Athlon 1700+ on Epox 8K9A

[greasEdego]

I know this will probably sound like every other post, but exactly how can I overclock more? I have an Athlon XP 1700+ Thoroughbred, unlocked of course. I currently have it set to 133x13.5(I think) for 1.8ghz or 2200+. Runs perfectly stable here. My question is this. I can't seem to get it to run at anything over a 133mhz bus. And I mean NOTHING I do can get it to run stable. I've gotten it to boot at 1.96ghz, but it definitely wasn't stable. I can't seem to do anything to get it to run stable. I am by no means a veteran overclocker. I've messed with some OC'ing stuff before, but not much. Any tips in general for how I can OC past 133mhz bus stabley would be greatly appreciated. My specs are as follows:

Epox 8K9A mobo(KT400)
Athlon XP 1700+ @ 1.8ghz
1 256mb stick Nanya pc2100
1 256mb stick Samsung pc2700
2 60gb IBM HD
Leadtek GeForce4 MX440
AOpen 48x CD-RW
Ricoh 12x CD-RW/8x DVD combo drive

Thanks for everyone's help!

 

[lucasc]

You'll have to drop the mulitplier to increase the FSB. Since the stock for a 1700 is 11x133 by increasing the multiplier as much as you have you're limiting your fsb. I have a 1700+ Palomino unlocked running at 11.5x140 with a vcore at 1.85. The highest I could run stably was 12x135@1.85, a nice increase in cpu performance but not in memory bandwidth.
Also you may want to try it with just the stick of pc2700 ddr. Haveing 1 stick of 2100 and 1 of 2700 will limit your results since the 2100 is in sync with the 133 fsb but the 2700 has more headroom to accept a higher fsb.

"It's my sexy zoo and I can do whatever I want." - Frank O'Hara

 

[svol]

Well it could be that the stick of PC2100 Nanya memory is holding your back if it is low quality memory.
Or your CPU is just running at his maximum speed. If you didn't increase the VCore yet you can try that.

My CPU runs so hot the arctic silver undergoes nuclear fusion 😱 .

 

[greasEdego]

I'm doubting it's the stick of pc2100. That's what I initially thought it could be so that's when I ordered my stick of pc2700. I tried OC'ing with just the stick of pc2700 and couldn't get any higher on the FSB. As far as the Vcore goes, I've tried playing with that. I'm a little leery to try taking it any higher than 1.85v. I read somewhere that anything past that is getting into the risky area and I'd rather not go there. Whether or not that was true, I dunno. I also don't think the pc2100 nanya is too low of quality memory. I know it's not the best, but it was rated at CL2 so I figured I'd give it a shot as my first stick of DDR and was quite pleased with it. It even survived when my system decided it wanted to blow up and fry half my parts a few months ago.

lucasc - thanks for your info about dropping the multiplier when you raise the fsb. I never really thought about really lowering my fsb. I'll have to give it a shot when I get some time. Won't be for a few days though. Gotta study for my computer science finals this week. Don't really care about my other classes. Comp sci is where it's at for me 🙂

Thanks for your help guys. When I get some more free time this week I'll mess with it some more and post on how it turns out.

 

[svol]

Well as long as the temps aren't too high a VCore of 1.9V or 1.95V wouldn't hurt. I ran my XP1600+ at 2.05V with watercooling and I could have put it on 2.25V if I wanted... but you don't want to go higher then 2.25V (although I heard of people that ran them on 2.4V).

But yes if your CPU is at his max you can lower the multiplier first ansd then increase the FSB till it reaches its max again.

My CPU runs so hot the arctic silver undergoes nuclear fusion 😱 .

 

[greasEdego]

nah my cpu temps are nice and cool. around 40C under a full load. i actually don't think i've ever hit 40C...maybe once or twice. i wanna get some good arctic silver and see how cool it can get cuz right now i'm running with just normal silicone based thermal paste. i have i forget the model number, but it's one of the new coolermasters with heatpipes. but like i said...once i get some time, probably wednesday afternoon cuz finals are over then for me, i'll play with lowering the multiplier cuz I really wanna increase my FSB. That's where the real gains are in my opinion. Think I can hit 166? probably not, but that's my goal. I'm doubting i can though.

 

[svol]

Well if you got a good OC core stepping you probably can push it to 166MHz if your memory can run at that speed.

That copper Coolermaster HSF with heatpipes is a real nice one... and if you remove all the silicon paste and put on a thin layer of Arctic Silver 2 or 3 then your temp could lower some degrees.

My CPU runs so hot the arctic silver undergoes nuclear fusion 😱 .

 

[greasEdego]

well, i finally got some time and was just playing around overclocking this bad boy. I got it running at 166 x 11.5 i think @ 1.83ghz. Everything seemed to run really stable so I decided to run 3dmark2001se. Everything went fine and I got a whopping(note the sarcasm) score of 6265. Granted, that's not bad(i don't think) considering I only have a GF4 MX440. A nice little gain compared to the 5928 I got before i tried OC'ing to 166mhz when i was running at 133x13.5@1.8ghz. Unfortunately, I had to take out my stick of pc2100 to get it to run stably at 166mhz. I had to put the vcore up to 1.95v to get it to boot. I'm back at 133mhz though for now. I don't really wanna run that high of a voltage for long on my chip, even though it was running fairly cool. If I OC my video card, I can hit just about the same score I did with the 166mhz bus. I'm willing to bet that I could hit close to 6800 - 7000 if i OC my vid. card and run it at 166mhz fsb. That'll be a challenge for another day. As for now, I'm quite happy with knowing I can run at 166mhz fsb if I really want to. I have a pic of my voltages, temps, and results from 3dmark if anyone wants to see it. Thanks for everyones help! 🙂

 

[lhgpoobaa]

Thats the ticket... i was just about to advise that you unlock it and run the sucker on the 166FSB. much more performance, plus your AGP/PCI speeds are still in spec.
And of course 166FSB needs a decent quality stick of PC2700 ram to run nice aggressive memory timings.

<b>My Idea of a DOS attack is to stop posting helpful information at Toms Hardware.</b>

 

[svol]

Sounds good... too bad you can't use that stick of PC2100 RAM under those settings. And a VCore of 1.95V isn't high... anything above the 2V is however.

My CPU runs so hot the arctic silver undergoes nuclear fusion 😱 .