copy and paste more than what is shown on the screen. If you would like to see the entire diagram, it is found inside the Prescott Pentium 4 for socket 478 datasheet, found here in PDF format:
http://download.intel.com/design/P [...] 056103.pdf

Sweet thanks for the help, unfortunately I cannot BSEL mod tthat 2.4Ghz 533Mhz FSB Northwood chip correct? If the board goes up to 533 then its a no go right? Well thanks for the help joefriday, I'll try this asap.

PS. So when it gets close to 3Ghz thats when a voltage increase needs to take place?

1. If your board only supports 400 and 533 fsb CPUs (such as the Dell Dimension 4500 we are talking about in this thread, then yes, you are correct in stating that there is no pin mod to get extra speed out of the 2.4GHz/533fsb P4 you currently have, as it is already running on the fastest bus supported by the motherboard.

2. Yes, that is correct. Usually, the old C1 stepping P4s only needed more voltage when they approached the 3.0GHz barrier, up till then they are usually rock solid stable.

Ok thanks for the help jorfriday, I'll try this and post back. I will notice a difference going from the 2.4Ghz P4 to a 2.66Ghz P4 correct?

I put the u-wire into bsel1 and bsel0 and it booted right up. I gotta say I'm pretty impressed. It's still at 2.2, but I'll take what I can get for now. Thanks alot

Yes you should stress test. Never know if it's truely stable or not unless you test it out. the only thing pin modding does is make it so the agp and pci clocks are running at stock frequencies, the cpu itself is still running faster than it was initially rated for. As for the diagram for BSEL1 to BSEL0.....NO! by now you should be starting to understand how this all works, what a u-wire is, how you make one, and why we use u-wires when we need them. Look at the pics and tables I've posted. Read my explanations. All the information is already posted here in this thread. Once you start working through this, it will all become much more clear. I'm not making another pic showing the BSEL1 to BSEL0 u-wire placement. It takes me 15 minutes to make those pics with all the finding the socket pic off the net, opening and modifying it in MS Paint, and then uploading it to photobucket, and finally linking it to this thread. Did you think those images just grew on trees?!

1. The socket layout is exactly the same as the diagram above showing all those pins and what they all do. You can think of that diagram as a map to the socket location of cpu pins. However, when you apply that diagram to the CPU itself, you must think of visualizing the CPU as transparent, like you're holding up the CPU, with the heat spreader facing you, and you can see through it to the cpu pins on the other side. So when you flip the CPU over, and now have the CPU pins facing you, all those pin locations have just jumped over to the opposite side, what was once left is now right and vise-versa (i.e. they are mirror images of each other). You must keep the orientation straight in your head. I always triple check before I ever perform a pin mod, to make sure I don't mess with the wrong pin!

2. I prefer hardware overclocks. They are usually much better in the end (i.e. more stable than bios overclocking) and able to reach higher overclocks overall with most boards (you can start to use the BIOS overclock tools once you've successfully pinmodded to the fastest FSB your cpu will POST to). For example, I used to have an old socket 478 Celeron 2.0GHz Northwood CPU. It was on a cheap ECS motherboard. Using the BIOS only, I could only overclock up to 2.5 GHz, and this board had no agp/pci locks, so my agp and PCI clocks went out of spec when I overclocked the CPu that high, which was probably the reason it wouldn't overclock any higher than that. Once pinmodded though, the CPU ran a 2.66GHz, and I could then bios overclock to 150MHz fsb (from 133 fsb pinmod) for a stable overclock of 3.0GHz. What's even better, is that at 3.0Ghz, the AGP and PCI clocks weren't as overclocked as much as they were when I ran the CPU at 2.5GHz with bios overclocking only! It was win-win. More stable overclock, and much faster to boot. Another example is on my current daily rig. I have a Celeron 420 running at 333fsb/2.66GHz. With bios overclocking only, I could only reach about 2.2GHz before the computer failied to post. Keep in mind that this is which a board that boasted PCI/PCIe/ram locks during overclocking. After pin modding to 333fsb. The computer boots up just fine at 2.66GHz on stock voltage. In fact, I can even up the speed just a little bit more to 2.8 GHz and be stable in windows. After that it rapidly gets unstable, despite increased voltage, and it refuses to post at all above 2.93 GHz. You can also perform more aggressive voltage mods with pin modding in most cases, or you can undervolt a stock speed CPU for decreased power consumption, since many boards simply do not have undervolt settings. Before I overclocked my Celeron 420 rig, I ran it for about 6 months at stock speeds, undervolted to 1.0 vcore (stock vcore was 1.3 volts). My mobo had over voltage settings, but no undervolting settings, so I had to manually set the vcore via a pin mod.

when looking at the socket, yes. Take the first pic I posted in this thread, the pic of the back of the socket 478 cpu, with the pins facing up. Look at the location of the highlighted cpu pin, and look and the keyed area at the lower left hand corner. Now, imagine slowly flipping that cpu over, and attempting to place it in the socket of the red motherboard pictured in this thread. If you think carefully about it, you will see that the highlighted cpu pin would end up being located at the top left hand corner, 3 columns in, and 6 rows down. If you can clearly visualize that, you've got it made.

I forget to address one thing you said in passing. You definitely don't need an aftermarket heatsink. If you already have a heatsink, there's no need to upgrade it. All we are doing here in increasing the clock speed and (hopefully) leaving the voltage the same. There will only be a very mild increase in power consumption. So mild, you probably will never notice it. Northwoods run very cool. It's a waste of cash to get a better heatsink, so save your money.

Hey. Not hijacking this thread or anything. I have a Celeron 2GHZ Northwood C1 at 1.525v 800MHZ stock. I'm wondering if you have the vid and Bsel mod for it. Also you said that most Northwood and Prescott PDF datasheets at intel don;t have any voltages over 1.6v this is indeed true. And that I need to get a Willamette PDF. Can you please provide the link to the willamette one. Thanks

Also I have a Pentium 4 Northwood 1.5v 2.53GHZ C1 533MHZ bus lying around and a Pentium 4 Northwood D1 2.6GHZ 800MHZ bus any vid and bsel mods for it?

Ever use an Ohm meter? Think of it that way. Zeros (0) represent no resistance, or in other words, a working connection (the pin is connected to "Source", aka Vss, otherwise thought of as ground). Think of the Zeros as "Low" on the BSEL mods. The ones (1) are the exact opposite. They represent no connection (not connected to ground, aka Vss or Source), and therefore would show infinite resistance on an Ohm meter (which on a digital meter is represented by the number 1).

To change a 1 to a 0, you must connect it to another vcore pin that already is a 0, or connect the pin to a VSS pin. This is done by U-wires. If on the other hand you need to change a pin from 0 to 1, that is done by either 1: breaking off the pin, or 2: insulating the pin. On socket 478 CPUs, the best insulating material is 30 gauge wire wrap, available at your nearest radio shack. Strip the insulation off the wire wrap, and transfer it onto the pin you want to insulate. It's tedious work, but still easier and more resilient than nail polish.

Finally, you made a typo in your CPU descriptions. You do not have an 800MHz fsb Celeron. It is 400MHz fsb. That Celeron is a great candidate for a 400 to 533 fsb pin mod, giving you a 2.66 GHz Celeron. The 2.53 is not accepting of pinmods as it has too high of a multiplier and too old of a stepping to reliably jump to the next available fsb. Your 2.6GHz northwood is already running at the fastest bus available for socket 478, however, if you want to be different, running it with a socket adapter to work on LGA 775 would give it a good chance at running on the 1066 fsb, giving a clock a 3.466GHz, which is possible with a D1 northwood. Probably not worth it to try though, as a 2.0 GHz Celeron 440 would be just as fast, already built for LGA 775, and use half the wattage of a northwood p4.

I don't suggest you actually go for 1.85v on any p4, with the exception of the Williamette, as doing so would rapidly kill the other newer P4s in a matter of hours to days.

Well can anyone help me with my last post?

Thanks. So basically the same still with celeron and p3 pin mods. If its a 0 just wrap around the nearest VSS pin, and break off 1 pins.

Thanks

lol @ last bit