I'd like to OC, but...

[lem0n]

...I don't want to spend a lot of money. I have an MSI nForce2 MB with 2x256 Kingston Hyper-X memory. My processor is an AMD XP 2400+ (Thoroughbred). Now, I'd like to know, what would be the cheapest (best performance boost/$) way to overclock my PC. Right now AIDA32 shows my idle temperature at 38-39 degrees C. I tried overclocking a bit using the guide on this forum, I got to 2118 MHz and then 3Dmark2001SE jammed right at the start. Now while doing this I also noticed this memory speed increasing as I increased the FSB. At this time memory speed showed at 354, instead of the usual 333 (when FSB was at 133). What does this mean? I could consider buying a better heatsink and/or a barton, but like I mentioned earlier, I don't want to spend a lot of money, since I'm not really what you'd call an overclocker. Thanks in advance for any answers.

 

[The_Thing]

Well, when you overclock there are two ways to do it. One is increase the FSB, which will increase your FSB obviously and you external clock on you cpu. The second is by increasing the multiplyer on your cpu(needs to be unlocked). P4's there is no way to unlock the multiplyer so FSB ocing is the only way, athlons you can connect certain parts of the CPU(L3 cash connected to L1 cache for example) to unlock the multiplyer. Look around in the archives and you can find a tomshardware guide to do this. The more you oc the more the heat, the more the heat the more likely the cpu will lose signals and lock up. Also its needs more voltage to compensate for the extra clock speed (vcore). good luck