Tom's Hardware Speed Project: Pentium 4, Over 3 GHz!

Overclocking In Detail: More Than 3000 MHz Is Possible

Some proof, but not everything: A Pentium 4 at 3010 MHz.

The multipliers of all Pentium 4 processors are coded into the SRAM registries of the CPU at the factory, so an increase in clock speed could only be achieved by increasing the FSB clock. Still, the other components that communicate via AGP and PCI bus were hardly overclocked at all, and were almost operated to specification. The platform that we used was the Gigabyte GA-8IRXP motherboard with the Intel 845D chipset. A motherboard with the Intel 850 chipset and Rambus memory was out of the question because RDRAM reacts very sensitively to increases in clock speed. In order to achieve an extremely high CPU clock speed, the following conditions had to be fulfilled: first of all, the CPU core voltage was increased from 1.5 Volt to 1.85 Volt; then, we set up a watercooling system from Innovatek (a popular system from our previous tests), so that the CPU temperature would not increase to over 20 degrees Celsius.

Here it must be noted that only very few boards can allow the CPU core to be adjusted to 1.85 Volt.

You can see Quake III Arena at 308,9 frames.

We set the CPU host frequency to 137 MHz x 22 = 3014 MHz in the bios.