I've oc/d the old pentiums and amd chips in the past, but have never attempted a P3 before. The idea of overclocking the bus speed concerns me. I'd like to hear any opinions on the real danger of overclocking the bus.
I have a P3 450 on an ASUS P2B-F mobo with 229 megs of generic pc-100 ram and many peripherals (scsi scanner card, printer, voodoo3 3000 agp, sound card, etc). What is the safest o/c speed, and what are the odds of damaging my peripherals? Thanx for the input
check to see if the ram you have is 8 or 10 ns. If its generic, its probably 10. If you'd like to take the chance, you might get it up to 527, but i wouldn't recommend it. 100mhz ram with 8 ns will get you to 559, and with 133 you could get it up or past 600. I have a pIII 450 @ 558 WITH pc100 ram and its holding strong, but take off the piece of **** heatsink that intel puts on there and get an alpha or t-rex. this will keep the heat down.
I came here to chew bubble gum and kick ***. And I'm all out of bubble gum.
They even sell the parts at the website and it looks simple. Have fun.
And your original question. Some things will run at the higher bus speeds and some won't. Maxtor drives run really cool, however don't like running on anything other than a 33Mhz PCI bus, while IBM harddrives will run on a 37 or 40 Mhz bus. The SCSI cards my Asus card does not like anything past 35 Mhz while the Adaptec will apparently handle it. My HP5000 glitches a very little when overclocked, however, my Epson and NEC don't mind. Like I said it could be the part even within a brand that might work and anoter not. You just have to try. You won't really fry anything, It will just not work or give you funny errors. Then you know you hit the limit for that part.
Actually, I have 224 megs of ram, 3 32 meg chips rated at 8ns, and 1 128 meg rated at 7/8ns, whatever that means. Anyway, I assume this would let me overclock up to 559 then? What is the bus speed and voltage for that anyway?
Again, my real concern is with my peripherals. I've got my scanner and modem in ISA slots, are they affected by overclocking? Thx again
I don't think your scanner would be affected by OCing. Never heard of it anyway. I have a P III 450 OC'd to 504 with similar peripherals, including a Maxtor hard drive which supposedly won't OC and I've never had a more stable system. It's a thing of beauty man!
If my BH6 didn't jump from 504 to 6 million, I'd go to 558 in a heartbeat. It seems like the system is at idle at this point.
Have fun, loosen up, it's only money. Heh heh.
Dan
As a very general rule, you can usually get away with a 75 or 112 FSB. These both result in a 37.5 Mhz PCI bus. About the only thing people have real trouble with at this speed is the harddrives, and it varies a lot. The only advice here is either test it very thoroughly before trusting your data to it, or disable UDMA in the BIOS and set the drives to PIO Mode 4. I really recommend that for any non-standard bus speed, just not worth the risk.
The Voodoo cards are beautiful, they seem to take any AGP bus speed in stride.
While technically yes, the ISA bus is overclocked, you won't have a problem there. It's generally run at a fixed 1/4 the PCI.
Most decent ISA cards would work at 15 Mhz and you won't be even close to that. I had a 286 board that I ran that way years ago - real screamer!
Thx for the input guys. I was just reading in the asus manual that the p2b can be set for 124 bus/31 pci, or 124/41 The first setting would seem to be a nice way around the hard drive issue. So if I'm right, the pci would be underclocked from 33 to 31, the agp would be o/c'd from 66 to 82, and a cpu speed of 559. Does this sound like a good choice? U think the voodoo 3 can take it?
Well, I thought I'd post my results in attempting to o/c. The p2b board has numerous bus o/c options in 2-5mhz increments. My only successfull o/c's that did not produce funky results were at 112 and 115mhz bus speeds. I tried some of the lower speeds like 105 and 110, but the bios wasnt reporting the appropriate bus speed. At 124mhz only 96 megs of my memory were being reported which means my 128 meg dimm wasn't being recognized. I'm going to do some long term testing at the 115mhz speed to see if there's any noticeable gang in performance. If not, I'll prolly just go w/out o/c'ing. Thx for all the help guys
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks